The Nausea Taxi

I'm back on the parasite diet after my trip to Cambodia (by the way, it was totally worth it and I would do it all over again!!!) and was feeling especially terrible after running some errands the other night, so I decided to hop in a cab and go home. While in the cab, my mom called me on my cell phone:

Mom: Hi, Tiny Walkers*! What are you doing?
Me: Well, I'm in a taxi right now, but I'm about to go home and get violently ill. How are you?

I think my driver understood enough English to know what I was talking about because he looked at me in the rearview mirror with a pair of wide, startled, deer eyes and then proceeded to drive at warp speed through some very heavy traffic. We were jolting our way between cars and around motorcycles with the driver speeding up and then slamming on the brakes every five seconds. We also almost died several times, with one memorable moment occurring when a giant silver whale of a van decided to inch its way onto the main road from a side street. Clearly the van had no idea that the little pink taxi would prove to be such a formidable foe. We came to an abrupt halt and I think my stomach actually left my body temporarily before slamming back into place and pulling the nausea around it like a slimy, protective blanket. Suffice it to say it was a less than pleasant ride, and made for a rather difficult phone conversation:

Me: Cambodia was--oof--really amazing and--whimper--I had a really great time--holy mary mother of god--I went to some incredible museums and--yikes--ate some really good food but I'm not feeling too well at the moment--eep!--y'know mom, I think I have to call you back--urp--because I might hurl right here in this taxi.

This, of course, served only to spur the driver on and inspire him to drive even more quickly and recklessly until finally we got a few yards from the driveway of my building and.....we were stuck at a red light. For a really, really long time. The driver nervously drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and my stomach gurgled progressively more loudly.

When we finally came to a screeching halt just in front of my elevator, he just said "mai pen rai!"--forget about it!--as I fumbled through my coin purse in search of three more coins. He waved me out of the taxi and sped off without his three coins, clearly happy to be rid of me and grateful that I didn't spew all over his impeccably clean taxi.

In retrospect, he really did me a tremendous favor by getting me home as quickly as humanly possible and doing his best to bring some efficiency to the thick clots of traffic on Bangkok's molasses roads. And I like to think that he made the extra effort because he really did care about my well-being. Or maybe he just didn't want to spend the rest of the night vacuuming vomit.

Meh....call me sentimental, but I'm gonna go with the former on this one.

*Tiny Walkers is the nickname I've had since, well, I first started walking. I'm still Tiny Walkers almost 28 years later, and I will most likely be Tiny Walkers forever.