One bad thing about living in a warm climate has to be the giant bugs. Many of the insects here are large enough to drive cars. I have been lucky enough so far to not find any large creatures in the apartment, but some of the other teachers have not been so lucky. A few of our friends have found cockroaches larger than a deck of playing cards in their apartments. It gets talked about a lot and I knew it was just a matter of time before I would have to battle one of these beasts.

Well my day came on Friday at school. One of the Chinese teachers came into my classroom in the middle of one of my lessons and said she needed my help. I left my classroom and went to her classroom to discover the largest spider I've ever seen. This thing was about as big as my hand, had thick brown legs, and could probably beat me in hand to hand combat. I didn't have a camera with me so I couldn't take a picture, but thanks to a quick google search I was able to find it. (it's actually a screen shot from this youtube video).

After a futile attempt to reason with it I decided it was time to fight. I took off my sandal and attempted to smash it, but this thing was way too fast for my ogre-like reflexes. I took several more swipes at it and missed every time. The spider ended up running away (it must have been a French spider) under a desk and we couldn't find it for a good 5 minutes. During this whole ordeal the students started flipping out and we had to move all of them to the opposite side of the room. We eventually found it under the teacher's desk (probably trying to learn English so we could reconcile our differences) and I was able to slow it down with some whiteboard cleaner. After using about half the bottle of cleaner it still wouldn't die so I was forced to river dance on its face. Once the spider was dead the whole class cheered and I went back to my class to finish teaching Language Arts.

This event has scarred me for life.