January 25th, 2013 - Moving in to our Apartment in Panwa (Or, That Time I Battled Legions of Spiders)

Geogirl and I moved into our new apartment today in Panwa. We had to check out of the hotel at noon and go somewhere, so we were very lucky to find an apartment so quickly.

Mike and Nuno were kind enough to pick us up in their car early this afternoon and carry our bags in for us (which is no small feat, I’m ashamed to say—but in my defense, I really did need the tool kit and first-aid kit and all those other very important things that resulted in my bag weighing in at seventy-five pounds).



This is what the apartment building itself looks like:








So we got ourselves and our things into the apartment, which we had logically assumed would be the most effortful thing we needed to do, at least for now.

Then we took a closer look at the place.

Now, don’t get me wrong, our apartment is gorgeous. It’s the kind of place I’ve dreamt about renting; the kind of place that would have cost five times the price back home. There are granite countertops, hardwood floors, marble tiles, a sea view, an awesome balcony—the works.

But…well, you know how exposure therapy is supposed to work? The idea is that you take a person with a phobia of something (say, hypothetically, a fear of spiders) and start exposing them to whatever they're afraid of in teeny tiny doses. You then gradually increase the intensity of exposure until the person’s anxiety threshold has been raised to such a degree that the target phobia becomes tolerable or is conquered all together.

I bring this up because I can now say from personal experience that this method is, indeed, effective.

Of course, you’re supposed to start small and work your way up over a reasonable period of time. My ‘reasonable period of time’ lasted all of thirty minutes. We got into the apartment, said to each other, “Hey, let’s tidy the place up before we unpack,” and suddenly, surprise: spiders!

I don’t mean one or two. No. I mean dozens. Maybe even hundreds of them. Oh god. So many spiders.

And you know why there were so many spiders? That’s right, because there were about five times as many insects in the apartment for them to feed off of. The place was teeming just beneath the surface, like it had been left empty for a month with a little wooden picket sign out front that said ‘All Bugs Welcome! Me Casa Es Su Casa!’ (but in Thai--these bugs didn’t speak Spanish).

This explained the presence of all the insecticide in one of the cupboards. I hadn’t even considered using actual insecticide at first, but when faced with this great a foe, you do whatever it takes to survive. Between the insecticide and the vacuum and the bottles of bleach, those spiders didn’t stand a chance. We fought bravely and won against the teeming horde.

Consequently, yeah, I’m not so afraid of spiders anymore. Probably because I butchered legions of the awful things and proved to myself not only that they are more afraid of me than I am of them, but that they should be afraid. Very afraid.

We left the flattened carcasses of some of their brethren on the balcony to serve as a warning to future invaders. The place is nearly spotless now, by the way. I won’t be breathing the air in here for a while, but wow, is it ever clean.

See how clean that is?

Pretty great view from the balcony, too.

This vacuum has seen some serious trauma. We’re too edgy to empty it now, so we covered the end with a plastic bag to prevent anything from crawling back out. Until one of us loses a bet or something, it will stay exactly as it is.

And that is how I conquered my fear of small crawling things.

-LuckyStar