Reverting back to the jungle

So we just had a week long holiday, a mid-semester break.  Wahoo!  The girls and I went to Sihanoukville for the week.  It's a touristy town on the seaside with beautiful islands covered in jungle.  You'll get a post on that one later.

Well today was my first day back at work and I noticed a few things.  When you leave things unattended for a week during the rainy season, things start reverting back to the jungle.  I don't mean this in a literal sense.  I didn't come home to vines growing over my bed or anything like that, but things definitely deteriorate.  Here are some fun examples.

We have a shoe rack in our living room right by the front door, because in Asia it's polite to remove your shoes before entering a house.  Well I went to grab a pair of leather flip flops for church yesterday and noticed they didn't quite look the same. I thought, "Wow, a lot of dust has gathered on our shoes in a week."  I took them outside to blow off the dust and noticed they had a greenish tint.  It wasn't dust, it was mold.  All the shoes that were made of natural fibers like leather and cotton molded over.  Yuck.  That's definitely a new experience for me.  I considered throwing all my shoes away, but finding shoes in Asia for my size 10 feet would be a hard task if not impossible.  I'd probably have to have shoes made for me.  Second option.  I stirred up some bleach water and went at it.  You know that works pretty darn well and didn't seem to harm my shoes any.  Anyway, I'd rather have discolored shoes than put my feet into moldy shoes, gak, it gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it!

At school I was in a scramble to get my morning situated.  I made lots of changes since break and was getting everything in order, and I also had an observation that afternoon.  I was stapling papers and ran out of staples.  I grabbed my little box of staples that was sitting in a basket on top of my filing cabinet.  When I picked it up there were ants crawling all over it and inside it.  I thought, what in the world could be inside my box of staples that ants would want?  Well all these ants started scrambling around carrying eggs.  They had built a nest.  In my box of staples!  I dumped it outside so I could retrieve my staples after I broke up their little party. 

The bike ride to work was something else.  The potholes are multiplying exponentially.  This means that a 2 lane road may really function like a 1 lane road because of all the potholes lining the edges.  This calls for great timing.  On one particular road there is a skinny path of pavement in between numerous potholes.  Of course you aim for that path, but so is the moto coming the other way.  If you are closer, you speed up to get there first and he slows down to reach the path just after you pass through.  It all works out.  There were also animal carcasses on the road (I should say more than usual) and a bus depot that seemed to appear out of nowhere.  There were buses doing 3 point turns all over the place and blocking up traffic like nobody's business. 

I attribute it all to the rainy season.  Mold, ants finding a dry place, potholes... however, the buses I cannot explain.