What an Idiot!

I'm sorry for the lack of posts - blame school, its back to being incredibly busy again. Sheesh. Don't they know, I want a life?!

I saw this article in on Yahoo today:
Thai woman tells of 25-year detour after catching wrong bus
by Rapee MamaThu
A Thai mother who was lost for 25 years after catching the wrong bus home has spoken of her ordeal after being reunited with her family thanks to simple song.
The last time Jaeyaena Beuraheng saw her seven children was in 1982 when she left south Thailand on one of her regular shopping trips across the border to nearby Malaysia.
She never returned, and police later told her family that she had apparently been killed in a traffic accident.
In fact, Jaeyaena had simply taken the wrong bus home -- an error that would have been easy to fix except that she only speaks the local dialect of Malay known as Yawi, according to officials at the homeless shelter where the 76-year-old has lived for two decades.
"I didn't tell anybody where I was going on that day, because I went there quite often," she told AFP, crying as she spoke.
She was heading home from her shopping trip when she mistakenly hopped on a bus to Bangkok, some 1,150 kilometers (700 miles) north of her home in Narathiwat province.
In Bangkok, unable to read Thai and speaking a language few Thais can understand, she again took a wrong bus, this time to Chiang Mai, another 700 kilometers (430 miles) further north.
There she ended up as a beggar for five years, until she was sent to a homeless shelter in the central Thai province of Phitsanulok in 1987.
"I thought I would die in Phitsanulok. I thought about running away many times, but then I worried I would not be able to make it home. I really missed my children," Jaeyaena said.
Officials at the shelter told AFP that she was known as "Auntie Mon," because her speech sounded similar to the language of ethnic Mon living along the border with Myanmar.
But still no one could understand her, until last week when three health students from Narathiwat arrived on an exchange program to research the problem of homelessness at the shelter.
She sang a song for the visitors, one that the staff at the shelter had often heard but did not understand.
"She sang her same old song, one that nobody could understand until those three students from Narathiwat told us that she was sing in Yawi, a Malay dialect," the official said.
"So we asked them to talk to her and find out if she had relatives," official said.
Jaeyaena told the students that she had a Malaysian husband and seven children, recounting her entire story of the bus and how she had become lost in northern Thailand.
Her shocked family sent her youngest son and her eldest daughter to meet her and bring her home on Tuesday, the official said.

I'm sorry if this sounds cold, but what a freaking idiot! I don't understand this woman....if it was me, and I was seperated from my family voluntarily, I'd do EVERYTHING in my power to get moving. I wouldn't just resign myself to "being lost, no one understands me, guess I'll just stay here and beg for five years, la-dee-da" Everyday would be a day of movement for me, even if it meant walking and eating from trash, because I had no money. I just don't get it. Also if it was me, I'd try to have some geographic knowledge to know where I am and where I need to get too and because clearly this woman didn't possess that (knowing Bangkok was north of her hometown) maybe she shouldn't have gone shopping in the first place. Aye!

Could this just be a cultural thing?