Drunk Man

Last night Matt and I met up with Peter on the street across from his condo, about two minutes from our condo. We were waiting for Lisa to come in her taxi to pick us all up and take us to Maria's. We're carrying - iced tea, beer, settlers of catan and other goods.

A man goes by on a bike. He is on one of those old bikes with a ton of cans and bottles strapped to the back with garbage bags and bungee cords. We didn't pay much attention.

Then...*crash!!!*

We look about 20 meters away, and the bike has fallen on the curb, but we couldn't tell if the man was there. Nothing was moving. Matt and Peter ran over (I was the designated ambulance caller) and indeed there was a still man, connected to the bike, while the bike was sort of in the road and sort of leaning on the curb.

Matt and Peter pried the man off of the bike, and he was semi responsive. His eyes were moving, but he wasn't communicating at all. Unclear why. Then a super nice Singaporean man came by on his bike and stopped to help as well. They carried this man to the grass on the other side of the sidewalk, and they were trying to talk to this guy - and I was trying to figure out if an ambulance should come.

This man did not speak Chinese, and he didn't know very much English. Finally the Singaporean guy figured out that the fallen man was totally wasted. He then smiled and said, "I drunk." Matt ran off to get some water and snacks (unclear why he got snacks, but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. Blood sugar?). The man somehow communicated that we should just wait with him for a few minutes, and then he would continue. We waited, trying to figure out if he was hurt (he FELL OFF HIS BIKE!!), too drunk to go home, or if there was someone we could call to come and help him. Matt returned with the water and snacks, but the only water the store had was Evian, so this man basically poured the Evian all over himself, and maybe a little went in his mouth.

Eventually, the man got up and tried to get back on his bike. He kept saying thank you for the water, and he kept kissing the bottle. He even held it in his hand when he drove off...but it took him about five minutes to get the bike going again. He lost his flip-flop. He didn't look for traffic behind him, he was a disaster. We didn't know if we should keep him there, since we were pretty certain that he had a higher chance than normal to get killed, but we didn't know how to do that...so off he went.

And we ate a good dinner and played Settlers.