Painful days; and: Back to Spanish

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Damn, what a load of bullshit traveling can be when you're not healthy. To make it short and sweet, I contracted a bad infection on my right thigh during our stay in Samoa, and everything got a bit pear-shaped from then on. I didn't feel it was necessary to go and see a doctor at first, but it just got redder and redder each day, and I got a mean fever that lasted for two days and left me pretty useless. On the day we were flying out to New Zealand, it was probably the worst, I was in so much pain, and we had to take a bus and a ferry and another bus to the airport, where we had to wait some long hours for the check-in. Having arrived in New Zealand, I shlepped myself and my stuff to a hostel, and then took a taxi to hospital. They sent us to a different clinic, since foreigners had to pay a shitload of money for consultations in the hospital. I got treated there with some fierce antibiotics intravenously, and they pressed the pus out of the wound, which was not too pleasant. The next day I had to go back there to get the same treatment, but the doctor decided to lance my thigh, and stabbed it with a scalpel. The superficial anesthetic he gave me was rather ineffectual, and I thought I had to die on that miserable pritsch in a god-damn clinic in NZ. On the next day it still hadn't gone better, and they decided they couldn't do anything for me, and sent me back to the hospital. On the same night I underwent surgery, at 1:30 in the morning, after waiting for hours and hours for the nurse to come in and finally get me to the operation. So they cut a hole in my thigh for the pus and the blood to finally get out, and thus stop the infection from spreading further. Fortunately, that time, they put me to sleep, and after waking up, I put back in my piercings, and went back to sleep. I had to stay in that fucking hospital for four days, until the doctors decided to release me. We had to postpone our flight to Argentina, which cost a fee of course, so we had to hang around, or limp around in my case, in Auckland for a couple of days. We didn't really get to see or do much, as my leg impeded any greater excursions. At the same time we have been trying to keep the wound germ-free and dry, and put elaborate dressings on it. It has got a bit better, but I still have a hole in my leg, I still have to take antibiotics, and I still have to make sure that the wound doesn't get infected again, and that it heals well, and closes, of course.

So we're in Buenos Aires now, have been for five days. It's a quite pleasant city, I'd say, relatively safe for South American standards, there's a lot of culture going on, it's not too expensive, and you can even find some decent vegetarian cuisine. The architecture is very European in some parts, there are loads of monuments, plazas, and broad avenues, and there's too much dog shit lying around. I'm pretty damn sure I saw my evil Spanish professor from Uni back in SB. He's the only Argentinian I know, so it makes perfect sense that I meet him on our second day in the 13-million capital of his country, although he's been living in Germany for 25 years. The world is just too simple. I wasn't sure first if it was him, but he looked at me, and I saw the recognition in his eye, then he ignored me, which is perfectly him. Everybody hates him, by the way, he's that sort of stereotypically arrogant Argentinian, chauvinistic, but well-educated. I wanted to follow him to take a picture, but we kind of lost him. Oh well.

What's really annoying about Argentina is that you can only withdraw 300 Pesos at a time, which is maybe about 70 Euros. And every time I do that, I have to pay a fee of 5 Euros. And they won't give you cash advances on your credit card. And that pisses me off. Maybe might have to grin and bear it.

We'll probably be making our way towards Patagonia soon-ish, since we've seen quite a bit of Buenos Aires now, and I'm kind of sick of big cities. Hopefully my leg will get well soon, although I can already walk a lot better than in New Zealand, and the wound doesn't look that nasty anymore. All this shit I went through just taught me an important lesson, i.e. that health does indeed come first, especially when traveling. Should have listened to my mum.

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