The Guest House

Some people have asked for pictures of our house so I went out and took some yesterday. Our house is crazy large and the red gate with gold accents does help either! The house we are currently staying in is the Mercy Corps guest house and has 5 bedrooms, a greeting room, main entryway, TV room, dining room, kitchen as well as 2 larger living spaces upstairs between the 3 bedrooms. The layout is not like anything I have been in prior and definitely feels like a palace to me. The floors are all tile, and the walls are white coat on concrete. For some reason all the light switches are set around my shoulder height which would make them inaccessible to many kids. All the doors have locks and the keys are usually left in the locks at night. This is so one can easily unlock them in case of an earthquake. For the last year I worked for Kwickset so I have some professional curiosity in the locks they have here. They front door lock has a key that you insert horizontally vs. the common front door key I am used to which is inserted vertically. On top of that teeth of the key are ground into a center line and not along an edge. I can only assume this key must cost a great deal more then the standard key I am used to.

 

It is customary to take ones shoes off when entering a house. This is not a big deal for most since almost everyone wears sandals during the rainy season. (It rained for 3 days straight when we arrived and the river rose ~5 feet and flooded many houses.) I think that the furniture in the house went through the tsunami because it reeks of mold. We put down a sheet to cover the couch when we watch TV.

 

 

The ceilings are all covered with wood in very elaborate designs. In our house the termites have found the wood and so their droppings cover the floor in spots and it feels like sand. Lucky for us we have a house cleaner that cleans it everyday. All the wood forms in houses here are solid slab wood which is very beautiful. Our stairs up to the second floor are nice wood, you just have to be careful because the stairs are not all the same size and they start our very steep.

 

 

The kitchen layout is spacious but sparse. There is a double sink but no disposal. There is cupboard space below the sink and counter but it would not serve to hold anything you would ever want to put within 20 feet of your food. The dishes, plates, and silverware are all stored in a glass cabinet on the far wall. This serves to keep them off the floor away from the ants, as well as shielding them from the lizard poop which can drop from anywhere. Just this morning I saw a swarm of ants in the main hallway and discovered they were finishing of a baby lizard. They had already eaten his arms and legs and eyes and were finishing up the torso. But I digress. While we stay in the guest house we have a cleaner come and do our laundry, clean the house and we have a cook that prepares our dinner.

 

Dinner food here tends to be fried in grease. Guess that is best since they wash it in poop water to clean off the dirt, lizard poop and fly larva. Just today at lunch I watched maggots flailing in the ketchup bottle sitting on our table. That said it is never advisable to eat the salad at a place you don’t know. There is always nasi or rice with every meal but in the last week we have had fried chicken, eggplant, some sort of fried potato pancake, fried tofu, a chicken curry, and fried & breaded shrimp kabobs. The drinking water comes from a 5 gallon plastic drum that is inverted into the water dispenser. The cool part is the dispenser provides both chilled and boiling lava hot water so you can make your instant coffee quite fast in the mornings.

 

 

Now back to the house tour. Upstairs we have the master bedroom where we are currently located. They do not have any rooms set aside for closet space so they have bureaus which also have locks on them. We have AC in our room which makes it quite pleasant to sleep at night. It is local tradition to sleep without AC and no blankets either. It took us 3 days to get a top sheet since all they had were bottom sheets in the house. Then it took us another 2 days to get a thin blanket. I guess it just does not make any sense to chill the room just to put on a blanket to stay warm! But the reason for the madness is that mosquitoes do not like the cold and tend to sit on the walls when its cold and since our mosquito net has not yet arrived we are taking this strategy to minimize exposure. We have both been bit already and in fact we are killing multiple mosquitoes that have made it into our room every day, despite heavy precautions such as keeping the door to the hall closed at all times, and spraying a mosquito neurotoxin (probably not good for us either) on the walls and whenever we leave the room.

 

 

 

 

Did I mention that they do not use top sheets here? Well it was the second day of us using our 2 sheets and blanket system(oh yeah!), and when we went to our bedroom the top sheet was neatly laid out on the bed, the blanket was folded across the foot of the bed and the bottom sheet was folded into a square and resting on top of the blanket. We fixed the order and the next day the bed was made correctly. This is not a big issue, but for some reason they wash our sheets everyday so it is nice not to have to remake your bed everyday.