Living in my San Pedro homestay for the last month has resulted in me learning a whole array of Spanish vocabulary relating to the anthropod world that I did not previously know or think I would ever need to know.On my second day in the town, one of the brothers came into the homestay kitchen with a scorpion crawling on his bare arm, causing the frijoles (beans) that I had just eaten for lunch to shoot through my digestion system and propel me three feet out of my chair. As it turned out later, it was just an 'ALACRAN', a scorpion lookalike that according to my well-informed Spanish maestra Clarita, can give you a nasty bite, but on the positive side will not kill you.
I also learnt the word for ant ('HORMIGA') and fly ('MOSCA') fairly early on in my time back in Guatemala, as they like to come into my bedroom when the four brothers in my homestay leave my door wide
open after they have paid me a visit to tell me to draw them a picture of Garfield.
I learnt the word for grasshopper ('GRILLO') more recently, when I had to ask Augustin, the eldest of my homestay brothers at age 11 to remove one from my bedroom wall earlier this week.
Mosquitos of course need no introduction (at least not to my nose whilst I sleep now I line my nostrils with DEET repellant before I go to bed), and also need no translation, as the word in Spanish and English is the exact same - 'MOSQUITO'. Cockroach ('CUCARACHA') I already knew long before I arrived in Guatemala, and infact this is one of the insects I have actually not yet come across here in San Pedro.
And then of course there are spiders, which I had originally thought were like mosquitos and needed no translation as Juan the youngest of the homestay brothers kept asking me to draw him a dibujo of Spiderman, but it has since turned out that the non-Marvel comic ones are actually called 'ARAÑAS'. Spiders are my best friend and also my worst enemty in Guatemala. There
are my best friend because they cast their webs in high corners of my
bedroom, eat the mosquitos and other insects that come into my room, and generally keep out of my way. They are my worst enemy because they are generally
a lot bigger than Scottish spiders, and some of them have eyes that look
at you as you sit on the toilet.
I hadn't even noticed the large beady
eyed spider that lives in the homestay toilet
until Kelly the new homestay guest (that is now the old homestay guest as she has gone to Honduras) mentioned it to me last week in passing. Now I know that its there, I cannot
sit on the toilet without 1) first checking it hasn't moved and 2) then watching it watching me. In fact, the beady eyed spider in the homestay toilet doesn't in fact move very much, but when I blew on it lightly the other day to check it wasnt dead, it moved
across the wall with the velocity of a red-faced extranjero leaving a
Guatemalan farmacia after buying hemorrhoid suppositories.
Which has left me suddenly wondering: perhaps it is from from sitting on the toilet seat staring at the large beady eyed spider on the wall for too long that has led to my unfortunate recent brush with the Belinda Carlisles.
Like Charlottes Web, but with a fetish for watching me
whilst I do a dump
whilst I do a dump
