creatures!

So I’ve been in Colombo for almost a week, and things seem to be going ok. We had our two day Fulbright orientation, which was good. They brought in a bunch of speakers, who were all pretty interesting. I’m still living in the same guest house, which is going pretty well, although it kind of sucks to be in this huge house all by myself with Irene, the woman who runs the guest house. It’s a HUGE house, and it feels very empty when it’s just me.

My room is growing on me, though this may be because I have been seeing fewer cockroaches in the past few days. I think I’m already getting used to them, though, because now my reaction when I see them is one part “ew ew ew” and 3 parts “kill kill kill!” I take the shift in the ratio of squeamishness to anger as a good sign, even though right now I’m out of my super kill cockroach killer. The spray is satisfying because you can watch it die from a distance, without having to squish it yourself, which creates this shudder-producing crunch.

Sri Lanka, it seems, is a land full of creatures. There was a snail in my shower this evening, which was gone when I came back and looked an hour later. I thought they were supposed to move slowly? I’ve also met some lovely (read: kind of terrifying) spiders the size of my palm. These seemed fine to me until I woke up yesterday morning to find one on the INSIDE of my mosquito net. This was not ok. It’s a good thing I was still pretty sleepy, so my wondering of how it got up there wasn’t too intensive. I guess I need to work on my mosquito net tucking-in skills – it’s harder than it seems!

We’ve just begun to look for apartments, but today was Sunday, so we had a hard time getting in touch with people. I think a few of us are looking for a place together. It’s really hard to do in a city that we don’t know very well at all, but someone at the Fulbright office said she would come with us to look at places to make sure we were getting a good price, which is great. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better luck.