2006-11-07

Two weeks

I will be on a minibus, trying to breathe in the stifling heat of Malawi's tropical hot season.

1 Canadian Dollar = 125.941 Malawi Kwacha (when I was there it went from about 1:30 to 1:55).

The mangoes will ripen around the end of my stay, about the end of December. Bananas are year-round. As are passionfruit. And guavas.

I will be wearing sunscreen and a Tilley hat (oh so high fashion). I need to buy new sandals because I just realised I threw out the ones I was intending to take with me. Where in Canada sells SANDALS in NOVEMBER??? Ye Gods.

I have to get an appointment with someone who will prescribe me some lariam or something. But the dreams are super-wild. Not really nightmares, just way too real for comfort. Particularly for someone like me, who without benefit of psychoactive substances already regularly gets, as my mother calls it, "the Hag."

I will be attempting to convince myself that I am not REALLY afraid of spiders (of course not, that would be silly, they are usually harmless) even if they ARE the size of dinner plates. Yes, I have actually seen spiders that big. I have no idea what sort, I called them banana spiders because they lived in the banana trees. And they barely moved, and they spun the most amazing webs made out of tempered steel or something, you could practically hang your laundry on them.

Nor am I afraid of:
giant field mice
snakes of various colours and sizes
three-inch-long-flying cockroaches

Etcetera.

What me, getting a little nervous? What makes you say that?

1 comment:

segacs said...

I saw huntsman spiders in Australia that were in that size range. Not poisonous or anything (though I reckon the bite would hurt quite a bit) but still kinda scary just because of their size.

There was one living in the parking garage that was the shortcut from the ferry stop and her apartment in Brisbane, so she walked by it several times a day. She kept meaning to bring a coke can or some other known-quantity object with her so she could photograph it next to it to prove to people back in North America how big it really was.

Of course, in Australia, the big spiders are usually okay; it's the little ones that'll kill ya.