Chocolate Log

I’ve mentioned that shout wipes are a must when packing-both in my purse and extras in my suitcase. I’m fairly clumsy to begin with. Add traveling to that which means you don’t always know when you will have a chance to wash your clothes and you get a mess-or at least I get a mess. I’m always impressed on TV shows were people get off planes and buses looking fabulous. I get off looking rumpled with as many bags under my eyes as I have checked at baggage claim.

On the flight to Italy when I studied abroad I was sitting away from the rest of the group and I was proud of myself for remaining calm with no one’s hand to squeeze for take off. I imagined I looked quite calm and relaxed. Then the food tray came around and when I popped the top off the yogurt it exploded all over me including my glasses. Just great-another 7+ hours to go in these clothes and I’m now covered in crusted strawberries.

But dried strawberries are nothing to the disaster I created on my clothing on the orchestra tour to South Africa. One night a bunch of us were hanging out in our hotel room. I was laying across one of the beds on my back, chatting for a few hours. When I got up, I found something nasty underneath me. It was chocolate. One of those little chocolate mints that nice hotels place on your pillow had become chocolate fondu under my lower back and rump. Yes, I know what it looked like. It looked like a mess. I feel sorry for the hotel cleaning staff when they found that the next day… Of course the story spread around the orchestra. Notably songs about my mess were created to the tune of “O Fortuna” which was one of the pieces we were playing. Even the orchestra conductor got in on the fun by getting someone to get me off the tour bus so he could stick a chocolate candy aptly named “chocolate log”  that he found at a rest stop on my seat.

Look before you sit.

Pictionary

My sister is currently in Paris and she just reminded me of one of my favorite things about navigating in foreign countries: their signs. We are so used to our own road signs and directional signs in buildings that it is surprising that other people have had different ideas of how to show people around. The following are some of my favorites, feel free to add your own interpretations of what these signs mean:

don’t feed the walrus

why did the penguin cross the road?

“no tromboning in the street”

don’t lean on a friend

don’t travel with giraffes

hard to see but it looks like another don’t drink and drive version

“dont play your flute into your phone”

“don’t drink and drive”

found on a wall in a school

“dig for burried treasure”

fans so strong they make men and women fly?

bathroom? that little girl has to pee I think

Don’t let the bed bugs bite?

When I got bit by the travel bug I didn’t know it would leave a welt. An unfortunate trend I’ve noticed when traveling is getting bit, and as I’ve said before I don’t react well to buzzing in my ears (or ringing for that matter). Almost a decade of showing up to my older sister’s birthday parties with one eye swollen shut  from a run in with a black fly or mosquito has left me quite paranoid about bites.

In Brazil one of my friends came to my room in a panic because he’d seen a lizard in his room. A lizard actually probably was a good thing because he was hopefully eating the bugs in the room. Maybe I’ll start traveling with a lizard. Another one of my friends was bit by some unknown bug which resulted in black and blue welts all over her legs.

In Italy my sister and I laid an elaborate ambush for a mosquito. The start of the problem was that the window to our hotel room had been left open. I’ve learned the hard way that most other countries don’t have screens the way we do in America. Just the other day a cousin of mine from France was lamenting all of the screen things in the window because he didn’t have the freedom to chuck things out the window. Since I was unaware of this convenience of chucking things out of windows and more concerned about what was climbing in the windows I have always been careful to restrict air circulation to a minimum when staying in screen-less accommodations. Therefore when my sister and I returned to our hotel room and found the window left open I knew we were in for trouble. Shortly after laying down I heard the tell-tale buzz in my ear. I knew there was no way I would sleep with that buzzing noise going on. Since my sister also heard the buzzing noise I knew I had her on my side. The two of us set up our trap in the bathroom. We shut off all other lights but the bathroom light and left the door open a crack so the mosquito would have to come through the tiny crack to get to us. I was perched on the bidet and my sister was probably perched on the sink as we sat in wait. The little buzzer never saw it coming.

While on safari in South Africa I knew bugs would be an issue. And of course this time there was malaria to contend with as well. I had enough bug spray on to keep a small elephant away, but nothing could change the fact that we were staying in a bungalow that 1000 different species of bugs called home. I barely slept all night listening to the rustlings in the thatch roof. And I certainly didn’t eat anything since I could tell even in the firelight that my dinner was crawling.

Most recently in China I again had the problem of bugs to deal with. The first night sleeping at my friend’s apartment his sister and I awoke with bites all over our faces and arms-basically anything that had been exposed while sleeping. Since it was just the areas exposed I dismissed the possibility of bed bugs (we had been staying at a hostel the weekend before, a good place to pick up bed bugs I’ve heard). And since there were more than enough mosquitoes flying around the room to share I assumed that must be it. I resorted to sleeping with my ipod in my ears to drown out the buzzing and a sweater over my face with just a tiny air hole to breath out of and sacrificed my arms to the bugs since it was too hot to be fully covered. I didn’t think I’d have any luck getting my friend and his sister to stage a trap in the bathroom for multiple reasons: a) there were too many mosquitoes, b) the bathroom was too tiny for us all to fit there, and c) as I’ve already mentioned I had destroyed the bathroom. When I returned home looking like I had chicken poxes my mom panicked and threw all of my stuff in the freezer which is apparently how you get rid of bed bugs. Luckily no more bites occurred once I was home and I still don’t think they were actually bed bugs.