Spider in my bra

Sign at Indian Museum, Calcutta, India ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn

Finished dinner a few minutes ago and picked up a basket of fruit, the homemade basket we bought a few days ago from an old man on the street in Pingwu. Hugging the basket I felt something large fall into my cleavage, DAMN, a jumping spider was lodged in my bra. Lickety-split off came the shirt and the bra, to the hilarious laughter of my children.  

That reminded me of a scene from my childhood when my family lived on a sailboat in Central America, my mother suddenly thrashed out in a hysterical dance and ripped her clothes off in front of us: a cockroach had crawled into her shirt. 

Which made me think of a friend whose mother had put on her underwear one day in Arizona only to be bitten in the worst place by a scorpion having a cosy nap in her knickers. 

Burton then related the story how he the other day took a deep drink from his water bottle only to find that he had a large (drowned) cockroach in his mouth. 

Which reminded me of a story my Cuban grandmother told me when I was little. She shared a bedroom with her sister in Havanna and one morning she woke up to shrieks: her sister, who like Emy had extremely long hair that had never been cut, slept with it tied up in a braid. During the night a python had snuck into the room and proceeded to eat up her braid, centimeter by centimeter, until the greedy snake finally choked himself to death. The sister woke up with the dead snake stuck to the back of her head, thus the shrieks..... 

Dreaming of Jialebihai

2004 ©Ingrid Booz Morejohn

Recently I have begun studying Chinese (long overdue) and today in the stream of consciousness kind of way that I absorb most knowledge I learnt that the Caribbean Sea is called Jialebi Hai 加勒比海. This beautiful, melodious transliteration of the way the word is pronounced (not a translation of its original meaning) immediately transported me to a dreamy, floating world of turquoise waters, blinding white sands, warm breezes gently sashaying around palm trees, platanos fritos, rum punches, pelvises pressed together and a man's hand firmly placed on my lower back, guiding me in a rythmic salsa. I suppose the past few balmy days here in Chengdu have stirred my Cuban roots out of their subconscious hibernation causing my mind to wander a bit too freely. 

It's wonderful how not only the meaning of a word can bring you greater enlightenment but its sound may carry you to places you wouldn't have imagined. Just as exotic sounding destinations like Kashgar, Turfan, Lhasa, Gobi, Shanghai and Peking conjured up images of dusty camel caravanserai, tinkling pagodas, magnificent palaces and dark alleyways teeming with exotic-eyed, black-haired peoples to pop into my child's mind over 40 years ago, hearing Jialebi Hai teleported me into a tropical world where sitting in my classroom chair I suddenly saw hibiscus flowers sprout from the teacher's head and little paper cocktail parasols grow out of the end of my pen. 

The magnetic pull of romantic sounding foreign placenames was a great impetus to start traveling when I grew up but surely traveling in your head is much cheaper? Back to the classroom: along the way a few other geographical words were thrown into today's lesson: Portugal is Putaoya 葡萄牙 (which literally means Grape Teeth); Cuba becomes the masculine, meaty sounding Guba 古巴 and something I've known for a long time: Sweden, Ruidian 瑞典.  Why Sweden is pronounced Ruidian is because it has its beginnings in the Cantonese Suidin, a phonetic translation. Converted into putonghua it became Ruidian whose first character means "auspiscious" or "lucky". Lucky me!