A Warning

You will let yourself do appallingly stupid things this far from home.

You will take minibuses to the worst parts of town and buy five-foot plastic horns for far too much. You will mix drinks, you will eat red meat. You'll smoke, although you never smoke.

You'll stop flossing. You'll contemplate dying your hair blue. Yet again, you will avoid both the diet and the exercise regimen you swore you'd be on. You'll sleep fourteen hours one night, and on the next night you'll do it again.

You'll spend eight hours and $40 one Saturday on gifts and cab fare for an evangelical wedding in a dingy one-room church. You'll listen to the preacher thunder and shake about AIDS and homosexuality and contraception interchangeably, you might even raise your voice in honest hallelujahs to a God you openly scorn, a God that Dutch ships brought to this heathen land.

You will do the unthinkable: when the urge is too great, you will hitch up your skirt and pee into a hole in the ground.

At the wedding reception, you will meet high school children, not even fourteen, who have spent years of pocket money on Michael Jackson records, and they will ask you whether you have ever met a celebrity. You will say, Of course.

On a Thursday afternoon, when the offices have emptied and the last buses are almost ready to depart from Gandhi Square, you will sit at a desk on the eighth floor, watching the orange twilight reflected in the city's many glass faces. Though even natives are mugged for less, you will not look over your shoulder once on the lonesome walk home.