Lady Sunset..

For months now I've had an image in my mind that I wanted to capture. I'd think about trying to set it up at least every week or so yet in amongst the busyness of life I discovered that months had gone by and I was still repeating the same ole mantra to myself'; "next week.. next week.. next week.." It was while drinking my morning coffee a couple of weeks back that I noticed the fields behind my house were beginning to make the shift from impossibly green to a warm golden hue and I knew if I kept up this mantra and didn't act soon then my window of opportunity to shoot in amongst the rice fields would be gone, and that was something I was not prepared to let happen.

I asked amongst some friends if they'd be willing to let me shoot them and sold them on the concept of the shoot and was pretty jived when they agreed. Part of my vision was to have a background in which the setting sun was just kissing the mountain tops and so on a couple of afternoons at around sunset I rode around the outskirts of town location scouting. I thought I had settled upon a place but randomly one afternoon when I was picking up Wildfoot and Little Feather from their school, I decided to take the long way home and as we rode the scenic route through fields upon fields of rice just ripening for the harvest I knew I had stumbled upon a far more beautiful space.

I came back later that afternoon and wandered around the fields looking for interesting nooks and crannies and points of interests that I might want to include. The whole time I was keeping my eye on my watch so I would know where I needed to be at what time to get the most of out the rapidly changing light, but at times it felt almost pointless. I challenge anyone to try and focus or to make plans while walking through those fields at sundown! The whole afternoon felt like I was walking around in a dream. The soft breeze blowing across the top of the rice fields that created ripples which stretched out all the way to the base of the Himalayan Foothills while the sun gently settled down behind the mountains and smothered everything with an impossibly gorgeous golden light. If I'd had a picnic blanket, a bottle of red and my wife I believe I'd be well in my right for thinking that I'd died and gone to heaven.

 I rang around and locked in a day and a time for the shoot. I even managed to convince my friend's eldest son to come out and be my lighting guy/voice controlled light stand and this move ended up being one of the the best 60 baht I've ever spent! But on the morning of the shoot things didn't look anywhere near so promising. The weather was overcast and cold, the wind was kicking up a stink and the sky was continually threatening to rain. Living in a valley means the weather is always unpredictable and so there was always a chance it might come good, but because the weather report said it was likely to rain I opted to postpone the shoot till the following week, a risky move considering the difficulties in getting all my friends there at the same time coupled with the unknown date of the impending rice harvest but ultimately it was the right one.

The days rolled by and thankfully the rice remained unharvested. Everyone turned up for the shoot and it was like God had been saving up the most beautiful weather he had ever conceived of just for that day. The golden sunlight was otherworldly and helped give a real milky quality to parts of the images that I was hoping to capture along with the occasional bit of lens flare. I fired off a bunch of shots in different locations and tried to capture a variety of moods (as well as a number of individual portraits which I'll upload once I've had a chance to edit them) and walked away with a digital copy of the image that I'd been seeing in my mind's eye for months in advance (the first image on this page) and that is a sweet feeling indeed!

The final noteworthy part to this story came the following day when Shoonklicky Spoon went for a ride back to where we shot these images only to find that the fields in their entirety had been cut down in the harvest. Not more than than 12 hours after I captured these images the harvesters arrived and put their sickles to work. If ever there was a time I was grateful to have gotten off my butt and made something happen, this is likely to have taken first place!

Chhath Puja..

We've been back in ole Banaras for a little over two weeks now and it feels like our last days living in this city are all too quickly racing away. We've been insanely busy packing up our home and selling off most of the possessions we've amassed over the years, trying to schedule in enough time do decent goodbyes with friends (which I feel we're failing at), trying to not wear out the kids with all the running around (which I feel we're failing dismally at) - and of course, trying to manage all of the above with a family who have all had the flu since arriving back in town.. It's been an exhausting couple of weeks!

But none-the-less, I'm trying to make the most of our last days here and thus trying to get the camera out as often as possible. And whilst those who know me know that mornings are not my most favourable time of the day I decided to get my sorry butt out of bed get and down to the Ghats before sunrise last week to witness Chhath Puja. 

Chhath Puja is a an ancient Hindu festival that centers around Surya (the sun god) in which participants offer puja and gifts to thank the Sun for sustaining life and to grant their wishes. Prosperity, healing, babies and other various wishes are all considered up for grabs over this four day festival in which devotional acts such as abstaining from drinking water, offering prayers at the rising and setting of the sun and prolonged standing in bodies of water are all part of package. Whilst men and women both participate in Chhat Puja, it does seem to be more of a Women's festival and with the noticeable increase of women outside of their homes it actually creates quite a different (and wonderful) atmosphere in and around this overwhelmingly man's world which is Banaras.

I hope you'll enjoy this little morsel from the feast of colour which is the Varanasi Ghats during Chaat Puja!

(And because I can't help myself I have to point out that the compression that occured when uploading these images has done some weird things with some of the colours and really brought out the vignettes. You'll have to be patient and forgive me this time round till I work out how to fix it.)

Fishing In The Post Apocalypse Mall..

The Mall On The Other Side Of The Apocalypse..

On one late Autumn night in March 2014, I was huddled up on a couch in Australia and killing time on my computer when I happen to stumble across a comment on a Facebook thread that would immediately crawl in under my skin and make itself at home. Someone had heard a rumor about an abandoned shopping mall somewhere in Asia that had flooded and subsequently become home to a large population of Koi and this person was looking to find clues to it's existence and possible whereabouts. I eagerly followed the thread hoping to learn more but found that as the comments slowly dried up I was left hanging with no concrete information, no photographic evidence, no first hand accounts.. nothing but an explosion in my mind at the thought of the possibilities and burning desire to find out if this place really existed. Cue the inevitable sleepless night that followed filled with the pounding of various word combinations into Google until finally I happened across a grainy, pixelated, low-res yet outstandingly exciting image and the name that accompanied it; New World Mall, Bangkok, Thailand.

As I poured through various websites and my eyes grew wider with excitement at the various images a thought suddenly hit me like a steam train and for a moment I held my breathe as the sound of my heart beating in my chest began resounding in my ears. As many of you know, after many years living in India we're relocating the beautiful mountains of Northern Thailand and so between mid-October and mid-November we doing some traveling, a lot of traveling, including journeying from Australia to Thailand, Thailand to India, India to Thailand (and then in December Thailand to Laos to Thailand.. don't ask!) and that during this time we will be passing through Bangkok on at least two different occasions. I furiously opened up my travel itinerary and there it was, a 17 hour stopover in Bangkok between connecting flights on our way to India! If I could track this place down and organise our timing just right, I might actually be able to step foot inside it for myself!! The thought immediately caused my heart rate to double.

New World Mall, Bangkok..

 
Seven months later and the thick, heavy, humid air was filling my lungs as I hurriedly pushed my way through the masses along the sidewalks of Bangkok. After much research I had managed to track down an old address online and so booked our accommodation close by, and with the help of Google Maps in my pocket I was feeling confident that I was where I was meant to be and that I was on my way to something special. Suffice to say that after 25 minutes of walking with a growing feeling of confusion a helpful police officer was able to enlighten me that I'd been walking in the complete wrong direction since my first step out of the guest house.. niiiiiiice.

Fast forward through the long walk back and I soon found myself on the street which I knew the Mall was just off. I walked the length of it three times but any indication of a giant abandoned mall filled with fish was nowhere to be seen. Most things I'd read online about the mall were now a couple of years old and one mentioned how it was highly likely to demolished and developed at any time as it was in a area of growth and gentrification; a growing sense of foreboding and impending letdown was upon me. 

... B&W Three Shot Panoramic ...

From what I could gather online, it seems that some years back a brand-spanking-new eleven story Mall was being built in downtown Bangkok which would go by the name of the New World Mall. The unforeseen Global Financial Crisis in 2007-8 meant that the funds to finish the project dried up and soon after the doors closed on a half finished Mall. But the story doesn't end there, oh no, the eleven story mall was being built in an area where the zoning regulations prohibit construction above the seventh floor and so when the council came in and knocked it back down to it's seventh floor they opted to not bother with putting a roof on. This one act of a leaving a completely exposed and roofless mall meant that when the monsoon rains arrived they fell into a perfect reservoir and over time came to completely fill the bottom floors. With Malaria and other Mosquito borne diseases being a problem throughout Thailand, the story goes that a local man released a handful of fish into the waters to eat the Mosquito larvae and as this was an artificial watercourse which therefore had no natural predators in it, the fish thrived and began to multiply.

But this is where I come back into the story. You see I was standing on the corner of a small and completely nondescript alleyway that was filled with plastic tables and chairs and one or two of street food vendours, the same alleyway I had already walked across the mouth of 3 times, when I I saw the Krungthai Bank logo, the landmark I was searching for, and realised I was precicely where I was suppose to be.

 
I began walking down the alley and could see that less than 20 meters a head of me the alley ran into a wall and became a dead end. Two-thirds of the way down on the right however I could see a large wire fence covered in green shade cloth running parallel to the wall, the type of fence you put up around the outside of construction sites when you want to keep people out, and smack bang in the middle of this was a gate with a handwritten Thai sign which even as a foreigner I could tell said 'Do Not Enter!' My heart began pounding harder and harder as I stepped closer but I wasn't able to even get within a couple of meters of the gate before an elderly Thai man grabbed my arm and regaled me with the universal hand gestures for 'You can't go in there.'

I asked as politely as I could (currently being a non-Thai speaker this wasn't quite so easy) if I could just pop my head in quickly but he kept waving me away. I know the Thai word for 'Fish' and so I pointed to the gate and said "Plā" and the old man and his friend nodded vigorously yet with even more vigor they waved me away. He picked up a rather large piece of concrete from the floor and gestured that it had fallen from the roof, he then repeatedly tapped the top of his head - now after three years in India I've gotten pretty flippin good at charades (you should see me trying to ask my neighbors if they've seen my wife's bra after it's blown off the clothes line on our roof) and so I knew he was telling me that it wasn't safe for me to go in because  the roof/walls/giant pieces of concrete were liable to fall on my head. I appreciated his concern but yet found myself standing at the crossroads in which one direction meant to walk away and miss out on potentially seeing something amazing whilst the other was to stay and try and change the minds of these immovable objects/gentlemen without having any grasp on the language at all. I opted for the latter.

I began by using the few Thai phrases I knew; "Hello, my name is...," "I am .... years old," "I come from ...." etc. etc. etc. But it had little effect. I dug deeper into my memory bank and came back with "I like Thai Food," then I smiled real big. Both gentleman smiled politely and waved me away. I had pretty much exhausted my repertoire of Thai sentences and so was force to reverted to single words. "Fish. Buffalo. Monk. Temple. Bottle Water. Airport. Left. Man. Traditional Hats." That slightly sideways quizzical look began taking over the old mans face so I continued; "Child. Right. Little. Novice Monk. Elephant. Symbols. Snake... Pad Thai!!" The corner of the old man's mouth began to tremor and slowly raised into a smile. Success!!
  

First Floor; Women's Hosiery..

He began chuckling and so I kept on repeating my random assortment of Thai words and he turned slowly and led me up and through the gate. From the street side of the gate the opaque green cloth obscured all vision of what was on the other side but within one step through the gate the attached photos were all I could see. It was astounding. There was no long walk, no scrambling through tunnels, just one step through a wire gate and I was standing in the place that had been dominating my mind for months on end. What's more, literally millions upon millions of people would pass within a handful of meters of this place each year and yet the vast majority would never know it existed. To be so fortunate was rather humbling.
 
I'm not sure of what breed of fish they were (fairly sure they weren't Koi - at least not a breed that I'm aware of) but goodness me they were huge and numerous! Hundreds and thousands of amazing dark Blackish-Blues and Albinos splashing around in this cavernous underground wonderland. And when the old man began hitting a metal pipe that protruded from the water with a stone the fish turned and almost uniformly began swimming towards us whereby he reached into a bag and threw a mass of pellets to them which they swarmed over and devoured in an instant. I whipped out my camera and began shooting in what was a massively tricky lighting situation, and though deep down I'd love to go back and improve on these images, I'm happy enough to have come away with a handful of keepers. The old man began pointing at the roof above me and I could see where large slabs of concrete had become dislodged and fallen all over the floor, within 2 or 3 minutes since first entering he again he grabbed my arm and this time I knew it was the right time for me to leave.

All in all it was one of the more exciting and surreal moments of my life. When I burst back into the guesthouse and couldn't stop my lips from pouring forth the longer (and exceptionally more boring) account to Wild Flower (but she's a great woman and an even better wife so has learned how to put up with my ramblings) and I was riding the high for days. So if you ever find yourself in Bangkok and want to hunt down one of the most amazing places on earth make sure to get yourself to Banglumphu Junction on Samsen Road (walking distance from the main backpacker district of Khao San & Ram Buttri Road), find the Krungthai Bank (big blue sign with a white eaglish-hawkish-birdish logo) then keep your eyes pealed for the small and easily missable Soi Kraisi, turn right into it and look for the green netting a stones throw away on your right. The only other advice; just make sure to have your list of completely random and completely unrelated Thai words at the ready.


* Dedicated to my ole boy Ragnar - It's not Kolmanskop, but it's getting close!

Firing Into The Sun..

There is one particular joy about life in Australia which is hard to adequately explain to someone who hasn't been raising there kids in a place like Banaras. If you've always had access to it then like a lot of things you probably don't realise just how unbelievably amazing it is, but if like many of my expat friends who hail from the distant shores of America, Europe and Africa and are raising their kids in North India, well, they know precisely what I'm talking about... Parks!!

Oh the heavenly riches of having safe places where your kids can run around, be entertained and play without the throngs of BHU boys (the local university students) who have already commandeered the broken down Seesaw (which functions like a guillotine more often than not) and the Slippery Dip (which are always broken half way down and end in a series of sharp jagged spears that spell nothing but impending doom), as well as not having to be constantly set at Defcon 1 to prevent the very common occurrence of someone picking up your child and starting to walk off with them because hey, they just wanted to take a photo or to show their family who live 3 streets away the cute white child they found (in our first year in India this happened to us A LOT!).

Just the mere fact that there are child friendly parks is a completely new experience for us. I can really only think of one park in Banaras that's good for little ones but sadly it's about an hour from our place, all other "parks" (of which there are not many) are covered in drying clothes, rubbish, snoozing homeless folk, young lovers trying to sneak a kiss, packs of dogs and a million games of cricket (often it's this and more). Yet where we're living in Sydney at the moment, I have an amazing park at the end of my street where all these photos were taken and another 5 brilliant parks within walking distance. And in our family there's no way you'll ever miss noticing that you've gone past a park due to our park detector, ie; Little Feather, who squeals with delight from the back seat each and every time she sees a park and begin to wax lyrical about how wonderful the park looked and how we should stop whatever we're doing to go play there.. Every. Single. Time!

 
There are so many wonderful things about raising our kids in India but the lack of outdoor places for the kid to play in our city is something I truly lament! Small as it may seem, the simple pleasure of being outdoors with my kids and seeing them excitedly charge from one set of play equipment to the next brings such warmth to this Papa Bear's heart, thus parks are definitely something simple yet special we've been indulging a lot in since being back in Australia. It kind of makes you realise some of the smaller things in life that are worth being grateful for; something I'm actively trying to be more conscious of at the moment. It's so easy, in fact I think it's our species' default, to overlook and undervalue many of the exceptionally wonderful gifts we have and to instead waste our time being frustrated that we don't have more/better/newer/etc. so why not join me in taking a moment to give yourself some freedom and search out with fresh eyes those glimpses of beauty in your life which you've gradually become accustomed to no longer seeing.

As a final thought, someone once told me that you should always take photographs with your back to the sun.. I must wholeheartedly disagree! My love for photography really burst into flames last year and the last few months I've really enjoyed working through an online photography course in an attempt to grow my measly skills into something a little more robust. I've loved that its been challenging me to be more creative with my shots and so when it comes to firing into the sun.. well, is there anything quite so magical?!

It's (Really Not )Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas..

* It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Everywhere you go

Take a look at Manikarnika Ghat

Babbas on their mats

With sacred fires and cremation pyres aglow

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

 Winter coats on every goat

But the prettiest sight to see

Is the Paan stains that will be, on your own front wall

 

Some dhal and rice and a kite that flies

Is the wish of Padmabandhu Tiwari and Shri Priyanvad Raj Kumar

 

And Bangles of all colours that they'll throw at their brothers

 Is the hope of Saraswati and Somalakshmi Deepika Rai Vidya Kapoor

And Sadhu Ji could hardly wait to get back to sleep again

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Monkey Caps on every child

And the ladies drying out the poo, which they'll burn to cook their food

Have less now because it's also on my shoe

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Every man in a sparkling vest

But what will fill your heart with glee

Is the Paan stains that will be... on your own front wall

Have a Wonderful Christmas! 

Dedicated to our beloved Halfcocks Pariwar who the whole city is missing this Christmas!

*To the tune of Bing Crosby's 'It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas'

The Elephant Man (Not For The Faint Hearted)..

That quick pinprick pain on your foot. You know the one. When a small critter sinks his teeth/stinger/dagger right into you and for a split second the only thing in the world that matters is slapping the hell out of the affected area. Well I had that today, and after it happened my sweet Winnie Wild Flower said "Well, lets hope it doesn't get infected like last time." What she was referring to took place almost exactly 12 months ago when I woke up one morning and felt a slight pain on the corner of my lip.

I spoke to Oodbilav about it as he was a Triage Nurse before moving to India but he couldn't see anything wrong with it and so he sent me on my slightly less than merry way.

A day later the very corner of my lower left lip swollen and was painful to the touch.

A day later it was half of the left side of my bottom lip, it was hard as a rock and my 2nd back molar was giving off quite a bit of pain. I googled it and the verdict was pretty much unanimous; an abscess under my tooth. Now this is bad news regardless of what country you live in, but in Varanasi this news means having to see a dentist, and that is almost as bad as it gets.

We rang around and found the best dentist we could and went in to see them right away. Her office was clean and so was her equipment so that felt like a good start. I told her what the issue was and she took her scraper thing and poked around for a bit. But then it got all India. She took her little mirror, the one that's attached to the end of a little metal rod and turned it upside down so that she was holding the mirror in her hand with the metal rod sticking out from her fingers. Using this metal rod, she then gave a strong and decisive WHACK, right on the sore tooth. I gave off a shocked and slightly pained shout but by that point she was already taking off her gloves and walking away, totally satisfied with her work. She said "You need a skin doctor, not a dentist. If that was an abscess you would be crying on the floor right now, and you're not, so it can't be an abscess." 100 bucks says they don't teach you that in any Dental school in Australia! So off we went to find a skin doctor.

I'll skip past some boring bits like plenty of searching around and sitting in waiting rooms and go to when things began to pick up when we finally got in to see a really great skin doctor. She told me that what I had was an insect bite of some sort and most likely from a spider, and that it had turned into Cellulitis and thus she prescribed a ridiculous lot of tablets. It was a Friday afternoon and she told me to come back after the weekend if there wasn't any signs of improvements.

To be taken 2 or 3 times daily

Saturday morning the growth was so bad I could hardly speak.

Sunday morning turned out to be worse. I woke up early but found that I was unable to speak a word. The skin on the left side of my face had stretched as far as it could outwards and so had began to stretch the only other direction possible, inwards. I couldn't put the teeth on the left side of my face together as my cheek had swelled about an inch into my mouth in a giant painful bulge. On this morning for the first time you could actually see a small white headed pimple right at the spot where I first felt the pain and so I began to do what one does when they have a pimple, I squeezed it.

What came out is almost too distasteful for me to describe.. but I will, cause hey, that's the kinda guy I am! Wave after wave of thick, off white, semi solid puss oozed out from deep within my face with each squeeze. The process was intensely painful but with each squeeze I could feel the bulge inside my mouth lessening and the ability to open and close my mouth was improving and so I'd give myself a few moments to get psyched up to get through the pain and then would just keep on squeezing. On a couple of occasions the tiny hole became blocked and so I sterilized some tweezers and literally pushed them into the hole in my face and pulled out semi-solid masses of puss. After about 40 minutes I had filled up a small glass cup about a third of the way.. I offered to show it to Wild Flower but surprisingly she was not even slightly impressed with me.

Hellooo Ladies!

Oodbilav made a call and took my to see the Doctor again that morning as I was in too much pain to wait another day. She saw me sitting in the waiting room and called me straight in and I must have looked quite a sad sight as she didn't bother with any examinations but instead told me that she was going to have me admitted to the hospital immediately.

Going to hospital in Banaras is never good and in general I will avoid it at all costs, however today I really felt that I had run out of options. The hospital she wanted to sent me to was not a good one, in fact it has a terrible reputation and Oodbilav voiced this concern with the Doctor. She replied "in all Ponds there are good fish and bad fish. The hospital I am sending you to is filled with mostly very bad fish, however the specific fish you want to see is the best fish there is!" She had proved herself to be a very capable and trustworthy Doctor up to this point and so I took the gamble and trusted her.

Getting checked into the hospital was a typical Varanasi bureaucratic nightmare. A forty-something minute wait at the front counter to pay your first pointless "welcome" fee. Another long cue to pointlessly hand over your receipt at another counter in a different part of the hospital and pay another fee. Another long wait with the thousands of other sick patients on concrete benches in a cavernous underground room that apparently disdains natural sunlight in order to see our specific Doctor. Finally seeing the Doctor and being assessed by him at the same time as he assessed two other patients with horrible (and smelly) skin infections and then offending the Doctor by asking him to please use new gloves before he put his fingers into my mouth after he had just been poking an open wound on another man's leg. The list goes on.

Angelina Jolie Sold Me Her Lips

I was finally admitted to a private and quite decent (decent by Banaras standards of course) room with the help of Oodbilav who really was my hard working hero throughout all this. They brought in an IV drip with some cocktail of antibiotics and after a couple of failed (and painful) attempts managed to get it into a vain, and slowly things started settling down. Or so I thought.

I had fallen asleep around 11pm and at midnight the nurse came in, woke me up and asked what every single other person who had entered my room that day had asked; "Where is your family?" This question was fine, it was the second question that was really the kicker; "Where is your medicine?" I did my best to wake my mind up and managed to grumble out "huh?" She asked again. I naively responded through swollen lips "My family is sleeping at home, and aren't you the nurse? Aren't you suppose to bring me the medicine?" And here came my introduction to the Indian medical system!

You see, in Banaras when someone is sick or injured and is admitted to a hospital this turns out to be a whole family affair. And for good reason! You see, the sick person lays in bed while the family members do all the running around as Indian hospitals don't provide you with food, or water, or medicine, or medical tests! This is all to be done by your family members! And as I didn't have any family members with me and it was too dangerous and unthinkable to call Wild Flower and get her to wake up Little Feather and make the trip this late at night, I had to go for a walk, with the IV still attached to my arm out of the Hospital and up the street to the nearest store that sold medicines. I didn't get to sleep for another couple of hours.

The next day was pretty uneventful. The swelling seemed to have stopped and maybe even come down a little and so I watched a couple of movies on the computer and read for a bit. At one point the nurse forgot that she had turned on my IV and so about an hour after it had finished I went wandering through the halls looking for someone to take the tube out. At one point blood from my arm started flowing out and down into the tube so I squeezed the tube to prevent further flow. When I found the nurse and she came back to my room and took the tube out, I asked her if she would get me a new tube to which she rolled her eyes, said she would clean it, then walked to the corner of he room then held one end of the tube up in the air to let the blood splash out onto the floor in the corner. When Wild Flower and Little Feather visited I made them keep their shoes on and sit on my bed.

That day I made sure I had all my medicine in advance so as to avoid the post-midnight stroll into town to buy some and was settling in for a quiet evening. I ate some dinner (sweetly brought in earlier by my dear wife and daughter), watched a movie and curled up and fell asleep. But sure enough, jut after midnight, in walked a young student doctors who wanted to take some blood samples. His first question "Where is your family?" His second question "So who will take your blood to get tested?" Yep, at 12:30am I was told I would have to walk out onto the street, hop in an auto rickshaw, traveled to the next suburb (still with my IV in) and drop off my blood samples to get tested. Oh India!

The next day was Wednesday and it was a pretty drastic improvement. It was my third day of being routinely treated with IV antibiotics and by midday the swelling had come down to the point where if you didn't know me you might not have noticed any swelling at all. The little hole in the corner of my lip (from where the puss had made it's grand exit) had now opened up a little and if I pushed it from behind with my tongue the skin would open up just enough that you could actually see into a cavity inside my face! Very bizarre. They gave me an extensive list of medicines to continue using for the next couple of weeks and to my great joy discharged me sometime later that afternoon. Getting out of there and arriving home was a huge relief and thankfully within a couple of days all swelling was completely gone and I was the Elephant Man no longer. 

So tonight, as I'm sitting typing this up and looking at the little bite mark on my foot I'm rather thankful that I'm not sitting and thinking "hummm, so which hospital would I like to stay in this time!?"