Travel Pathology

Sorry mom, don’t read this. As for the rest of you, let me tell you, I’ve been in the UK for over a month now and have identified ways I might encounter premature doom. Here is a list.

Death by bus

Within my first hour in the UK, I found myself on a tram, enjoying the lush green scenery and the sprawling city. As I gazed out at the oncoming traffic, I suddenly spotted a toddler standing with delight near the front windows of a large black sedan. This little child was leaning against the dashboard, right beside the steering wheel. It struck me as an unsafe parenting situation, although I confess my father let me sit on his lap and pretend to drive a time or two myself. I searched for the adult whose lap the toddler must have been in, but I saw no one.

“THIS TODDLER IS DRIVING THE CAR!” I thought, panicking. All of this transpired in a matter of seconds. Just as the sedan was about to disappear from my view, I caught a glimpse of an adult male on the right side of the car, holding a steering wheel. It was then that it dawned on me, “Oh, right, they drive on the opposite side here.”

I encounter this epiphany daily. Every time I engage with the traffic in this part of the world, my instinctual habits of where to watch for oncoming traffic are at odds with my safety. I frequently catch myself subconsciously glancing for approaching vehicles before crossing the road when a car enters my peripheral vision from the opposite direction, serving as a reminder that traffic operates on the opposite side here. To stay alive I swivel my head each way at least three times before crossing the street entirely unsure where to expect those mechanical beasts to spawn from.

It seems I am not the first immigrant who has been perceived as a hazard to society. In the touristy sections of the city, they have painted directions indicating where to look before crossing the street.

So, it seems reasonable that one of the ways I will likely die in the UK is by getting hit by a bus while looking away from it.

A deadly cycle

There is a lovely park behind my building, with large trees and several pathways for leisurely walks on the rare sunny afternoons. However, it has one potentially dangerous feature: bike lanes. Unlike in my homeland, here, bike lanes are shared with regular pedestrian pathways and are clearly marked with big, bold white lines. The locals have had years of experience in checking their blind spots before passing slower pedestrians and merging into the other lane where there is room to gain speed and overtake. This also applies to crossing the path; one must look both ways due to the significant speed of the cyclists.

I have already had several close calls and heard many unhappy Scotsmen shouting at me to “get out of the way!”

This, like the bus, could also potentially lead to my demise: crossing a bike lane and losing the battle with a velocipede.

Death by poison

There was one encounter that made me add this to the list during my first week.

I was lost in the labyrinth of streets of my new home when I passed by a shop with haggis rolls on display. Immediately, my memory recalled the first pastry I purchased in my first hour in the city, how it was the most satisfying and affordable meal. I stepped inside the shop and smiled at the jolly man behind the counter who was rearranging a variety of pastries, rolls, and pies, each one stuffed with mystery meat. He greeted me and waited patiently as I scanned all the foreign snacks on display. I pointed at the one with the lowest price, which looked exactly like what I have named ‘Scottish Hot Pockets,’ and he promptly bagged the item for me, charging me one pound and fifteen pence.

“Made it with me own hands.” The kind Scotsman assured me.

I was delighted. In prompt purchases of items made by kind locals in their shops somewhere deep in the city were exactly the kind of experiences I daydreamed about during the weeks leading up to my move here.

Reaching into the bag, I noticed the pastry was cold. I was somewhat disappointed, but I couldn’t really expect much for just a pound, could I? Starved after a day of walking, I didn’t want to wait to get home and heat up my dinner, and so, I took a big bite from the top. Something was… off. I inspected the inside of the buttery crust and noticed the meat was entirely pink. “Wait, is it supposed to be pink and cold? Was I supposed to cook this first?” I thought.

There was no way I was going to waste the caloric potential of the pastry. Every pound spent on nutrition could not be wasted. Not when I had an entire year left to live off of only my savings.

So, in fact, I did wait until I made it home to cook my dinner, just to be sure that I wasn’t consuming raw meat.

Minutes after arriving at my flat, I placed the pastry with a bite taken off the top onto a plate in the microwave. After heating it for a few minutes, I inspected whether the color of the meat had changed to a safer, more brown-like color. Surprisingly, nothing changed about the pastry except for the once buttery crust had become soggy and was falling apart. Touching the inside, my finger retracted back as it came into contact with scolding meat.

“So it was supposed to be pink? Is there any meat that is safe to consume when pink in color?” I have had enough experiences with beef to know that when microwaved, it would transition from pink to brown or even grey.

Deciding not to risk it, I apologized to the kind shopkeeper in my mind as I slid the pastry off the plate and into the trash. Losing my appetite for the rest of the day, I waited for any signs or symptoms of food poisoning, bracing myself for a rough night.

The last time I had food poisoning, was during my summer in Tucson. My partner Troy, highly skilled in the culinary arts, had made it a habit to prepare local cuisine, using ingredients like cactus pads from the naturally growing cacti in the backyard surrounding my grandmother’s garden. That summer he created various creative dishes with cactus pads served with specialty meats that my grandmother and I celebrated and enjoyed. Little did we know-there is apparently another species of cacti that looks identical to the prickly pear and is poisonous if ingested.

One night, after a delightful dinner, both of us were abruptly awakened in the middle of the night by severe nausea and diarrhea, and we spent the remainder of the night suffering while huddled over our respective toilets. As the night wore on, I couldn’t help but imagine starting my own IV, hanging a bag of saline, which I knew my body desperately needed, and attaching it to a secondary bag containing acetaminophen to alleviate the intense body aches and fever. I contemplated whether the wonders of hospital treatment might outweigh the cost of an EMS call, transportation, and the subsequent bill. Ultimately, I decided against it and opted to test my body’s limits, enduring nearly 10 hours of body aches, nausea, dry heaving, and chills.

However, on that day nothing happened. Apparently the Scotsman’s pastry was safer to ingest than the death ridden cactus. In fact, I felt well enough to complete all my household chores and organize my dorm that night.

I still don’t know if the pastry was properly cooked or not. Hopefully, in the next year, I will have the opportunity to buy another pastry and inquire about the cooking instructions before leaving the shop. If not, then I could accidentally poison myself and make headlines as the student who ate raw meat and died next to her toilet.

Swept off my feet

I am a dramatic person, I know, but I am not being dramatic when I talk about the wind here. Compared to this city and it’s narrow stone pathways, Chicago is but an “asthmatic whisper city”.

And because of this, there is a very real possibility the wind will catch me at a particularly vulnerable maneuver and push me right down the stairs. It has already nearly happened certain times when navigating the stairs of my campus without using the rail, and the wind will literally manipulate the projection of my foot as it descends from one step to the next.

Survival becomes even more challenging when it’s compounded by the unexpected and forceful gusts of wind that can sneak up on you while you’re just trying to find refuge under your umbrella. It’s as if the capricious atmosphere, having already subjected you to a daylong deluge of rain, decides to play an additional trick by sending these gusts that seem to come out of nowhere, catching you off guard and pulling you suddenly one direction or the other, like off of a street curb and into traffic, or down the stairs.

The chances of you becoming a victim of the wind and falling into a premature demise are slim, but never zero.

Lost at sea

This has little to do with the UK as much as it does with the daily hazards of just being me. In a recent development, because attaining a master’s degree wasn’t enough, I am now a member of the Sailing Club.

Sailing has always been something I wished to pursue one day. I’m not sure why, but I was under the inaccurate perception that sailing was easy.

My first day manning a dinghy, I mostly spent swimming in the North Sea. Time after time, after a failed tacking maneuver, I would watch my mast slowly sink into the water, leaving me no choice but to slide off the hull and swim around to the centerboard, where I could use my weight to flip my boat right-side up.

Experienced sailors possess the knowledge to interpret water and wind conditions, enabling them to manipulate watercraft effectively. I, however, keep getting confused about which rope does what. And while I am figuring it out, there is a chance that the sea may decide that I needed a spontaneous trip to Greenland and I would be powerless to decline the offer. I’m not always prepared for extended days at sea, so perhaps, this situation might result in my becoming one of the many ghostly legends that haunt this city. Oh, I do hope they makes a sea shanty about me.

I head out once again to sail tomorrow, in fact, so I guess we will “sea”.