Living the lizard life

This evening I came home to find a lizard on my wall, way up high by the ceiling.  When I returned from my bedroom it was gone.  Creeeeeeepy.  I’ve decided that it found its way back outside and that there is zero chance that I will find it in my bed or wake up to it crawling across my face.  I’ve also decided that it’s a totally harmless lizard that just wants to eat my insects and not my face, as it is not one of the toxic lizards I heard about at dinner last week. 

This has nothing to do with the lizard; I just love local art.  

View from where I spotted the lizard.  

I had an amazing dinner at the home of a local archaeologist and his wife, complete with home-cooked food, including delicious blackberry jam, fresh strawberries dipped in powdered sugar, beef wrapped with spinach and cheese and potatoes au gratin.  My mouth was in heaven. My head was unfortunately swimming as I heard stories about toads with razor tongues and toxic saliva, dead snakes found under the hosts’ bed pillows, huge insects landing on people’s arms, poisonous lizards that look harmless (it’s always that winning red, black and white combo to watch out for) and the big black snake that lives under their porch and eats mice.  Needless to say I had to look in every nook and cranny before I went to bed and jump up to turn on the light several times during the night to investigate noises that could have been any one of the critters on their list. 

I’m not sure what the noise in my bedroom ceiling actually is but I can hear it throughout the night and in the morning I often find piles of what looks like coffee-grounds made from wood on the floor.  I keep pulling my sheets up over my head at night and trying to pretend it’s just the noise of the ocean and not something living and crawling 15 feet above my head.  I need to ask my landlord to tackle this just like he tackled the roof situation in the living room after I discovered several spots where heavy rain created a variety of waterfalls shooting from the ceiling and an eventual lagoon on my floor.  When you only have one towel – and that’s your bath towel – you can’t afford big puddles of water in your living space.

 What lurks in my lovely wood ceiling...?

My bedroom.

Site of last week's indoor river. 

I’m trying to figure out the trash system and have deduced that in order to get my stuff to the street in time for pickup, I’m going to have to wake up earlier than 9 AM.  This is sad news indeed.  I love that my office doesn’t really get jumping until 10:30 or later every day.  I don’t love that there’s no trash bin provided by the City because I have no idea where I should put my small bag of trash, my compostables or my recyclables without them getting strewn about by local street dogs.  I don’t really like leaving out a plastic bag of trash, but I’m not willing to leave my stuff out in a plastic container because both Cindy and my office have lost containers on the street.  This PC volunteer just can’t afford to buy multiple trash containers.

 

More scenes from this week's local art show. 

I am cooking now and made my first chicken soup this week using a piece of chicken with bones, some fresh green beans I received as a gift, a tomato and the only spice I’ve been able to find thus far, garlic salt. I’ve got a special container for cleaning my fruits and vegetables using purchased water and microdyne.  We had a full day of lessons about how to properly clean our food for good health, and I decided microdyne was a better option for me than the recommended bleach (it’s just so not cosmopolitan to cook with bleach).   I also received two awesome glass mason jars from Cindy as a gift and those are the current pride of my kitchen (and the current home for my chicken soup).

Peace Corps recommended cleaning for fruits and vegetables:

• Scrub with soap and water
• Soak in chlorine water
• Rinse with treated water and dry
• Remove skins

View at the tienda for pollo. 

My kitchen - site of intensive vegetable cleaning. 

This is how you pour water; and how you use a dust pan without bending over. 

My hope is that if my lizard decides to keep living in my house, it stays out of my kitchen, and gorges himself on mosquitoes and flies out of my line of site.  I can successfully coexist with lizards and spiders so long as I don’t see them; if I don’t see you, you don’t exist, and I can pretend to sleep just fine at night.  And if that noise in bedroom ceiling disappears, then I can actually sleep just fine.