Feeling doltish

So I moved with unnecessary haste coming out the front door of the minsu (homestay) where I was staying yesterday, and scraped my left little toe badly enough that it gushed blood for a good few minutes and merited two stitches to tidy it up. Fortunately, the guides who were showing us around Green Island (綠島) were just picking me up for lunch then and whipped me off to the local hospital posthaste.

Because Green Island has an islander population of about 1,000, the local hospital is only about double the size of a typical Singapore HDB clinic and looks like something out of the 1970s. A young mainlander doctor and an islander nurse attended to me, and he was very apologetic when he had to put two stitches in my toe instead of one. Total cost (including a tetanus shot, antibiotics and painkillers): NT$ 360, equivalent to about S$16. My Singapore HDB doctor charges me more than that for consultation alone.

So now I'm limping a wee bit and confined to wearing slippers for the rest of this trip and changing the bandage every night. No more hot springs or snorkelling for me, so it's just as well I had a taste of that before my silly fall.