Broken bathroom, grabby gibbons, but feeling good
Trip Start
Jun 11, 2008
1
17
62
Trip End
Aug 07, 2008
Phetchaburi,
Thailand
Thursday, June 26, 2008
1. A cockroach ran over my hand when I was working on preparing the primates' breakfast yesterday. It was two inches long! I've had some bad bug experiences, but that one was gross.
2. I got grabbed again on the wrist by Zack, the leader of the teenage gibbon gang. Seriously, there are 9 teenagers all in one enclosure and they're absolutely wild to watch, but terrors to try to feed. You have to put your hand relatively close to the cage in order to drop the bowl in (and later, also, to pick it up). Zack is a Chinese white-cheeked gibbon, the only one of his kind at the whole center, and he is the leader of the other 8 gibbons in the enclosure. They're all unruly, but he's the unruliest. He left a few scratch marks on my skin, but the skin wasn't broken
Broken shower
. It's amazing how strong they are. This is not my picture of him, but this is what his species looks like: http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/fs/sheets/images/30lg.jpg3. Our bathroom shower broke!
The bathroom connected to our room was challenging enough already--open air/tin 'roof,' hardly working shower, no flush on the toilet (you pour water from a side bucket down the toilet with a pan instead), bugs all over the place (beetles, huge daddy long legs, some geckos, flies, mosquitoes, moths...) but then the shower broke. I was turning it off and then handle and the plastic connecting it to the wall just popped right out of the wall and water began SHOOTING out of the wall directly at me. It was quickly flooding my bathroom so I ran, in my towel, to the volunteer house (where we eat, hang out, and a few of the bedrooms are located) and tried to get some help. Other people ran to go get Emma, the volunteer coordinator staffperson, and I ran back to my room and turned the water valve off outside in the back of our house. We didn't have any water at all for a day, but it was fixed by the next day, but here's a picture.
4. Very disappointing night out.
I went out last night with Bianca, one of my British friends, and Shaun, a guy from New Zealand, and we went to the nearby resort. The plan was to get massages and then dinner at the Western style restaurant. The massage was decent- very similar to what I had received in Bangkok- but the dinner was just horrendous. I was soooo looking forward to it, but the service was disappointing (it took us over an hour to get our food, even though there was only one other party in the whole entire restaurant)..
Me & Bianca on our way to the resort
. and then they still got my order wrong, twice. I just ate it the 2nd time because it was a least vegetarian in the second try. Oi, so sad, I was really looking forward to a good night away from the center. OH, and, two things of weird bat/bird/bug poop literally fell from the ceiling onto my placemat (during the hour we were waiting for the food to arrive). We changed tables. I am refusing to give that 'resort' another chance. It looks like it'd be so nice, doesn't it? http://www.petchvarinresort.com/petchvarin/tabid/311/Default.aspx
Oh well. Tonight I'll just have a quiet night (I've picked up The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates from the shared bookshelf, and I'm realllllly liking it), tomorrow night we have a BBQ party for all of us, and Saturday is my day off. By the time Saturday comes, I will have worked 9 days in a row!
If all goes according to plan, I'm going to try to meet up with Andi and Andy on my day off. Andi is a girl from California who was a JV at my placement at the YWCA a few years before me, and she stayed there and still worked in the area by the time I got to California. Andy is her new husband and they will have flown into Thailand on their honeymoon yesterday
One of the bad bites on my arm
! There's no way they could ever find the sanctuary on their own, so if I get to see them, I'll have to take a taxi to one of the nearby towns to try and meet up with them. Hopefully it works out!Now, some other good things...
I'm back on Primates 1! Despite their wickedness and occasional grabbiness, I love primates 1! Also, now that I'm midway through my 2nd week here, I feel like I now know what I'm doing. I'm even helping to teach other new people.
I've had 3 relatively easy days in a row.
The shower is fixed.
My blisters on my feet are healing.
My bites don't itch too much (but check out the photo!)
I'm having fun here at last, and I really like some of the people, including my roommates!
Day off work on Saturday!!
I have some cool pictures of some of the animals at the sanctuary, and other animals in the wild (like the wild lizard in the forest that I got a picture of). Let's try to post them now...
