Actually, let's start with last night. All over our kost, the office, and Jakarta, there are little lizards. They are cute until they dart across the room really fast and startle you. They tend to hang out in the common areas, where it is warm and humid, and not where there is AC. See Exhibit A:
(pictures to be posted once I can get a good view of one of them).
Not so cute when they are in your bedroom and hiding behind your bed. Luckily (or so I thought), we have the aforementioned super cat, ready and able to catch lizards. That is, if she can see them. Needless to say, Erin and I had to scare this little guy out form behind the bed before the cat would take notice of him. Then, she was so intense, Erin wanted to try to save the lizard by grabbing him and putting him outside my room, but he was way too fast for us. Finally, the lizard was low enough on the wall that Mundo could jump up and knock him off-right onto my bed. Then, she ran out, and the lizard seemed to have disappeared!
Or did he? I went off to see where Mundo had gone while Erin lizard-hunted under my bed. Mundo had gone into Erin's room, and when I saw her, she jumped up and ran away, but I saw enough of her to see the lizard in her mouth! She got him! Except I saw what I thought was another lizard, this time a baby, in her room! I ran to get her, and she walked over to it--only to discover it was not a baby, it was a tail, still wiggling even though detached (apparently as a defense mechanism the lizards can attached them easily at will)?
Luckily our shrieks summoned Dewi, our roommate, who mustered up a broom and dustpan and disposed of the tail. The lizard escaped Mundo and sat as far away from her as possible, tail-less, and Mundo continued to give it the death stare. It was quite the adventure.
This morning, we got up and left at seven for Bogor, a small city about an hour to an hour and a half south of Jakarta. We spent most of the morning in a gorgeous botanical garden called Kebun Raya with about half of Jakarta's population--many people went there to picnic for the Muslim holiday.
The highlight of the park should be a corpse flower, or Amorphophallus titanum, which attracts flies for pollination by smelling like a corpse. Unfortunately, it only blooms once every four years (!), and we are in a down year. Perhaps we will return in 2013 for its appearance?
We also had some (mediocre) Middle Eastern food at Ali Baba and some (surprisingly) excellent apple pie at Pia, a little cafe in the city. We attempted to get to a wayung puppet workshop before we had to leave, but it began pouring, and we decided to head home--which was a good idea, because it took us almost three hours with the traffic.
One more work day this week, and then to Borneo in the evening!
No comments:
Post a Comment