Where is the happiness in Cambodia?

Day 2 in Siem Reap started off with us being all touristy and ended off with an overdose of happiness.. a bit of a misadventure (but kinda touristy too, depending on how you see it!).

We headed to Angkor Wat in the earlier part of the day, had breakfast outside Angkor Wat (PANCAKES! funny how i remember these things), after which we headed to tour the place. I thought my team leaders made the mistake of hiring the guides because as much as I'd love to know more about the place, i'm really not much of a listen-to-what-the-guide-is-saying person (also thanks to my short attention span), especially not in Angkor Wat because all i wanted was to walk around the place and soak it all in. Our guide started talking about the significance of every single thing (e.

g. the story of ramayana) and not long after, you could see people falling asleep while waiting for the guide to finish talking about a certain wall. what a shame. hahahaha. Then we reached an interesting part of Angkor Wat, which required us to climb a fleet of insanely steep steps. it was good fun. I love Angkor Wat and all its beauty.

After Angkor Wat we had lunch and did some shopping / window-shopping. In the evening, we went up to another temple near Angkor Wat, which supposedly had the best view of the sunset. The place was crowded (definitely not my idea of a perfect setting to catch a sunset) but we waited anyways (since we had climbed all the way up hahaha). Unfortunately, the gods and the skies decided to disappoint everyone there by giving us one of the most unimpressive sunset ever.

bah!

At night, a group of us decided to have a little adventure and "a taste of cambodia" by getting the happy pizza for dinner. so the plan was to eat in for dinner and then head off to FCC for drinks after. while waiting for the 2 guys to come back with our pizza, i suffered from a tummy ache, which was so bad i had to reach for my stash of possibly expired leftover prescribed medicine, which i had brought from home. i've always had this fantasy of possessing knowledge on how to prescribe medicine without being a real pharmacist, and knowing the complicated names of medicines and..well you get the drift. hahahha. anyways, i popped a pill into my mouth and the world felt right again. 

soon enough, the guys came back and by then we were starving.

we gorged on the pizza.. well, i did, because i was starving. we were pretty amazed at the absence of any effect of the pizza because it tasted like any other hawaiian pizza! so there i was all contented and happy, with my stomach filled :)

*drama queen alert* (do not read on if you can't stand long winded people)

About 45 minutes later, we took the cambodian version of tuk tuk to the FCC in Siem Reap, got ourselves comfortable and ordered some drinks. I then excused myself and headed to the washroom. That was when the world began to go a wrong. my senses seemed to have slowed down 10000 times and everything around me started moving SLOWLY. i walked out of the washroom to join my friends and tried my best to walk straight but i think i kinda swayed a little.

It was a little scary because it felt so different from feeling high from alcohol. I joined my friends and asked them if they were feeling what i felt and they simply looked at me with a smile and a dazed look and i was like wtf why am i not feeling as good as them! i tried to tell them something but my speech was kinda slurred. so i panicked. after learning so much about drugs in my psychology days, i knew well enough what this meant. whatever that was in my system was affecting my speech and my train of.. well lets just say there was nothing "train"-ey about my thoughts.

then i had a sudden thought - is this the happy pizza's doing and if it is, whyyy am i not happy and why are my friends happy and why could my friends talk normally!

and then i had another thought - omg, it was the medicine.

Ohmmm...shamalamalamalai...

and the pizza! oh shit. a chemical combustion in my body. IN MY BRAINS. a lethal combination. i am going to die.

needless to say, i panicked. i took out my phone to call another friend who was out somewhere in siem reap because i figured my four friends with me weren't in any shape to bring me back to the hostel because seriously, they just looked so high and happy and were smiling at everything i said. (even their supposedly concerned "are you okay??" was said with a smile and a dazed look!)

so i scrolled down my phone list and i couldn't help but notice how SLOW the names were scrolling and that convinced me even more that i was gonna die that night. hahahahahhahha. my more trusted friends (at least for the night) did not pick up their cellphones. so i just grabbed one of the guys with me and told him to bring me back to the hostel because i could not trust myself to go back alone. 

i grabbed his hand and we walked off (leaving the other 3 smiling away at FCC) towards the road where a bunch of tuk tuk drivers parked their vehicles and waited for customers. i don't know if i looked unwell or if i was not walking straight but based on my relatively clouded vision, i could almost feel the sinister smiles on the drivers' face which said "hur hur lets knock the stoned guy off and kidnap this girl." i held my friend's hand tight and walk towards them.

that was when i believe god loves me. as we were about to cross the road, a van stopped in front of us and guess what it was KC's van!! a few of my friends were in that van and they were on their way back to the hostel. they just happened pass by the area when spotted two familiar looking people crossing the road! at that point, i could just kiss everyone. i was SO thankful. i rushed into the van and tried telling my mates everything (including my symptoms) but i could not get my message across because my speech was just f*cked. my friends brought me back to the hostel where i kept lapsing into unconsciousness (during which i was feeling VERY awake. is that even possible?? The whole sleeping and waking at the same time was unnerving!). 

the next few hours were very disconcerting. i don't remember much but i remember lying on the bed.. and having some friends sit by my bedside. i remember me telling them to let me touch them (???) because the warmth from the human touch was very comforting as it made me feel less "floaty" and more "alive" (wahahahhahaha). eventually, i asked my friends to bring me to the doctor because i just wanted to make sure i'm ok. at this point, allow me to add that i felt awful for troubling my poor friends, who had been kind enough to take care of what seemed like a drug addict.

so they managed to get me into a van and drove me to a 24 hr clinic. i don't remember much. i remember reaching the clinic and everything was closed. i remember being slumped on an abandoned chair in front of the clinic and some friends standing around me while i lapse in and out of consciousness. i remember people banging on the clinic door. the next thing i knew, i was on a bed and everything around me was white. i remember opening my eyes and thinking "she's pretty". apparently the doctor was this korean (or japanese?) lady and she was looking down at me. if someone had told me then that i was "walking towards an angel in the white light", i would've believed him. i managed to say a few words to the doctor, i don't remember what they were but i think i told her not to call me parents in singapore ahhahaha. i might have asked her if the combination of drugs might kill me. haha. in the end, i found out it was not due to the medicine i took but somewhat an overdose of the drug from the pizza. well apparently, it turns out that my friends had bought a large pizza with a large dosage of "happiness" as well because they figured it should work out fine in proportion (!!!). 

so why did it have a negative effect on me and not my friends? well the doctor said the 2 guys, being guys, had a bigger mass so the drugs wouldn't have as much a reaction as it did in me. one of the girls probably didn't eat as much (which made perfect sense because i can be quite the glutton, especially when i'm starving).. and the other girl.. well she vomitted some time in the night, which got some people a bit worried too but she was fine in the end. the pretty doctor, whose face i'd always rememeber for the rest of my life, gave me a big bottle of what looked like orange juice to hydrate myself. That night, i fell asleep in peace, albeit very groggy still, but contented knowing i was gonna be alive. ahhahhaah.

So that was my 2nd day in Siem Reap, the day I learnt that happiness could manifest itself in many ways. ;)