Adventures in Bug-filled Japan: Part II
Last night, I went over to a friend's apartment to have dinner. When I met her at the station, she informed me that her house had come under attack by a large, palm-sized spider. However, by the time we reached her place, the spider had whisked off somewhere and we could not find it anywhere in her apartment.
After much fruitless searching, we decided to just go ahead and make dinner. While we were finishing up, she let out the most terrifying scream ever and she jumped on top of the table (I am not kidding. On TOP of the table with her shoes on). I freaked out and thought the spider was in my hair or something. But when she finally got her act together enough to point in the right direction, I found that the spider was crawling on the living room floor, some 15 feet away. I know I'm squemish about bugs, but that's ridiculous. It was obvious that it wasn't going to suddenly leap from its spot on the floor into our salmon dinner. Judging from its then-current trajectory, I was able to figure out where it was heading and I prepared myself for battle with the HAIRY 8-LEGGED BASTARD.
Of course, by no means was I excited about catching/killing this spider. I hate creepy crawly things with a firey passion and the size and numbers of the bugs in Japan is what's really keeping me from unconditionally loving this place. To me, the bugs are Japan's biggest vice. I donned my spider-killing paraphernalia: a long-handled broom, a dustpan, shoes, and bug spray potent enough to kill a moose. If I had an astronaut suit, I would have used that, too.
I sprayed that sucka until my own head got a little light-headed from inhaling fumes. And let me tell you... That spider REFUSED to die. It kept crawling around on the walls and all over my friend's furniture until finally, like 10 minutes after I had started spraying it, it crumpled up into a twitching ball of fuzzy legs under her living room table. I tied a mop handle to her dustpan (so that the dustpan handle would be as long as the broom handle and I could be as far as humanly possible from the presumedly dead body) and carefully swept up the carcass and flushed it down the toilet. I think we flushed twice... just in case.]
The spider looked kind of like the last picture on this page. There are also a lot of these kinds of spiders everywhere in Japan. I found one sitting on my bike the other day. And I was already late for school, too....
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