Le Pondicherry

Alicia here. We're in Pondicherry now, which is a lot like the South of France, a place I've never visited but have heard is something like Pondicherry. Last night at dinner on the rooftop of a pseudo-French cafe with great prawns stroganoff, I swatted away a few large clumsy mosquitos before they could bite and made fun of them this morning when I woke up. "What a dumb bunch of mosquitos!" I laughed, examining the corpses of several more of the same specie laying flatly against my mosquito net. "They're too fat to land on me without my noticing. They fly right in front of my face. They're not very stealthy." Har har har. Dumb mosquitos! How does their species even survive? Then I rolled over and was aghast to see what looked like a horrible tropical disease, or scientific experiment gone wrong, or biochemical rash, on the left side of each of my legs. I've got at least 75 big fat mosquito welts melting into each other all between the ankle and knee of each poor, stricken extremity. It's sooooo ugly! From the right side, knee-down, I look like a normal human being. From the left, Bride of Frankenweenie. That's what I get for wearing shorts. I can only imagine they must have been dive-bombing in from the left, or North side of the patio during dinner - under the table, undetected. So slick, so stealthy were they, that I was actually making FUN of them, so sure I was that they were too stupid to get at me. I'm sure the few I swatted away were just kamikaze distractors, part of an elaborate, intricate, well-planned and expertly executed strategic attack intended to lull me into a false sense of security. The whole episode just makes me glad that Dan-O insisted on a mosquito net late last night.
Aside from the mosquitos, there's an active dragonfly colony hovering in the street outside our totally awesome hotel, and a gang of bats swooping around the buildings after dark. It's almost like being on a Safari, and serves to distinguish our location from the South of France. Pondicherry is a pretty sweet beach town, and we're staying in a pretty sweet place with lots of warm colors, funky printed sheets and pillows and fascinating wall decor (the poster in our room is an advertisement which reads: "All black rice removed by Japanese Technology! Number One Super Rice!"). I'm not SO sad about becoming food for mosquitos, as long as it doesn't translate into any bloodborne disease.