On sharing your home with geckos

I've been putting off writing for awhile, mostly for the following reason: Right now I want to talk about geckos more than you want to hear about them. It's a fact, and I respect it. That's why I've been holding my tongue, out of deference to your rights to not be deluged with stories about geckos, especially after all the cat emails you've already endured. But then this heat thing happened and I just had to let it all out.

According to weather.com, it is, currently, "99° F (feels like 104°)". Of course that can't possibly be right. If you ask me those weather.com people are too conservative or maybe just liars (not be redundant), and are any of them really here, anyway, to accurately report what it "feels like"? I don't think so. If they were, even for a minute, they would quickly revise their findings to read "maybe technically 99° according to these probably faulty age-old thermometers we're still using like the chumps we are, but what does it feel like? Well, now that you ask, it feels like somebody decided to preheat Cambodia to 350° and then forgot to turn off the oven. Like hell, a little bit? Oh alright I suppose you could put it that way." Because that's the reality. We're baking over here, and baking is never fun unless there's homemade blackberry pie at the end. I remember when I was little, the hottest place I'd ever been was Davis, California, where my mom told me that it sometimes got so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. Boy was I impressed. Here, you could roast a 20 lb.Thanksgiving turkey by putting it out on the balcony for a few minutes around noon (that's hardly an exaggeration) and somehow impressed is not the word I'm looking for. The egg thing was cute. This is just obscene.

Anyway, let's get on to the geckos. I don't have much of a story even, just kind of a funny scenario, but here it is: the other day I came home and opened my fridge only to find a live gecko scampering frantically around in the lettuce drawer, terrified of the giant monster who had discovered him and fighting wildly to escape capture at my hands. Naturally, I captured him promptly. And then what did I do? I showed him where the cockroaches live. I took him over to their little den of filth and whispered words of encouragement in his ear to embolden him for future battle. I could have scolded him for hiding out among the vegetables when he should have been fulfilling his god-given destiny as a cockroach-chomper, but I chose positive reinforcement instead in hopes that something good could still be salvaged from the wreckage of my romaine.

Unfortunately this particular gecko has turned out to be a huge disappointment. Lazy excuse of a lizard that he is, he has not caught or dismembered a single cockroach since I freed him over a week ago, even though he owes me big time for being so understanding of his invasion of my vegetables. Pssh. Call yourself a gecko. Why is that instead of getting all the macho carnivorous warrior geckos, I get stuck with the wussy ones who just want a little nibble of salad and a cool place to rests their heads? How did I end up surrounded by creatures that range from worthless to repulsive, all of us cooking in the "feels like 104" degree heat, when nary a year ago I lived a comfortable life with a charming chihuahua and temperatures which all reasonable people can agree are nothing but perfectly pleasant?

Maybe it's annoying of me to complain , since there are a lot of perks to living here too. Take for example the little jaunt to Singapore some friends and I I took last weekend to crash with a fellow volunteer and her parents at the Marriott Orchard Road. I could talk a lot about the free happy hours/goat cheese samplings that came with being guests of Executive Premier Marriott patrons, and also those avocado shakes they have in Singapore that I may or may not have already mentioned(hint: I did) and a few other things like a whole shop that sells nothing but cardigans (really!). It was a fun weekend getaway, and one I could not have easily pulled off from Oakland Ca. This is true. I've also recently been to Kampot, a riverside town in the south of Cambodia that's home to what was once considered the finest pepper in the world, and I got to see firsthand the rolling plantations upon which this pepper is nurtured along into full blown pepper glory. Kind of neat, yes. I also spent a lazy afternoon leaping into the river from a rope swing hanging from a swaying coconut palm, eating jackfruit off the vine, and later gorging on pizza and strawberry shakes with two of my favorite new people from this whole southeast asia gig. Those are lovely memories and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

I guess what I'm saying, though, is sometimes, as fun as it is to live here, I just want to go home to a refrigerator that does not contain geckos. A house that does not contain cockroaches. A country that does not make you feel like you're inhaling flames every time you breath in. Is that so much to ask? I watched a movie recently that at one point commented on how many days of our lives are simply not memorable --they come and go filled with routine pursuits, and there's nothing you can point to and say, that's a memory in the making right there. That's probably true in most cases, but it's not really true here. I'd say more of my days here are memorable than aren't, and while there is certainly something to be said for that, it's also, quite frankly, a lot of work. The gecko thing just reminds me of the cockroach thing which reminds me of the tropical climate thing, which reminds me that I'm sweaty and sticky and hot and tired and gross pretty much all the time. Which reminds me that I still have four months left of this. Oh and my water tank burst this weekend. Fantastic.

But then I got a package from my mom which included Peeps and an egg-dying kit, and Zsaleh came all the way out here to visit me and brought with her lots of good gossip and several trashy magazines -- and somehow that makes all the difference.


oops, one missing already…naughty gecko!

And let's be fair: at least it was a gecko in my fridge and not a cockroach. Right?