Sometimes I wonder if Ahsook thinks of me as often as I think of him. Or if he’s told the story of our short friendship as many times as I have. The two weeks we spent dining together in Bangkok every night is one of my most cherished travel experiences.

Our friendship started with a motorcycle crash. My fellow travel study participants, Dr. Steinfatt, and I were spending a long weekend in Pattaya, a touristy beach town south of Bangkok known as a place where members of the military go to blow off steam when on leave. A few of us decided to rent motorcycles one day to go explore the smaller villages in the surrounding area.

As we headed out of town, stupidly helmet-less on a busy two-lane highway, Dr. Steinfatt was leading the way, followed by two women sharing a bike, with another woman and me on a bike bringing up the rear. Although we were keeping up with the pace of traffic, we weren’t going fast enough for a large truck behind us who decided to pass. The Thai drive on the left side of the road, so as the truck passed on my right, I slowed down to let them between me and the second bike. As they went for the second pass, my friends in front didn’t see them coming, and the truck didn’t get far enough in front before coming back into the left lane and clipped the two women with the back left corner of the truck.

I can still see what happened next vividly, but in slow motion.

The driver fell clear of the motorcycle. Her passenger, Cherry, didn’t. As the crash unfolded, Cherry and the bike tumbled together once, and on the second roll, Cherry face planted on the pavement and was vaulted into the air, turning and landing on her back in the ditch.

After coming to a stop on the side of the road, I rushed to her, sure that she was dead. I called her name, and her eyes immediately popped open. “My teeth are loose,” she said. I couldn’t believe she was alive and assumed she had smashed her whole face in.

Thankfully and miraculously based on what I saw from my front-row seat, Cherry had only minor injuries. She had broken her front two teeth, which had also gone through her upper lip. Beyond that, she only had scrapes and bruises. Not a single broken bone.

After an initial triage at a small medical facility in Pattaya, Dr. Steinfatt and I joined Cherry on a transfer back to a hospital in Bangkok – where Cherry then proceeded to get groped by a medical orderly while being taken to get more x-rays. I had already kicked into protector-mode after the trauma of the motorcycle crash. When she told me what the orderly had done, I went full knight in shining armor, insisting that they take us to a different hospital. I also decided I was going to stay with her overnight rather than leaving her there alone. That’s when I met Ahsook.

Although Cherry was born in the U.S., both her parents are Thai and immigrated to the U.S when they were college students. After Cherry spoke to her parents back home, her local family that she had never met came to the hospital. Her uncle “Ahsook”, which literally means “uncle” in Thai, was not about to let her stay alone in the same room overnight with me so the three of us bunked in Cherry’s room that night. After that, Ahsook realized I truly did have no ulterior motives or intentions with his niece and decided I could be trusted.

Although Cherry’s injuries were relatively minor, she did have to have dental reconstruction followed by plastic surgery and ended up spending a couple of weeks in total at the hospital. We worked out a schedule where Ahsook would spend his days with her while I was off working on the research I needed to do while I was there, and then I’d return in the late afternoon and spend nights after going to dinner with Ahsook.

But here’s the thing. Ahsook didn’t speak English, and I spoke only enough Thai to haggle over prices with tuk-tuk drivers and shopkeepers. Ahsook would pat my stomach in the early evening and say the one English word he knew to start off our nightly dining ritual: “Hungee?”

He took me all over Bangkok and fed me amazing meals. He would order, we would both eat, and we would have lively conversations, neither of us having a clue what the other was saying. We’d just take turns talking. After getting back to the hospital, Cherry would translate and tell me what I ate. Maybe you can imagine my surprise the night she told me I had fish gut soup for dinner. Probably not what I would have picked for myself, but I’d definitely do it again.

I only saw Cherry once after that trip, and I never had contact with Ahsook after returning to the U.S. I hope he remembers those meals as fondly as I do.