Overload
(Old man with his cargo of boxes)
People carry all sorts of items on these bikes; I saw a man with a cart full of melons at Pearl City and they were all gone in ten minutes. I heard he was from the country and they were fresh that day – so the word went round and they disappeared. This picture doesn’t fit the rest of the text here, but I’m desperate to tell you about the medical, but I don’t have an image!
Ever since I had a medical for my visa to be extended, I’ve wanted to write a piece on it, simply because it was such a unique experience. We were driven to a building that smelled like hospital but looked like a bank or an embassy. We were handed a small plastic box and I began to panic that I might be called upon to produce a ‘sample’ to put in it. Luckily, it turned out to be a little First Aid kit full of multi-coloured Chinese treasures in miniature pill bottles. I have used several of the contents already!
Once we had our papers, we embarked on a production line medical; into one room to have blood taken, another for x-ray, then height, weight, eye test, dental check, heart monitor. The least pleasant (probably due to her time constraints and our communication issues) was the ECG heart monitor. My clothes were yanked up round my neck, and in doing so, the nurse had roughly poked me in the face with the monitors that she was about to attach to my chest. To her credit, she apologised for that, but what might have been funny in different circumstances felt upsetting at the time. To be fair, I had not been able to eat since the previous evening and I was feeling woozy after the blood test.
All the tests were over in little over ten minutes, in that sense it was amazingly efficient, but the speed and the uncertainty of walking into a room without the knowledge of what would happen is an experience I hope won’t be repeated!
