travels

What would one expect after taking a nice, cold shower late at night on a Thursday? To put on some p.j.s (as little clothing as possible) and hop into your cardboard-supported bed. Sounds simple enough right? Hah. Last night, after taking my cold shower and getting ready to settle myself down to watch a movie in bed, I paused to remove my towel and put on underwear. This action required me to open my dresser drawer. To my surprise, I wasn’t the only one who liked sleeping in underwear. So do flying cockroaches. Yep. They fly, they’re huge, and their antennaes wiggle around when they sense danger. So upon opening my underwear drawer, I found a giant, live cockroach comfortable nestled in between Fruit of the Loom and Hanes Her Way.

Cue heart palpitations and fight vs. flight mode.

I chose to fight- to capture and destroy the “x numbered” legged creature. I readied myself with a plastic cup but as I went in for the grab, mr. scallywag took cover. In my underwear mind you. I stepped back, reorganized my mental strength, and went in for hand to hand combat. I slowly removed every tank top, bra and underwear in my quest for the enemy, only to find him once I removed the last item…hidden in the corner. I flung the drawer onto the floor and was ready to step on him but he was too quick. In a matter of milliseconds, scallywag dove underneath my dresser into safe territory which means I was unable to kill slash catch him without sticking my hand under there, unarmed. Now am sleeping less than a foot away from him.

The grossest part? I think cockroaches excrete some kind of material (I don’t want to say feces because that’s gross). And I think scallywags had been living in my dresser for a few weeks. I’ll spare you the details but all I can say is SICK. And last night I had trouble sleeping.

On a less grosser note, I’m going to the beach today with my family. This is a new thing for us but I can’t say I’m not happy about it. Although I’m wondering who I’m going to swim with since no one knows how to tread water. Really! No one knows how to swim here. I would have thought they would have since we live next to a river that half of the year is overflowing with water. Nope.

This past weekend I went to Piura city (I’m pretty sure I told you all of that). It was great- great food, great internet and great hot showers. I took full advantage of all of these. But sadly, all good things must come to an end and I had to come back to Tumbes. So, we (Alyse, Ian and I) all bought our bus tickets and we’re ready to go at the bus station a half an hour before take off time (we all had meetings we had to make later that day). I should have known things were not going to be going according to plan when the bus showed up 45 minutes late. But whatever. We got on, loaded our bags and sat ourselves into the cloth stained chairs that would be our companions for the next 5 hours. There are two kinds of buses in Peru. Bus and Bus Cama. You always want to get Bus Cama. They’re air conditioned, dark, have big, comfortable seats, and don’t smell like dead aliens.

Then there’s the bus we took. Bus (sans Cama). These are hot ( I mean you walk out with serious sweat stains hot), not air conditioned, sticky with some mystery liquid that a five year old probably spilled on the floor a month earlier, and smell like sweaty zombies. And our bus’s windows only opened two inches.

Instead of taking the predicted five hours, our bus ride took seven. This was due to the fact that we stopped upwards of ten times to let people off and on and to fix one of the back tires while we were stranded on the side of the highway.

During one of our prolonged stops, I stuck my head out of the bus to see what was going on. I managed to catch a man emerge from the bottom of the bus (where I had stowed my newly bought pillow), with a dead animal in his hand. But to my surprise, instead of just throwing it out on the side of the road, he put the animal into a plastic bag and then proceeded to reload him onto the bus. No wonder that bus ride smelt so badly.