Sometimes things are just different living overseas. Some days it seems
everything is different and the cultural gaps are magnified. Those days we refer to as an "Asia wins" day because you just have to laugh at whatever cultural faux pas you've experienced. Or, you laugh because it seems the culture has, shall we say, "turned" on you.
This post highlights some of my recent Asia wins days and they all have a common thread: unwelcomed critters. Feel free to laugh at my aversion to such things. I'm ok with providing a laugh at my expense :)
1. I came downstairs during the night to get some water and my water bottle is on the table in the living room. I reach for the bottle and turn my head, and I see a cat sitting on the couch, starring at me. And...I don't have a cat...
2. I moved out of my house for a week so it could be treated for possible bugs (we'll just leave the details at that). The morning after I move back in I hear a noise coming from the bathroom. I go check it out and there's a bird sitting on the window ledge. There's a screen barrier so the bird can't get in, but the screen isn't the sturdiest thing and his morning wake up call was easily heard. I just beat on the window and told him to be quiet. As a side note, I also beat on the bedroom windows almost daily because birds like to have a grand party on my roof.
3. Sometimes I also beat on walls and tell the geckos to go home. I don't mind George, who is a frequent visitor in my bedroom. But when he brings his friends, that's where I draw the line. Especially when one of his friends falls out from hiding in between the stack of clothes you just washed.
4. During a recent vacation I was excited that our hotel bumped us up to a really nice room. Until I go to bed that night and pull back the covers, and there's a spider the size of my hand behind the pillow. The manager "tried" to kill it but I really think he was trying to catch it, not kill it. Because his version of the room being spider-free was when the spider crawled from the bed to the floor. Because crawling around on my floor is ok?
5. The other day I heard this piercing scream coming from the kitchen. I was sitting at the kitchen table, with my back to the kitchen. The scream was so loud I thought some kind of animal had come through the pipe and was in attack mode. I ran out of the kitchen and unlocked the front door as fast as I could. I could still hear the noise outside! I stood there for awhile before I worked up the nerve to go back in. I put on my shoes and grabbed an umbrella (because the real weapons, the mops and brooms, were, of course, in the kitchen). I saw no sign of an imposter, though.
6. While not directly related to critters, this one just has Asia written all over it. Repairs are often done halfway here, meaning they do it just good enough. The lock to one of the bedrooms in my house has been broken for awhile now. I know not to shut the door, but one night I was in there and it just happened. The door swung shut. And I was locked in. I was going to figure it out in the morning, but considering I was in the bedroom and the bathroom was not, that didn't seem wise. Thankfully my neighbor, a friend, was home. He climbed over the balcony at his house, and came through the balcony into the room where I was. So he has now gotten me
out of my house and also back
into my house (once when the main front door lock wasn't working he did the balcony climbing thing in order to get in the house to let me in the house).
#asia
