i suppose none of them are too notable, except maybe the second giant spider. maybe also the first giant spider.
okay, so here goes:
the place where we stayed in Eluru was totally ghetto.
i mean, it had everything that the other places had, 2 beds in each room (the beds were hard, as hard as sleeping on the floor would be, so we would be sore in the morning, but i got used to it, and i like a firm-ish bed, so it wasn't so bad), a washroom with a toilet and a tap, a sink, a window, under which sat a desk and chair, a shelf for stuff, a mirror and hooks. but it was terribly ghetto. we were the only ones staying there, even though the place had quite a large capacity, so i suspect that the nuns who ran the centre also had the impression that the place was ghetto and didn't make anyone else live there.
there was mould growing from the ceiling to which i was allergic. at first both my roommate and i were stuffed up from allergies - but hers might have been from her mouldy shoes, so when she got rid of those, her allergies went as well. but mine lingered. whenever i was away from the room for an extended period of time they would start to clear, and then when i returned my sinuses went right back to their old green mucoid secreting selves.
our room had this horrible odor that we would notice whenever we walked into it. probably from the mould.
there were giant cockroaches living in our bathroom, so we never knew what we were going to find. my roommate was becomming quite the expert at killing them - WHAP!! and they were dead. we were both still a little squeamish though. we would keep one of her running shoes on the top of the toilet, just in case, because you never know when they would creep out. i'm blind without my glasses, so i never quite felt safe taking a bath because i wouldn't be able to see them and react. there was the usual fare of geckos and little spiders and bugs of undefined sorts. these weird wormy things (they were red, and oh so disgusting and about as long as your longest finger) would crawl around our room occasionally. we would hand wash our clothes in the buckets they provided and hang them to dry whereever we could around the room. once a wormy thing crawled onto my drying bra. i saw this red thing on my bra and wondered what it could be? so i touched it, and ACK! it was a wormy thing!!! i was mortified.
the bathroom was dark: the floor was dark and the walls were dark, so you couldn't tell how dirty it was in there. that was probably a good thing. you also couldn't quite tell what the colour of the water was because the light in the bathroom was not very good. also probably a good thing. but at one point, after the heavy rains, the water started running a very noticable muddy brown. so i had to avoid a shower for that day. i pretended it had cleared up the next day in order to convince myself to bathe.
we got into the habit of not flushing the toilet because it took so long to fill up. i guess it was a pretty good way to conserve water and all that. but ghetts nevertheless.
there were reddish splotches on the wall by my bed, that had sort of dripped down a little bit and were dried there. i had the sneaking suspicion that it was the blood of whatever some previous denizen was lucky enough to kill, and all that was left were the marks to decorate the rooms.
the electricity would go off every night at around 6:30 or 7:00 and be off for about an hour. we liked to have dinner during that time, because what else are you going to do sitting alone in the dark? besides the food wasn't spectacular and wasn't particularly helped by shedding light on the subject. so we would eat by torchlight or candlelight in the dining hall.
the mosquitoes were killer. at night after dinner, we would go straight to bed - around 8-30 or 9 o'clock. my roommate covered in her sleeping bag and i in my sheet, wrapped right round to the point of suffocation just so that nothing creepy crawly could come in and so that i had some, although not completely effective, measure of protection from the mosquitoes. by the end of our stay there they were getting worse and worse, even biting right through the sheet. so one day i decided to use my umbrella as a prop for my sheet, as a makeshift mosquito net, and i slept under the umbrella. (i can be pretty ghetto myself). my roommate was amused. it was terribly uncomfortable but it worked. so i tried it again the next night. it was the most uncomfortable thing that ever was, and this time they got in, perhaps through little places where the sheet was not held down completely. awful. i would not recommend it.
i mention all these things not to complain but because i think that they are really funny. the giant spiders were also quite funny.
the first one we lived with for a few days. my roommate saw it first and pointed it out to me. it was smaller than a tarantula, but getting there in size. it's body was a bit bigger than a toonie, and it's legs were long and hairy and thick. it didn't seem to be moving very far and it stuck to a corner of the room above the window where it was rather away from us. we were just extra careful to zip our bags up to make sure it didn't crawl into anything. but then my roommate pointed out that it could be poisonous. so we decided to ask the nun who had come with us what we should do. of course it happened that she was afraid of spiders. she came to our room, and then when we told her what it was, she didn't even look, she just backed out of the room, totally creeped out. we found that amusing. but before she went back to the city she did get someone to come in and kill it for us. there was this long pole, a sort of broom or mop type thing, but it was maybe twice the length of a regular mop. he took this thing, and used the opposite end, which was just the pole and ended in a sharp little jagged point, and he climbed on top of the desk in our room and zot! he stabbed the spider, impaling it on the end of the pole. and that was that.
until the second giant spider. this one was not in our room, it was in the hallway. same size and type. we were worried that it would crawl into one of our rooms. so someone had to kill it. my roommate was the obvious choice, because she was an expert at killing things - but she didn't want to do it. one of the other girls was also a good candidate as she would kill everything and anything, and was obsessed with keeping everything sterile - but she also refused to do it. the third girl was hopeless, she wouldn't kill anything. so they all coaxed me into it. it took a lot of coaxing but i was feeling a little bit brave because i had just killed my first giant cockroach, so i took the long pole thing and stood as far away as i possibly could, and attempted to do what the dude had done - stab the thing. it was terrifying and a lot harder than it looked. but i aimed and stabbed. i think my stab may have stunned the thing, because it moved off to the side, but it just lay there. i had missed. i couldn't work up the nerve to do it again, so my roommate came over and had a go at it. she stabbed at the spider that was just lying there. but she missed - and it got up and started running for us, so we both screamed and ran out the doorway outside the building. 2 of the nuns were standing at the front of the other building, probably amused, watching the fun of lame foreigners trying to kill something, but i don't think they liked us and they didn't come to help. well, the sterilize everything girl convinced us to come back inside because she saw the spider and it was safe, and so we went back in. she then took the mop pole thing and used the mop end to try and sweep the spider out (it was hiding under my umbrella which i had left in the hallway to dry). well, it worked sort of, but when she got to the end of the hall, by the entrance door, she couldn't anymore and so my roommate took over again. bang bang swish. out the door, and down the steps. but then bang bang bang, she was clobbering the thing. she deemed that it was best to put it out of its misery because in the struggle and the sweeping it had been injured anyhow.
so that was the end of giant spider number 2.
i'm so glad that i am not in that place anymore.
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