As I prepare to leave for South America for a few months this Sunday, I’m reflecting on my past travels and thinking back to that time I had food poisoning in Vietnam. Actually, I had the poisoned food in Singapore (which, by the way, everyone is always like, “Oooh Singapore is so nice and clean,” but it’s the place where I had both bed bugs and food poisoning in 48 hours…so jury’s still out…) but my case of food poisoning, quite persistently, followed me to Hanoi.

So I’m in Hanoi and apparently there’s this massive typhoon rolling through. I don’t know why I said “apparently” because it was very apparent by the truckloads of water that were ruthlessly plummeting from the sky. It was seriously like the ocean and gravity and the sky all got confused and the ocean was like, “Oh hey I want to try seeing what it’s like in the sky…let me go up there…” but then the sky was like, “wait, you can’t be here” and then the ocean was like, “oh, yeah you’re probs right…” and then the ocean was like “oops…” and then fell back down.

To summarize what I’ve established so far: I’m in Hanoi, it’s raining, and I have a wicked case of food poisoning (read: my insides are trying to find all available emergency exits).

So I go to the front desk at my $3.50 per night hostel, for which I kind of think I overpaid, but that’s a separate story, and ask for suggestions on how to remedy my situation. The girl suggests one of the pharmacies around the block (in the Old Quarter in Hanoi, a lot of the same type of shops are grouped together) and writes down for me what I need in Vietnamese and tells me how to say it. “They’ll probably speak some English, too, but just in case,” she said quite convincingly. I should mention that she thought this whole situation was hilarious.

So I went to walk outside and my first thought when I opened the door was, “but like, where’s the road?” I couldn’t see my hand fully extended in front of me.  I’d say it was sheets of rain but “sheets” sounds too gentle, almost like a warm embrace. What was unique about this rain was that it was both collectively fluid and singularly granular simultaneously: I was instantly soaked, even under my poncho, and yet I could feel the weight and pressure of every last drop pelting me. “It’s not a competition, you guys,” I told the rain drops. “I’m already wet. You win.”

As I made my way through the thunderous waterfall, I didn’t reflect on the decisions in my life that had gotten me to that literal road, but it might have been a good time to do it.

I eventually made my way to the pharmacy, which was basically a storefront room with a bunch of glass cabinets and an older woman sitting behind a glass counter.

“Hello,” I said in Vietnamese. “Do you speak English?” (I said that in English.)

“No! No English!” she snapped.

I went to pull the piece of paper with the medicine written on it out of my pocket. My heart stopped for a second. “Oh my gosh, it’s like, really wet in here.” I pulled it out. The paper was soaked and the writing was smeared.

I showed it to the woman anyway. She looked at me like I was crazy. So I tried to say it in Vietnamese, and then she looked at me like I was simply nuts.

Great. It was pouring, I was soaked, and I felt…let’s go with “ill.”

Before I knew it, my body stepped in to help my brain, which was apparently fresh out of ideas. I grabbed at my stomach, made circular motions with my hands over it, and gave a grimacing wince, pantomiming my illness. My eyes met hers, but she only returned a blank stare.

“Man, how is she not getting this? Maybe I need to step up my performance…” I threw myself into my craft, twisting…and…writhing…(and since this is my story, and as I am the sole writer, I’m making a creative decision to let you as the reader decide if there were audible noises made).

I looked at the woman again, and again, a blank stare. “How can this be?” I thought…

…and then it happened. First, a twinkle in her eye, then an upwards curl at both corners of mouth, then a full smile. A light chuckle. And then came the thunderous laughter. Her whole body was shaking.

Her accent was thick, but the words still came through. “Diarrhea?! You have diarrhea?! Why you do not just say so?!”

She turned around to walk away to retrieve the remedies, still laughing, amused by what had just transpired.

I wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. My thoughts went something like…

I didn’t think it was *that* funny…Hey wait, I’m pretty sure she said she didn’t speak English…Wait, do I speak Vietnamese now? Haha, good one, Liz…But wait, did she really just trick me into doing that dramatic reenactment?

Still laughing, I heard her mutter to herself, “girl has leaky poop.”

She returned to the counter and gave me two packets of pills. To this day, I’m not sure what they were. “Take this one two time a day and this one three time. Then you be fine. 85,000 dong. Thank you come again.”

And that’s the story of how on a random evening on some street corner in Hanoi during Typhoon Doksuri, an old Vietnamese pharmacist woman tricked me into pantomiming diarrhea for her when I had food poisoning and forgot about Google Translate.