Come in to my bathroom, said the spider to the Mo
Sorry I've been letting Brand do all the talking. Between the strange hours, the work, the errands and the pool, I get very little chance to post. Plus, he creates more amusing posts than I, so I figure you're all enjoying yourselves.
So last weekend in Pondi, Brand mentioned my marvelous adventure with the shower. You have to understand a couple of things to fully get a sense of this story...
It is pretty common in Indian hotels that are only trying a little hard to be western styled to have a fully tiled bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower, and no division between them. Where there is a western style toilet, its plumbing, for the most part, works like a normal toilet, except that often there is two places to flush it, which provide different amounts of water. Brand and I haven't quite figured that one out yet.
Often though, the shower (and sometimes, as we found out in a restaurant in Mahabs this weekend, the urinals, ick) don't actually have full plumbing. Instead, they have a drain that leads to a flexible tube, that empties over a regular drain in the floor. Where there is an open shower in the room too (one with no walls) that drain under the sink is the same one that serves the shower. Sometimes the floor will be slightly slanted to make the water move that way, sometimes there will be a groove, most often, it seems that the water is just left to it's own devices.
So, the bathroom at The Dune was a circular hut about 10 feet in diameter with a six foot tall cement wall around it. Above that wall was thatched, wide roof that is held up on pillars above it. The benefit of this was that while you took a shower, the breeze from the Bay of Bengal would come in and blow around you, feeling rather delightful. After the hot 4 km walk through the 39 degree heat with 85% humidity (which translates into 48 or 50 on the Humidex), I felt like I'd just won this week's Reward Challenge.
The Hanuman looking fellow in the picture is just a little wall that stands before the door of the bathroom so no one can see you as you dress.
The other thing you should know, is that no one that has ever met me in person has ever mistaken me for a girly kind of girl. I'm not particularly squeamish, I don't notice when I break a nail, I get dirty, I kill my own bugs. When I was in the amazon a couple of years ago and I saw a foot long centipede squiggle it's way across my path, all I did was swear because I didn't have my camera in my hands.
But when I saw this Cthuloid beast in my shower, I shrieked like a 1950's housewife.
Ugly! Bugly! And it sort of ran in all directions at once! And then it hid beside the sink and stayed in the room. So I shriek, and Brand comes running, and when he sees it, he gives a squicked sound of his own. He takes off his shoe and tries to nudge it to move it up over the wall and get it to leave us alone, but it would not be ousted. In fact, as Brand found out quite terrifyingly, they also jump. It was that moment that, as much as his intentions were all about ahisma, his instincts were all about survival, and the spider went splat... and I do mean splat. I have never seen such a wet splooch of a dead bug in all my life, and frankly, I could do without doing so again.
So I spent some time on the interwebs and finally figured out what kind of spider it was... Brand and I agree, the Cthuloid beast is called a Huntsman, or a Fisher Spider. If you click on the picture below, it will open to one that is closer to life size.
And I'm glad that it's only in retrospect that I know that Huntsmen can often be found hanging out in groups. Eeeeee!
So last weekend in Pondi, Brand mentioned my marvelous adventure with the shower. You have to understand a couple of things to fully get a sense of this story...
It is pretty common in Indian hotels that are only trying a little hard to be western styled to have a fully tiled bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower, and no division between them. Where there is a western style toilet, its plumbing, for the most part, works like a normal toilet, except that often there is two places to flush it, which provide different amounts of water. Brand and I haven't quite figured that one out yet.
Often though, the shower (and sometimes, as we found out in a restaurant in Mahabs this weekend, the urinals, ick) don't actually have full plumbing. Instead, they have a drain that leads to a flexible tube, that empties over a regular drain in the floor. Where there is an open shower in the room too (one with no walls) that drain under the sink is the same one that serves the shower. Sometimes the floor will be slightly slanted to make the water move that way, sometimes there will be a groove, most often, it seems that the water is just left to it's own devices.
So, the bathroom at The Dune was a circular hut about 10 feet in diameter with a six foot tall cement wall around it. Above that wall was thatched, wide roof that is held up on pillars above it. The benefit of this was that while you took a shower, the breeze from the Bay of Bengal would come in and blow around you, feeling rather delightful. After the hot 4 km walk through the 39 degree heat with 85% humidity (which translates into 48 or 50 on the Humidex), I felt like I'd just won this week's Reward Challenge.
The Hanuman looking fellow in the picture is just a little wall that stands before the door of the bathroom so no one can see you as you dress.
The other thing you should know, is that no one that has ever met me in person has ever mistaken me for a girly kind of girl. I'm not particularly squeamish, I don't notice when I break a nail, I get dirty, I kill my own bugs. When I was in the amazon a couple of years ago and I saw a foot long centipede squiggle it's way across my path, all I did was swear because I didn't have my camera in my hands.
But when I saw this Cthuloid beast in my shower, I shrieked like a 1950's housewife.
Ugly! Bugly! And it sort of ran in all directions at once! And then it hid beside the sink and stayed in the room. So I shriek, and Brand comes running, and when he sees it, he gives a squicked sound of his own. He takes off his shoe and tries to nudge it to move it up over the wall and get it to leave us alone, but it would not be ousted. In fact, as Brand found out quite terrifyingly, they also jump. It was that moment that, as much as his intentions were all about ahisma, his instincts were all about survival, and the spider went splat... and I do mean splat. I have never seen such a wet splooch of a dead bug in all my life, and frankly, I could do without doing so again.
So I spent some time on the interwebs and finally figured out what kind of spider it was... Brand and I agree, the Cthuloid beast is called a Huntsman, or a Fisher Spider. If you click on the picture below, it will open to one that is closer to life size.
And I'm glad that it's only in retrospect that I know that Huntsmen can often be found hanging out in groups. Eeeeee!
1 Comments:
Squick, squick, squick! Shudder. I am an arachnophobe to begin with. I considered myself quite brave to have taken a little baby one outside the other day. The thought of seeing groups of giant jumping spiders that look like that is just terrifying. I am covered in gooseflesh just from the picture.
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