worked with oron this morning but my foot was prohibiting sparring so i mostly did boxing pad work. afterward i went to the doctor, foot is not broken which is a huge relief, i just have a bad sprain in the joint between the second metatarsal and some other bone. the doctor gave me some celebrex for inflammation and told me to stay off it, so i'm staying off it as much as possible (ie. not training for the next little while, which of course sucks but injuries have to be expected and could be a lot worse).

i rented a scooter finally, which i've been sort of putting off doing due to a combination of the intense nature of the streets here, my general unfamiliarity with driving in the first place, and my specific total lack of knowledge on motorcycles. but considering a taxi to the hospital was going to cost me at least $30, and renting a scooter for a month cost a little over $100 and it's causing me considerable pain to walk anywhere, i figured it was time to man up.

and holy fuck these things are so goddamned fun. the first five or so minutes of getting used to the accelerator, steering, braking etc was frustrating but once i got it, i announced, "hey these quiet roads are totally easy to drive on let's go try the highway." to no one in particular, and no one suggested, "hey maybe the highway in a country where they don't seem to have road law isn't the best place for someone who has never ridden a scooter before." and i damn sure wasn't going to say it.

i took a gander at google for the directions and at first i was like hey no proooooblem. but then i took a closer look (here, go do the same: zoom in and follow the path on this map) and noticed that a number of the streets off the highway had the same number running in different directions-- sometimes the highyway split off at right angles with both keeping the same number, or once there were two streets running parallel off a roundabout again with the same number.

"welp," i figured aloud, and put on my stupid helmet and loaded the map into my ipod while i was still close to internet access. i figured if i got off track i could take a look and know which road i would want to get back to and even if there's multiple roads numbered the same thing, there's only going to be so many with that number. i'm bound to get where i'm going eventually

"welp," i reasoned further, and hopped on my bike.

the good thing about there being no law on the roads here is that you can totally suck at driving and there's still someone doing something way worse than you. i saw one woman on her bike, talking on her cellular phone, and every once in a while cradling her phone with her shoulder while she drank a fancy coffee smoothie thing. and she was smoking. i actually don't know how she was operating the vehicle. not mentally, i mean she clearly wasn't doing that, but i mean physically i don't understand what on earth was keeping the thing moving forward. up until that point i was concerned about keeping a steady velocity and not swerving too much-- after that i figured if i was going to die, it probably wasn't going to be my fault so much as some pre-teen playing a gameboy and driving with his feet cutting off a truck overloaded with a football team and spilling on top of me while i'm checking to make sure my lights are on.

so i get to that round-about and there's like fifteen streets off it instead of the five on the map. and none of them are labeled with numbers, only "patong", "promethep cape", things i didn't look at when i looked at the map.

"oh i'll just check my ipod while in the middle of this roundabout going 60km/h," i mentally ridicule my planning, then think about how that would not be out of place at all on these streets and laugh to myself. i end up taking a street that's approximately the direction i think i want to go and get to my destination, really without incident. i'm flooded with my first flush of driver's cockiness, credit the years of racing video games for my success, accept an imagination bouquet of flowers and start to swagger to the winner's circle emergency room until my mangled foot almost spills me flat on my face.