“This is about the only place in the house,” Kara said the first night I arrived, placing my cup on a shelf in the kitchen, “that isn’t infested with cockroaches.”

Lovely… Welcome to Sri Lanka!

I can deal with a lot, but I have had some surprising reactions, and some fantastic discoveries over the past couple of weeks. There are the obvious notables, such as cats and dogs running around with no one treating them as pets (Anjuna seemed annoyed and confused at the idea, although he was familiar with it). There are a surprsing number of cats, a good number of which are kittens, near the house.

For the benifit of the breed aware, half of them look like a tabby/bengal mix, while the others look like calicos, with a strong emphasis on the white and orange. All of them look scrawny. Anjuna was suprised when I told him I had a cat (“Blue?“), but was quick to tell me that a friend of his had 6 dogs. I got the impression that Anjuna didn’t make house calls very often.

There are bugs, of course. I was glad to usher a spider out of my bed a few night back, and was grateful that this unexpected beauty to the right didn’t put me into a hospital bed when I almost walk straight into his web while getting out of a trishaw in Negumbo last weekend.

While in America I do my best to live in karmatic harmony with all the little creatures loved by Mother Earth. Here it is war. Mosquitoes are the worst. Dengue fever is hitting a lot of local ex-pats (at least from what Kara says), and I am not taking any chances. The first time I went after a mosquito I barely nicked it before it exploded all over my shorts. I was caught somewhere between the horror of having killed the bug and the horror of now having to wash my shorts as the morbid delight, akin to a 12-year-old boy with a magnifying glass, took hold.

And then there is Ted. Ted is a gecko. He lives behind the oven. He is my friend.

Okay, he scares me to death. Something about the way he moves. It doesn’t help that he is always moving while in the corner of your eye. It doesn’t help that he snakes his way in unpredictable patterns across the wall, with you never knowing if his next move might be to leap at your head and suck out your eye ball.

The other night he was in my shower (A.K.A. the pipe in my ceiling — Kristi, think Bulgaria, minus the curtain). It was time for us to talk. It turns out he had first dibs, so I went and talked to Grant on I.M.

“There is a gecko in my shower.”
“Coolio,” Grant replied. “Have you named him?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “Ted.”

I don’t know why his name is Ted, it just is. That was the first name that came to my mind. Grant didn’t like this logic, but Kara and I couldn’t help but laugh the next day when I relayed the story. Our boss’s name is Ted.