Night in Tunisia

Harvey

Welcome to another installment of our wacky Tunisian life. Sometimes wackier than your average Tunisian life. Such as this weekend when we met Harvey the Wonder Bug...

For those of you who missed Tiara's introduction to our delight(ish)fully quaint little bathroom replete with happy-faced shower curtain and tiered mini-tub, though how you could have missed that is beyond my tunis-centric vision, look for the post of 2/4/2005 titled "Bienvenue Chez Nous!" In any case, it had a visitation.

The visitor was about an inch and a half long, with as long antannae, a squat and thick body and a set of pincers out it's back end reminiscent of an earwig. But it wasn't an earwig. And it was hiding under Tiara's towel such then when she needed it after a calming bath, she became a little less calm and promptly called in the resident bug taker outer. But that taker outer was not prepared for the gravity-defying and slippery glass impervious antics of our new friend.

First attempt with a glass and slip of cardboard a la canadian spider resulted in the as of yet unnamed critter crawling up the inside of the glass, down the outside of the glass, onto the door and under the support for the towel rack. Hmm. Tiara sweetly informed me that bugs don't do that... Next, after some jostling of the towel rack to try and dislodge the creature I again knocked it into the glass, and once again it proved impervious to my furious shaking of the glass and before I could blink or get the cardboard in place was crawling round the outside and in the direction of my furiously cup-twisting digits. It then jumped into the sink, crawled up the porcelain with the greatest of ease and lightning speed and ducked into the overflow runoff hole.

I had a few choice words for it.

More than a few.

Then, we decided it needed a name, because we were certainly no match for its acrobatics, grippiness, or intelligence. Harvey winked out at us just a couple of time from his new abode, teasing us with those twitching antannae and disappearing.

We haven't seen Harvey since.

All of which shouldn't give you the impression that Tunisia is crawling with bugs, because that is exactly the third that we've seen in the month since we arrived, only the second indoors and the first in our abode. But you know, for a couple of canuks used to the tiny northern critters...

Ein, at least we ain't got blackflies!

posted by Loren @ 8:35 a.m.