Damage Control
One of the recurrent themes of my trip centered around Marco’s almost obsessive battle against the evils of gastrointestinal distress. Fortunately it was a battle where the enemy never showed his face on the battlefield, as the wedding went off without any purple-faced mad dashes down the aisle for the nearest baño.
This photo was taken from the shotgun position of Marco’s car as he attempted to cut off at the pass the catastrophic volley of GI discomfort that was surely on its way due to our heroic bout of street dining earlier in the day.
It’s fascinating to me how easy it is to self-diagnose maladies and self-administer remedies this side of the equator. Although the harder, more easily abused drugs are necessarily more difficult to get, most drugs that would require prescriptions in the states are readily available here. Of course antidiarrheal medications hardly fit into either of those categories, but from what Marco told me the pharmacist gave him a hard time of it anyhow.
(And yes, this pharmacy is being run out of someone’s garage, which is not at all out of the ordinary here, and no cause for alarm)
