I love my HangChat neighbors

Here in HangChat we have several neighbor teachers who live on campus – a creepy janitor – a pack of blood-hungry dogs. But none of them hold my affections the way the animal neighbors do.

We’re talking the cute, the fuzzy, the scaly, the poisonous and the deadly.

The most annoying lately have been the geckos – not lizards, but geckos. They measure a good 10 inches each, and there are 7 of them living in the walls of our tiny place. The little lizards live here too, but it’s the big ones that make the most noise. They've been keeping me up at night with the crazy squeaking - last night I got up and started banging on the walls. That shut them up for a while.

I love the Buddhist explanation as to why they weren’t removed when the whole place was renovated. “I asked the janitor to get them out, but he said that they live there. It’s their home. So they stayed.”

Like I said, you can here them shuffling around and squeaking at night, and they leave huge turds everywhere. Mostly they are heard and not seen, but once in a while I’ll be sitting in the kitchen and see a claw hanging down, or a tail, or just a head or two.

This is actually 1 of them hanging out on our wall – it decided to stay out a while one night.

My personal neighbor favorite is Sapparot – or “pineapple” in Thai. She (I think) is a neighborhood cat that managed to sneak in our house during the Christmas party. Crazy Pan fed the thing all the leftover prawns, and now it hangs out for food scraps. I love her though – she’s actually a pretty sweet cat, considering that I don’t even like them.

Nate got a tropical fruits book for Christmas, and I happened to be flipping through it while the cat meowed at me from the yard. And Sapparot is fun to say. So that’s her name.

She likes to sit on the washing machine outside the window and meow at me. Cute. Until she put a hole in the screen.

I know she might belong to the crazy janitor neighbor, but I like to pretend that’s not the case. Even though, clearly, she is clean and well fed and belongs to someone.

The other two are less adorable – the huge spider in the front yard, and the scorpion(s) that we’ve found on our walking path near our house. Luckily, it seems that only the small-ish spiders have made a home in the Jungle Bungalow – which may or may not be thanks to the geckos.

This huge mean-looking beast has a huge web in our front lawn.

That’s Nate’s hand. Notice that the spider is larger.

The scorpion was most likely dead when we took this picture, but at the time we didn’t know and it all seemed very dangerous. We’ve mostly seen these still and dead, I think – we don’t throw things at them to see if they really are alive.


I wanted to, actually. I found a stick and everything. But someone convinced me that poking a scorpion with a stick was a terrible idea.


Lame.