Drunk Bugs

"Floods never come to our town!" "It won’t rain at the English camp!" "The drunk bugs aren’t coming this year!"

All of the above are examples of extremely misguided predictions that I’ve heard in Thailand during the last 12 months. Each one turned out to be quite the opposite: the flood DID come to our town, it DID rain at the English camp, and...

It only took an hour this evening between the time that I observed, before leaving on my bicycle for aerobics at the town hall, that the drunk bugs seemed to have not returned to our house this rainy season, and the time that I returned, well-exercised and sweaty, to find the little fluttery wings all over the walls, floors, furniture, and bathroom floor.

We first met these bugs last May, during one of the first rainstorms of the year, when, as we sat outside enjoying the sudden cool breeze, we saw that all of our neighbors were shutting their doors and windows. "How silly," we thought, "for them not to take advantage of the change in the air." In fact, we were the deluded ones, not realizing that with our doors wide open, the house was rapidly filling with strange moth-like creatures that fly dizzily, crash into walls, and flail about on the floor losing their wings all over. Each morning we swept them out the door, and each evening we watched as gecko lizards ate their fill.

We call them the "drunk bugs" because when we were first told their name, "maleng mao," we thought that "mao" (falling tone) was the same as "mao" (flat tone). The first refers to the bugs, the second is the adjective for drunk. They certainly seemed drunk to us, anyway, what with flying into walls and then falling to the floor, so it was an honest mistake.

As I write this blog, we are just hoping that when we turn out the lights for the evening, they will crawl back outside underneath the cracks in the doors... otherwise I do fear for Robert’s sanity!

(The photo also shows a friendly frog.)