Mexico (part two)
Waking up the next morning before I did, C went to sit by the pool. When she came back in, she said she had some bites.
"Some," in this case, meant 40+.
Displaying the blithe disregard of medical professionals for anything short of imminent amputation, she said it probably happened while she was at the pool, and it was nothing to worry about. We hopped in the rental car to go to Wal-Mart for supplies.
About the rental car: a vintage Toyota with 270k miles. It was an Avanza, the most popular car in Indonesia from 2006-2019, and it looked like a Tercel with a commercial pizza oven welded onto the back:
The image from the professional illustrator makes it look like a large vehicle, but it was not. It also rattled ominously at any speed about 90 kilometers an hour, as we'd find out later.
We came back from Wal-Mart and I went into the bedroom, where I saw five swaths of blood on the bed, seemingly the result of a wolverine attack or some other large predator. "We have a problem," I told C, and she came in and gave me a look of horror.
"Bedbugs," she said.
It was either bedbugs or mosquitoes, and in such a case, we had to proceed as if it was bedbugs. As two extreme over-functioners, we proceeded to over-function with enough combined energy to rival the sun. Research, research, research. Every method we looked at was sure to kill almost any bedbug.
The problem, though, was Die Hard.
What if you ran into the Bruce Willis of bedbugs? What if you just couldn't kill one, or a handful? Then you might as well have let a thousand through, because they'll multiply soon enough.
Then I had a thought. "I bet the bastards can't swim," I said.
As it turns out, they can't. So we proceeded to dunk every single piece of clothing and luggage we bought in the pool. Here's a candid photo of me looking unreasonably happy, both because of C's presence and because we outsmarted small parasites with no thinking capabilities whatsoever:
In 24 hours, according to the Internet, it would all be fine.
As it would turn out, though, there are many degrees of fine.
TOMORROW: C tells me to find the pony.
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