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..... 

Geckos galore

©Ingrid Booz Morejohn

One of the joys of the tropics are all the friendly and sometimes not so friendly creatures that want to share your days and nights with you. Geckos are the best and centipedes, spiders, scorpions, mosquitoes and cockroaches are the worst. Here in our bungalow on Koh Chang we have very few mosquitoes, only one poisonous centipede in the bathroom and no cockroaches but oodles of geckos and one big tokay gecko. The geckos make their own sound that is a little bit like their local names ching-chong or chick-chack but the large, colourful tokay has it's own distinct mating call - a tight, high pitched tok - kay, tok - kay, tok - kay from which it gets it's name. The sound is repeated and if you hear it speak 7-8 times some say it means good luck. The tokay gecko is the second largest gecko species, nocturnal and native to SE Asia. They are looked upon positively by most people in Asia, so much so that the Chinese consume them for medicinal purposes. They feed on the many small insects and rodents that might want to pester you, so please welcome them. But they do poop a lot!

Illustration: Drawing of a gecko (with only four fingers, they actually have five) that my son Burton and I did together, painted, then fooled with in the computer.