An enjoyable vacation that ended up in a hospital bed

Going on vacation is always a pleasurable experience that promises exotic sights, relaxation, time to medicate, the beauty of nature and infrastructural designs, and the like. As someone who loves to travel and behold new places at every given time, I've got loads of experiences I could possibly write about, but for this prompt, I've decided to write about one of my vacation gone wrong experiences.

The vacation experience I'm about to share actually took place when I was about 10 years old. I stayed with my grandparents in Lagos, and one thing about African grandparents is that they usually want a child to be well versed in the nitty gritty of his or her heritage and cultural background, so I guess that warrants the reason why they took me on a vacation to one of our relatives who stayed in a typical African village.

Prior to embarking on that vacation, I'd never really been to any village settings before, and I don't know how life is over there like we did in Lagos. Although I was born in Kwara State, Nigeria, I grew up in Lagos and spent most of my entire life there prior to this vacation. But one thing that kept me buzzing about our trip was the fact that I'd get to have a first-hand experience of what a village lifestyle looks like, unlike how Nollyhood has been portraying it in movies.

Our destination was Alarere, which was a village located in Oyo State, Nigeria. We arrived safely, and I hit the ground running, all thanks to the fact that our host had several kids of my age who took me around the village like a medal to show everyone they've got a relative who resides in Lagos. Though I felt embarrassed, I still enjoyed the feeling, even though I can bet they're leaving with a better lifestyle than we do in Lagos.

Although they would disagree, because unlike us, they've no electricity, motorists, or modern lifestyle like there's in Lagos, they're proxy to nature, have fruit, farm products, fish, and wild animal meat at the tips of their hands without needing to pay a deem like we pay heavily in Lagos for such, and to cut a long story short, I enjoyed the vacation due to:

The uniqueness of their houses: all houses in the village we went to were all built with clay; our people call it Ile Alabara, and I was wowed by those structures, which are said to have been built by several generations before ours, yet those structures still stood firm. Aside from the houses, another thing that blew my mind was the sight of trees. Now, I know you might wonder what's so special about trees that it blew my mind.

Well, as regards the trees, I was wowed because that was probably the first time I'd seen so many trees. In fact, the street we stayed on in Lagos, which housed over 60 houses at the time, had no single tree, so seeing so many trees made me feel good, and immediately I saw other kids climbing and playing on them, so I joined in the trend and played on different trees. In fact, on this vacation, I got to see mangos, oranges, grauva, and other fruit trees for the very first time. All I used to see prior to that was just the fruit or a photo of their tree.

I also visited the farm for the very first time and got to see how various plants and crops were planted. Although I wasn't allowed to join in the fun of working on the farm because they were trying not to stress me out, I got to see everything firsthand. Even there, I got to see farm tools and equipment such as cutlasses, hoes, and others for the very first time; prior to that, we were only shown their photos in school. Aside from the view, I'm also learning.

One of my favourite aspect of the vacation was the food, to say the truth, excessive would be an understatement to quantify how much the food were, I'm always been served a large portion of food and aside the three square meal we eat, we can easily plug any fruit from the tree and eat immediately, experiencing such from someone who use to pay before I can get those in Lagos made me abuse it until it leads to the inevitable that brought our vacation to a short end.

Yea, I know it may sound funny that eating could make one fall sick, but I ate to the point where, if they want to prepare pounded yam, I'll roast some yam under the flame and eat, then eat some of the boiled yam before it's pounded, and when it's finally pounded, I'll still sit with others to eat a large portion, and our host was just giving me more and more, and it got to the point where I couldn't eat again.

The sickness continued for a three-day stretch, and I wasn't able to eat anything throughout those days, so that made us leave the village in a hurry back to Lagos after spending just a month there, unlike the two months we'd planned to spend there. Well, they need to take me to a hospital to treat my illness since there are no medical facilities in the village. The village was so rural that passenger buses only came there once a week, so we had to make do with sitting in a bus that was conveying fruit from the village to Lagos.

Funny enough, the truck was filled with bananas, my favorite fruit, and the owner specifically said we could eat as much as we liked until we arrived in Lagos. Unfortunately for me, despite being surrounded by my favorite food, I couldn't eat any, and I was pissed seeing others enjoy it, but my stomach wasn't taking in anything. Well, luckily, we arrived in Lagos, and I was taken to the hospital for treatment before I became whole again and could eat again.

That's all on my vacation experience in the village, which, although enjoyable, ended on a bad note and was inspired by the city of Neoxian's prompt topic, which you can see here to get more information.

Thank you for your support and time, stay bless.