insectoid irritants

It's damn hot here, but I'm still riding around on my bike.  It's actually very easy to get by with a bicycle, and it's good exercize.  Takes me about 25 minutes going slowly to work, or 15 going speedy.  Every day I get up at quarter to seven, crawl out from under the net, go throw some buckets of water over myself, shower up, get dressed and do all those deodorant-y things.

Ha, ha, living alone!  I have created my patented 'nest bed', complete with multitudinous hair clips and elastics, kleenex detritus, old shirts, socks, old novels, and my Lao study books. I'm enjoying it while I can.

The house is located along one of the main north-south cement roads (at a right angle to the river road that goes by the French school). You come in through a gate, and then turn right, and there's a longish path in the grass to get down to the house.  There are nice papaya and coconut trees on the edge of the grass, and some nice potted flowers and plants also.  There's a bamboo fence that sort of divides my area from the landlady's house, but it doesn't totally cut us off from each other.  The house I'm in is one storey, flat on the ground.  It has good windows with screens, and there's a big huge living room, with bedrooms, bath and kitchen off of it.  There is annoying linoleum on the floors that trips me up.

The other annoying thing is the ants in the house.  For some reason, I have happened upon the most unusual ants in Lao.  No one has ever heard of ants like these.  I don't keep food in the house, and there aren't many ants, but every so often, they'll come in in a parade, and eat up something bizarre. The other morning I woke up, and they had swarmed into my khaki pants. Clean khaki pants.  They were just raging in them.  It took 10 minutes to get them all out, and when I'd finally squished out the last ones, I held the pants up to the light to check them and lo and behold I could SEE TINY HOLES in the pants.  Fuckers!  Boy was I mad. 

But then, if that wasn't enough, the next day I went to go to work and they had drilled teeny holes into...my sandals from Bangkok.  I mean, what the hell???  Every single person I have talked to about this has said that they've never heard of such a thing.  Am I extra stinky?  Do I have sugar in my clothes?  Why would they eat cotton and plastic?  Good christ almighty, WHY? In addition to the ant problem I have also been freaking out at night because I'm alone.  Last night I was convinced there was a rat in the room. Turned out to just be flapping paper, but I was seriously scared.

Oh, back to the insects for a moment...so I was shaking out my ant-y laundry (only 2 days old, not smelly at all), and was like, damn ants, when this enooooormous spider jumped out and went bouncing across the bathroom floor. If anyone had been here I would've screamed for sure.  As it was, I let it hide under the rim of my big water holding bucket, and I went ahead with my shower, scared silly it was going to bite me, or spawn all over me.  I had to hurry the shower cause Kinnalone, my Lao teacher was coming in minutes. Then tonight I had to go back, carefully bucket out all the water, and then carry the bucket and spider outside and dump them both.

On top of it all, Kinnalone squished a gecko on my coffee table by accident, and we had to remove it to the outdoors together.  Shurely all this is enuff?

I've been thinking a lot about differences between VN and here.  Mainly, I am missing VNese food.  I like the food here, but the variety is not as fantastic as in Hanoi, and there aren't all kinds of nice little places every two metres.  Lao is on a very Canadian scale I think:  big open spaces, gas stations for trucks, no one carries glass on a motorbike, no one rides with 5 people on a motorbike, you can't fall out of your house and into a bowl of noodles, there's grilled chicken but not boiled chicken, people are chubbier, people don't smoke everywhere, there are no xe oms, it's not so hot, you can't hear pigs being slaughtered, and people don't talk to strangers. 

In other food news, everyday for breakfast I just get half a bread with condensed milk from the bread lady up the street (ooh, but now I've got a jar of jam at the office!).  I haven't had anyone take me for breakfast noodles, so I don't know where to go (and you know I don't like trying places the first time by myself), and I can't be bothered to find out yet. Plus it seems like everyone eats bun gun (which they call khao biek for some reason) here.  Oogy!  The only time I got sick here was the day after I ate bun gun.

For lunch I usually just go over to the UNDP canteen.  Not many falang go there (actually, I've never seen any, except for when I was with a guy from my office), but [or perhaps 'therefore'] it's really good.  For only 4-5 thousand kip, I get rice, veggies, and some meaty thing, or else they have laap and khao nieu, or soup, or other yummy things.  It's excellent.  I have been trying to eat at home for dinner, but just take-out so far...[Laos-17-August-2000].