Happy Birthday!

Behold this year's first birthday present, received in the wee hours of the morning, before it was even my birthday in America.

Bed bugs, for the third time this trip. In my room, I finally reconcile myself to the fact it's not mosquitoes and I can't go back to sleep. That's not a nice thing to have to accept at one AM in the morning, or again at two or three AM after I try to go back to sleep.

It's what I get for staying in a single room for $7.50, where the ventilation slats in the bathroom open onto my neighbors bathroom, and my view is of the corrugated steel wall of the next building two feet away, and a water pipe runs down past your window; I never know if it's raining outside or I'm just hearing the shit and dirty water wash down from the floor above.

I pack my bags and go to the lobby, waking up the manager sleeping on the floor under a mosquito net.

"I need a new room. Mine has bed bugs and I can't sleep." I show him my bites; well, not all of them. I have them on my feet, going up my legs a bit, some on my arm, and a short line on my right ass cheek. He's not very responsive, standing in boxers, staring at the counter, and scratching himself.

"No rooms." I'm not sure I believe him, but he doesn't seem to be about to change his mind. I can't go to another guesthouse because everyone else will be asleep too. Plus there is a curfew. You never hear about the government in Laos, but they're a real bunch of Nazis, and I don't want to fuck with them.

"Okay, can I have some clean sheets then?"

"Don't have any." I think he's talking about rooms again, and I repeat my question. He understood the first time. He's really not going to give me clean sheets, which of course they have somewhere.

I give up and go back and shake out my sheets as best I can and lay down on top and luckily don't get bitten again. Or maybe I don't get bitten enough to wake up. Either way, this time is better than the other times I was a victim of these little bastards. The first time, I was bitten by bed bugs was in Vietnam, on a boat with nowhere else to go. The next was in Vang Vieng, Laos where I went down to the lobby and woke up the night manager. I got a new room that time. Both times I was with Adam, and both times he wasn't bitten at all.

Happy birthday, and think of the bites on my ass for a happy Valentine's Day.