What About Me?

I've spent a fair amount of time talking about where we've gone and where we are. The one thing I haven't mentioned thus far is how we are doing. Make no bones about it (what does that even mean?), jet lag is vicious. It has been a major struggle to get between four and six hours of sleep each night. Personally, the sleep has come in 1.5-2 hour increments between numbness and muscular atrophy sensations. By that, I mean the feeling you get after you've been working out regularly and then miss a couple of weeks. Only I haven't missed a couple of weeks. The numbness is akin to sleeping on a body part wrong... only there is no right way. Short story long, I wake up, do some stretches or exercises, maybe read The Book, and try to go back to sleep. Two hours later, I repeat the process. Shari has a watered down version of the same thing going on... minus the muscle sensations. It's very frustrating to not get consistent sleep... and for it to be low-quality on top of that.


At this point in the day (7:20 p.m.), I have very little left in the tank. We went down to the hotel restaurant to have dinner, and I could barely communicate with the hostess who at this stage seems to know better English than me. She invited us to go check out the buffet, and there were several good-looking, nice-smelling items. There were also items like braised river turtle, braised spicy dog, and let's not forget the snake. So I opted for the menu and had spaghetti (although not like momma cooks it), and Shari had a club sandwich that was unlike any club sandwich she's ever had. (I do not mean that it was out of this world.) I am frustrated because I don't want to spend this trip eating Western food, but I am so out of it that I just couldn't take the leap and try the non-snakey, non-turtley things. I hope to wake up tomorrow after a better night of sleep.


That's going to be a tall order considering that our mattress is a sheeted brick. Actually, I laid down on it about 15 minutes before going down to dinner, and it actually felt quite nice. Sleep deprivation changes the perspective on things in a hurry. If nothing else, I'll do the trick my boss taught me after all of his excursions to the Far East, which is to use the spare blanket as a "pillow top" to help take the edge off.

Oh well, better go and try to sleep, so that I can do my best to be energized for our new daughter tomorrow. We leave here at 9:00 in the morning to meet her for the first time (8:00 p.m. back home).

This is street view below my window. I was able to take it because the windows here actually open all the way.

Brad out.