Monday, February 28, 2011

Around the house - February 28, 2011

My wall. Look closely and you may see yourself.


Oh my oh my. This is where I try to shower.


Hanging out with one of my roommates

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Going crazy...

Yesterday evening I was reading in my bedroom when I started to smell gasoline. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, so naturally I decided someone was trying to murder me by burning the house down. I had already started to plan my pajamaed escape across the rooftops, mentally making note of what to bring and how far down the road I would have to run before being in a safe spot to call for help, when I realized the new 13 year old my family has acquired was just polishing the floors with some awful, pungent chemical.


Friday, February 18, 2011

Faces of Rabies Day

A couple days ago I accompanied my counterpart Bebie, Lila's Agriculture Technologist, out on her visit to the barangay La Fortura to administer rabies vaccinations to its furry residents.



Lila is dog-crazy - but that doesn't always translate to the kind of loving and responsible pet ownership that we expect, and have laws to support, back home. Most dogs here live in cages like hamsters, or on the end of heavy chains.


This is Sniper, my neighbor, and the only dog I've seen in the Philippines who actually lives inside a house, though still on a rope. She's very demure for a puppy, and I have to coax her to want to play with me.


Unlike dogs you meet on the streets of California, which are as likely to run toward you and nuzzle your crotch as anything, street dogs here go out of their way to avoid people, skirting in large circles around you, eyes warily on your legs and feet.


It was good to see people bringing their dogs out for vaccinations on rabies day, but most of the dogs looked like they hadn't been out in quite a while - nervous, shy, and over-excited.


Well hello there!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Where the Wild Things Are

A typical Philippine home is full of wild little surprises.



I almost stepped on this fellow during a late night Nalgene fill-up in the kitchen. In the dark I thought it was a pile of poop (you never know) but it turned out to be a hermit crab the size of a baseball. I paparazzi-ed it until it dragged itself under the fridge.





Then I went upstairs and spent 20 minutes holding my camera over my head trying to get a good picture of on of my ceiling geckos. On lonely days I like to think of them as pets.



Then I was distracted by this pretty, snowy moth, also on the ceiling.



But someone else found it too.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Bugs On Your Face, two ways

Today was my host mom's 75th birthday party in Tagbilaran. Kate was nice enough to agree to come with me, and after a late breakfast we made our way to City East, where we were discovered by two nieces and led to the correct house. Everyone had already eaten lunch, but we were ushered to a still set table and encouraged to load up on cold pancit, lumpia, lechon manok, and birthday cake. As we sat there next to each other, and trying to look like we were eating more than we really were, we started talking about Kate's new apartment.

"Margie was pulling her pants down, about to pee in the bathroom, and I kept saying 'No Margie there's no water!'" Kate is saying.

"Why is there no water?" I ask, and as Kate starts to respond, I look up from my plate and turn toward her.

"Well they turned it off because...gguuughh!" The sentence drops incomplete out of her mouth and she lefts forth a primitive sound, her face falling into a look of disgust. My eyes barely have time to widen as she swiftly reaches up and knocks something off my cheek. A large, cream colored spider falls softly onto my stomach.

"That was on your face!" she cries in alarm. I look down, jerk my arms back, and say "Flick it farther!" She flicks, and it sails onto the equally cream colored tile of the floor. It's not a small
spider, about the size of a nickel. I squirm in my chair, suddenly itching all over, and brush at
imaginary spider webs on my face.
I hadn't even felt it. I eye the beast warily from my seat and when it starts - very deliberately I think - crawling back up the leg of my chair we retreat to the living room.


This is the best photo I could commit to. It looked like it might be a jumper.




Though I want to think of having a jungle spider on my face while sitting down for birthday lunch as an isolated incident, my mind instantly goes back to an evening the week before, when I was getting ready for bed. I was starting my nightly grooming routine up in my bedroom - something I do to minimize the amount of time I spend in the somewhat less than sanitary bathroom - and had just popped my toothbrush into my mouth and was putting on a headband when I felt something like webs on my face. What the... My first thought was that a spider had taken up residence on my headband and I had just stretched its house across my forehead. But reaching up to brush it away I found several tiny ants instead. Then I noticed them all over my hand and forearm. "Oh no" I slur aloud, a mouth full of toothpaste. I yanked my toothbrush out of my mouth and looked at it in horror, then ran to my trash bag and started spitting frantically into it. There were ants ground into the bristles and smashed onto the plastic.

Lila's ants, it seemed, had finally acknowledged the overwhelming appeal of a nice toothpastey toothbrush, and in feeding frenzy that should have spurred someone to contact the Poison Control Center, were stuffing themselves with Aquafresh.
That I had failed to notice them even as I put the toothpaste on my brush can only be a testament to the awesome power of daydreams about grilled cheese sandwiches, vanilla soy lattes, hot showers, and HBO.

Six months here, and I still don't have a taste for ants. They show up almost daily in my meals, either roving through the rice or in suicidal flotillas on the surface of ramen, and though I know consumption is inevitable and have occasionally just turned a blind eye, I still find the notion of ants in my mouth...icky. Now I was sure I'd be flossing them out for days.

So last week the ants and today the spider. I might still be striving to achieve acceptance from my Filipino neighbors and coworkers, but it seems the Philippine bugs just love me.

Friday, February 11, 2011

The strange incident of the chicken skin in the evening-time

I have a confession to make: I don't always finish my dinner.

Food is important here. While I won't get into all the particulars of Philippine food culture now, suffice it to say that a meal is not a meal without rice (breakfast included), to turn down an offer of food is a potentially grievous insult, and to let a guest go hungry on of the worst offences imaginable. It's serious business.

That said, I eat my meals alone, so I have a bit of flexibility. My host mom calls me to the kitchen with a series of increasingly loud "Mangaon ta!"s as I scramble to get downstairs, and they sit in the living room and watch TV as I eat.

A typical dinner is a whole fried flying fish, a small plate of sliced carrots (for my benefit alone, as they've noticed I like my veggies), some ramen, and a heaping plate of rice. Things get increasingly atypical from there, and though I'm not a picky eater by Western standards, there are certain animals parts and quantities of things I can't bring myself to eat unless I'm being watched. Chicharron with hair still attached, fish heads, and any kind of entrails are among them. This is where eating alone has distinct benefits, but it doesn't solve the problem entirely. I still don't want to offend my host mom by leaving things untouched. The solution isn't a glamorous one, but let's just say I've begun to take advantage of the scrawny, small-boned stray cats that hang around the back of the house. From where I sit at the table, I can toss little bits of head and stomach out the door to the outdoor kitchen where they sit waiting.

Occasionally, however, the door will be closed. This does not deter one intrepid fellow, who has figured out how to climb from outside up to a foot-tall gap between the wall and ceiling on the other side of the kitchen. From his perch, he can look down to where I sit at the kitchen table and howl. He has learned that if he howls long and loudly enough, I will eventually finish my meal, walk across the room, and toss something up through the gap.

A couple days ago I had chicken adobo for dinner, which is really very delicious but I had a bunch of bones and some particularly unappetizing pieces of skin left over. So across the room I went, and first looking around to make sure I wouldn't be caught in the act, began donating them to the gap. The bones made it up just fine, but one large, slippery piece of skin wobbled a bit on the launch and instead of going through the gap hit the wall six inches below with a smack. Where it stayed. Utterly plastered, with no intention of moving, and completely out of reach.

Oh, no.

Wide-eyed, I looked around again. I briefly considered leaving it there, but I didn't think even my very old host mother could fail to notice a very large piece of skin stuck to her sea foam green kitchen wall. I didn't much care for the idea of explaining how it got there either.

Frantically, I jumped for it, but it was just out of reach. Then, trying to be quiet, I quickly rummaged through the drying rack and found a long, dangerous looking utensil. Reaching upward I jumped again. And as I'm jumping, just before I do manage to hit the skin and send it sailing across the room to land with a greasy smack on the floor, I have one of these moments where I really wish my family could see me.

Here I am, alone in a dingy, mosquito-filled kitchen on some jungle island near the equator, the sound of a TV crackling in the background as I, wearing my baggy turquoise nylon shorts and wielding a pronged kitchen tool, fling myself upward at a piece of skin on the wall. Yes, dear family, this is what I have become since you last saw me six months ago.

After the skin lands I run over and collect it before sending it sailing, successfully this time, up through the gap. Then I wash up, fill my Nalgene from the jug, and head up to my room, turn on an electric fan so old and powerful I swear it's made from a WWII propeller, and spend some time with Lisbeth Salander under my mosquito net before I fall asleep.

Well hello there

I think I've decided to try putting words here. Please bear with me on this, I promise neither to be a consistent blogger nor a profound or funny one. But I haven't been taking many pictures recently and need some other content.

That, and I've been inspired by a couple of shockingly good blogs written by women I know - blogs that manage to be lovely and self-effacing and entirely un-conceited. Blogs I truly enjoy reading.

So instead of continuing to put my family and friends through excessively long mass-emails about how many ants I've managed (or not) to avoid eating this week, I've decided to put the general interest bits up here and make my emails a bit more personal.

So dear family and friends, here goes.