“Wake up Zarina, we’re here!” It was my dad, and he looked just as excited as I was.
“Yeah! We’re here!” I jumped up, now wide awake, opened the door and got out. The first thing that crossed my mind was “What is that SMELL?!”
I took a step forward, hoping to have a look around, but before I got any further
SQUISH!!
“Oh my… EW! What’s that?!” I cried, hopping about on one foot “Ew! Get it off me!”
Just my luck. I’d stepped into a pile of cow dung, and now my foot looked like it was covered in a horrible colour of melted chocolate. This definitely wasn’t what I had expected to see… or smell! I felt as if I’d just stepped into a sauna with my clothes on.
All my family came rushing out to greet us, and once they saw my foot, I had about 5 people carrying me in to get the dung washed off. Not having to walk cheered me up, but as soon as I saw all the animals that they had inside, (including a couple of cows!!) I had a feeling that things weren’t going to get any better, which meant that my holiday, which I’d really been looking forward to was turning out to be not at all how I’d expected.
A few days later I still wasn’t used to the hot weather and the funny smells, but at least I didn’t have to go outside. I could jut stay in bed. Why? I was sick. I had some kind of stomach bug, and it was really awful. The hot weather didn’t help, because I had a very high temperature, and I was sweating like a dog. To top it all off, I had to keep rushing to the toilet, which was quite far away from where I was lying.
My mum and dad kept trying to cheer me up, but it didn’t work, apart from the one time they went into the town and bought me this really nice (and expensive) suit. It was beautiful, and I was very happy. Until I started to be sick. That was the worst part of being ill. I felt bad as I watched one of my relatives clean up the floor.
After that, not even a bar of Terry’s chocolate orange (which is my favourite chocolate) would have cheered me up.
3 days before we were due to go back home, I suddenly felt a lot better, and was up and about playing with the other little kids. That was the good news. The bad news was that now my mum and dad had somehow caught my stomach bug, and they couldn’t even get out of bed. The even worse thing was that most of my older relatives had caught it too, even though they were used to living in Pakistan.
Thankfully for me, the kids weren’t sick, it was just the grown ups. All we did was play all day. We had to prepare our own food, since he older people were lying in bed, no able to get up.
Due to the fact that my parents were too ill to travel, we ended up staying an extra week until they were well again. This was okay with me, since I was starting to have a good time. I’d started to get used to the smells, but it didn’t matter too much because we would just sit inside under the fan playing board games all day.
On the way home on the plane, I thought about how much fun I’d had once I’d stopped worrying about the bad points of Pakistan.
Even though we hadn’t had the chance to go sightseeing al over Pakistan like we had planned to, I’d still enjoyed myself and relaxed in the last week of my holiday.
Written by
Zarina . M 10U
