Bugs!

Hi everyone,

I've finally uploaded some pictures which you can view at my flickr account www.flickr.com/photos/48705722@N00/ . More to come but I didn't want to overdo things right away.

Should I explain the title of this post? I've been fighting a war with several bugs recently, let me explain. As I've said my apartment is quite nice in a number of regards: but shortly after I moved in I was beset by insects. First the mosquitos - the cultivation of rice fields requires kilometers of standing water irrigation and the Koreans don't use pesticide therefore mosquito breeding heaven. The problem is that my house is not well sealed, cracks at the windows and doors allow them to flock in at night. So I got a candle which was supposed to repell them, but woke up the next morning with an itchy bump on my eyelid. Enough is enough, time to nip the problem in the root so I bought tape and other sealing products and went to work. So far so good.

Hopefully this will take care of my other problem as well - cockroaches. They say for every one you see there are 100 you don't, which means at least 2000 live in the building. Some are tiny and cute, but some are big and fat: maybe 3/4 of the size of my thumb. I hope they are climbing in under my door and don't actually live in my apartment. I have reason to believe this because I have seen so many in the entranceway. So I have sealed the entrance doorway as best I could with foam - I would have to do this to keep winter heating costs down anyway eventually - and put out some raid poison traps in case they have set up nests in my home. I've been seeing less each day since then, hopefully these trends continue.

But some entrances in my apartment are not too obvious. For example, one morning I saw a drop of bird poo on a book I was reading, and wondered how it got there. Then I heard a rustle in the kitchen, and went to find a little sparrow flying around my house, bouncing off the walls. Eventually he found his way out a window I opened for him, but how did he get in? Turns out there was a sizeable gap around the hole in the wall for the vent for the stovetop fan.

Also a family of wasps decided to live on the light above my front door. Dozens of them clustered toghter. I noticed them the first time when I opened the door to check the weather and got divebombed by a few - they are much bigger than American wasps. I told my co-teacher about them and she said, "Oh, we call them horse bees. They can kill a person." So I used an insect spray and they flew away. A few days later they came back. The cycle has repeated about three times now. They have build no structure, so I don't know how strong their bond is to my home, but hopefully they will learn to find a new meeting ground soon. If this is my last post .. now you know why.

I saw the mantis on a country road. He looks at me like that because I almost ran him over on my bike.