independence day, malaria dreams, and the end of the world

I have been relatively lucky with my malaria medication; most people have stopped taking theirs due to bad side effects, but I have experienced relatively few issues and so continue to use it. As you may know, this is because I am holding out for the bubonic plague and don't want to risk getting malaria first. However, I take my malaria pill Sunday night, and I always spend the wee hours of Monday morning in a half-awake, dreaming stupor. My malaria dreams are always about the end of the world; unlike Murakami, my end of the world does not involve reading dreams from unicorn horns, but it does involve an apocalyptic blizzard a la 'The Day After Tomorrow'. It is strange that the medicine I am taking for a tropical disease makes me dream of the world dying under the onslaught of a thousand blizzards. I wish that my dreams were more exciting (or at least unique), but perhaps my waking imagination is so fertile that it is uninterested in the paths that quinine can open. It makes for a bad start to the week, though--I go to the office on four hours of sleep and four hours of wandering in a catastrophic frozen wasteland.

Today when I got to the office, the staff had put red, white and blue balloons and signs that said 'Happy Independance Day' (sic) on the expats' cubes. It was a nice touch, and I took a picture even though I am too tired to show it now. After work, Ranjit and the other chefs made an all-American feast. They made chicken burgers, and they fixed sauteed onions and real bacon for toppings. I cannot even begin to describe how amazingly delicious this meal was. The chicken burger was huge, and I topped it with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes, bacon, sauteed onions, and cheese. It was one of the most satisfying things that I have had since arriving here. After finishing the burger, I ate a helping of bacon straight up, along with some more sauteed onions. Mmm.

The best was yet to come, however--we sent Ismail out with Rs10000 ($250), and he brought back a whole trunkload of fireworks. These fireworks were the real deal--they were on par with the fireworks that are usually used in the Fourth of July display back in Iowa, although we did not have any volunteer firefighters to light them for us. Instead, the braver souls went out into the field behind the swimming pool and set them off one by one, which was very reminiscent of the long pauses between fireworks at the Corydon reservoir. I hung out on the balcony off the fourth floor of the apartment building (which is more like the seventh floor, since every 'floor' is really a 2-story apartment), and so got a great view of both the fireworks and the chaos amongst the lighting crew. I was sure someone was going to die--I found a statistic today that said that 5.2 people die for every 100,000 pounds of fireworks consumed in the US. That worked out to around a 0.27% chance that one of us would die, if we assumed that it was as safe as fireworks in the US, which was definitely not true. 0.27% is small, but too sizable for my tastes, and so I stayed out of the way. It was all fun and games until they brought out the M80's--these things were like flashy little hand grenades, so they would light them and then throw them as quickly as possible. Inevitably they would get very close to someone else, and all of us watching from the balcony would gasp in unison.

The fireworks were great, though, and it's fun to celebrate the Fourth in a different country. This is my third Fourth outside the US (Ukraine in '94, London in '02, and now Hyderabad in '05), and it was definitely a good one. Now it is time for me to go to bed; my air conditioner still isn't working, so without the inducement of the malaria medicine I sincerely doubt that I will be dreaming of blizzards tonight.