Today being a travel day, I discuss
catching critters in a hotel room or lobby. I also have an evening of
traditional entertainment at Yob Abyssinia, and then I consider my
current lodgings.
Caterpillar, lizard, bumblebee
There are some smaller critters I have
encountered along the way. For instance, I returned from one
particular outing in Lalibela only to cross paths with a tremendously
hairy caterpillar. If it's outside and not doing me any harm, I
generally leave it alone; I may take a picture, but even if it's cute
I will not risk touching it.
Things get more complicated when I'm in
a hotel room, wondering how a lizard got in. If the lizard happens to
encounter me in my sleep, bad things might happen to it without any
conscious effort on my part; maybe some sort of bad thing might
happen to me, who knows? Fortunately, provided the critter is small
enough, I can remove it from my room without touching it. I need a
sturdy flat piece of something with an edge (I find paper flimsy but
potentially workable; I used a small box of Gravol) and one of the
two drinking glasses with which the room came equipped.
The first trick is to get the critter
on a flat surface such as a windowsill. The second is to get the
upside-down glass to enclose the creature without causing any harm;
in this case I was concerned I would clip the lizard's tail, but this
did not happen. The third is to shuffle the glass over the flat piece
of something, which in this case caused the lizard to move and not
get anything stuck under the rim of the glass.
At that point I have trapped a lizard
which I didn't need to touch with my bare hands. I can safely deliver
the critter outside the hotel to a garden or tree. If this was
anything bigger, more snake-like or dangerous looking I would instead
have bothered the hotel staff about it, but there's no need to get
them preoccupied with a small lizard.
A different version of this method is
the hat trick. Yes, that brown hat is useful for something other than
protecting my eyes from head-height thorns and branches during the
mule ride. The hotel lobby had a particularly loud bumblebee (with a
touch of red on his jacket) stuck and confused around some window
curtains. My hat is sturdy enough to keep form and has a fair deal of
interior space, so I just put the hat over the bee and slid the hat
along the wall toward the open door. As soon as the hat slid past the
wall and allowed an opening, the bee flew outside and far away as
fast as she could.
I learned the hat trick as a painter. A
dragonfly had entered the workspace and I didn't need her to get
covered with wet paint or anything. I was able to trap her in a hat
and transport her way outdoors without causing harm and it felt
pretty good.
Yob Abyssinia
I arrived at the Tazina Guest House
shortly before 3PM and soon wondered what to eat. The place is new
and fairly nice looking but its location means requiring a taxi or
car to find food. I contemplated skipping a meal but eventually gave
in and requested a taxi. Since I have spent most of this trip eating
the kind of food I could easily get at home, I thought it was time to
try something more traditional. The driver brought me to Yob
Abyssinia.
The place is nice. It has traditional
basket tables everywhere, a selection of old recipes and a giant
drink menu. It also has a stage so you can enjoy a live exhibition of
traditional instruments and their sounds. It seemed like a display
for tourists, but a good quality one at that.
Tazina Guest House
I returned to the room half-seas-over
and slept fairly well for six hours. Then I awoke at 2:30 AM to the
panic-inducing whining sound of mosquitoes. There was no better alarm
clock, though this wake-up call came two and a half hours early.
I wondered how a newly-built place
suffered such a failure of anti-mosquito measures. True, Addis Ababa
is considered a malaria-free place. I would still expect new windows
in a new guest house to have new screens, especially if the staff
likes to leave windows open. No such luck; an assumption on my part
ruins any further sleep I might have had.
I killed one skeeter, but there's
another which seems good at staying out of reach. I'm not risking a
nap with that guy still humming around; unless I get him, I guess
I'll be up for another hour doing nothing until the taxi shows. I
already showered and packed.
D. Madeley
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