The drama continues

This is the continuing saga of my adventures with the creatures of Hong Kong.

Two nights ago I headed up to the far side of the property to the laundry room to collect my clothes. It’s dark back there, and as I made my way across the sidewalk, a very long creature started to cross my path. My very first thought was it was a snake and I stopped. But as it came closer (ignoring me, thankfully) I saw it was in fact a centipede. I’ve only seen a centipede a couple of times before, and those were nowhere near as big as this one. I stared at it out of morbid curiosity. So many legs! And again, it was massive.

Last night, I had yet another of many, many roach encounters. I see at least one almost every day, and I’ve gotten edgy about it now. Every time I think I see movement from the corner of my eye, or I’m lying in bed at night and I feel phantom flicks of my hair (probably just the breeze from the fan), I get tense and worried it’s a roach. And unfortunately, sometimes I’m right. They mainly stay in the bathroom/kitchen area since they tend to come in the windows. (side note: we don’t have central air, and with the intense summer heat, if you don’t crack the windows it’s even more like a sauna than normal, so closing the windows isn’t an option.) Maz headed into the bathroom to get ready for bed, and I could hear her chasing one and subsequently smashing it. I headed in there about 10 minutes later, and there was another one. “It’s the size of a cat!” I yelled to Maz as I dragged her in to kill it for me (and it was! HUGE). She just gave me a look and went after it. It was speedy, and ran all around until we couldn’t find it anymore. I decided I could wait for the bathroom. Sidney, our short-term roommate (until her apartment is ready next week) who is from Hong Kong, then went in, and a moment later she called out to me. The roach was back, and she is somehow more scared of roaches than me (hard to imagine). I couldn’t get at it to smash it, so I scrounged in the kitchen and found Raid. I sprayed the roach, but he got away before I got a good hit. There was an all-out battle raged as I chased it around, with Sidney jumping around behind me. It ran behind things, up the wall, skittered across the toilet, and started flying (that’s right, I said FLYING ... a nightmare come true). Out of pure luck, in all its haste, it flipped on its back and during its temporary disablement I gassed him with the Raid (by this point Maz was out of bed laughing her head off at us). Sidney clung to me, yelling to gas him some more. So I did. I probably used enough Raid to kill three or four roaches, but oh well. And then I smashed him with a shoe. And then flushed him down the toilet, just to make sure. Sidney told me I was brave (funny, I know), Maz laughed some more, and I went back to my room. A while later I came out and as soon as I walked into the bathroom, the Raid fumes hit me. It will take a while for the smell to go away, since we were spraying all over the place trying to catch the roach. But I think it’s worth it.