So much for the clean room...

The Bedroc Office in Nagapattinam


I am not back in Nagapattinam after a short trip to Chennai and Pondicherry. I feel strangely comfortable and happy to be back! My room at the Hotel Seahorse is much nicer that the one I had been living in for the weeks before I left for Chennai. It -- gasp! -- actually has a window! Also, it is much cleaner and is not damp at all. I was so happy! Why didn't they give me this room before?

Also, there is another foreigner here now. She is staying in my hotel, and is working on her PhD thesis. She is from England, but lived in Sri Lanka for 2 years prior to moving back to England. Yay! I am so happy! We had dinner last night and it was nice to be able to chat with someone. She was like, "I haven't seen another foreigner for the past three days." I was like, "Ya, I didn't see a foreign for the entire 3 weeks I was here before you got here!"

She is in a room without windows, and she wanted to see mine so she could decide if she would switch rooms. We walked in, and a huge cockroach scurried across my bed...so much for the illusion of staying in a clean room! I slept with the lights on because I had heard that roaches don't come out if it is light. I thought of changing rooms, but I figured if the roaches are in my second story room, they are probably in all the rooms. The hotel did agree to change my sheets...it was hilarious...the young Indian boy spent about 30 minutes putting the sheet on my bed, trying to make sure it was perfectly tucked and there were no wrinkles in it. I was like, this is a great effort on your part, but I am sure the roaches will be back no matter how neatly the bed is made! Then, he finished it off by dramatically spraying the whole room (including the bed!) with roach spray. It was comical.

Another sad part of this story...a cute little baby gecko was killed by the roach spray. I was sad, cause geckos are cute and they eat flying bugs. This poor little thing was having convulsions on the carpet before finally dying.

At first I was sad that a cockroach was in my bed...but then I remembered when I was travelling with Sarah in Rajasthan...We were on a camel safari to the sand dunes in the desert, and we were camping under the stars. The operator assured us that blankets and bedding were included. He didn't mention that that meant the blankets that were on the camel underneath the saddle! Not only were there fleas and whatever other bugs and camel sweat in the blankets, but there were also giant desert beetles that kept crawling in the blankets. I thought I would never sleep through the night, but I did, miraculously. So, the memory of that night made me realize that seeing one cockroach in your bed is no big deal. And if anyone has any comments about how gross cockroaches are, DO NOT post those comments to this blog or by email because I have to sleep in the same bed for the rest of the week!