The Lugano Experience

Saturday was a long day of walking around Venice, going to museums, eating a cubic ton of Gelato and laughing and enjoying great company.  By 10PM I was pretty much kaput.  So off to the hotel for a good nights sleep to follow with a great morning of tours in Venice.

Now, the hotel didn’t have air conditioning.  This is not terribly uncommon for hotels in Europe - in fact if they have it, they seem to make a big point to advertise it as if it were some new-fangled invention…  like teleportation or light speed or Jello beds or something. 

Ok, so, no air conditioning.  Not too big of a deal since it really wasn’t that hot and there was a nice ocean breeze blowing outside.  And, I prefer to sleep with the window open anyway.  Unfortunately, at about 2:30 AM, I was jarred from dreams of Lilleputians and leprechauns (no, not those kind of dreams) by the horde of spirited Italian revelers coming back from the bars.  Argh.  You know those drunks that have to yell at one another because for some inexplicable reason alcohol makes you both extremely hard of hearing AND annoyingly stupid?  Yea? Well those guys were all standing outside of my open window having a long and seemingly hilarious conversation that they not only wanted me to hear, but also mainland China. And for whatever reason, that same group of people thought it necessary to walk past my window every 30 minutes until 4:30 that morning.

That alone, would have been fine - a 30 minute window of sleep-opportunity would have been enough for me, because once asleep I can typically get right through loud conversations…

The real problem came when, somewhere in the dark, a high pitched whining noise busted through my semi-conscious state.  Occasionally it would get louder, then disappear altogether.  I managed to ignore it for several minutes until it made a screaming, relentless dive bomb right into my ear!!  ARGH, mosquitoes!

Now, I am awake and I know I am being eaten.  This, as you probably know,  is a very uncomfortable feeling.  Somewhere in the darkness there was a mosquito and it had (or soon would) drunk my blood like some vampiric child of the night.  Do I turn the light on?  Do I ignore it?  Do I blindly swat at it and hope it runs in sheer terror of my life-rending man-paws? 

I decided to pull the sheet over my head and hide.  This worked for a while and I felt that warm feeling of sleep tempt me into its open caress.  But after a few minutes of breathing my own exhaust I began to slightly hyperventolate which had the side effect of increasing my core temperature by about, oh, magma.  I immediately thought that I should turn on the air conditioning only to remember that here, in Lilleputia, there was none.  At this point, I am sweating profusely and the sheets started to stick to my back and I am panting like a rabid dog and little pin points of lights are flicking at the corner of closed eyelids… I imagined the headline “Man Suffocates Hiding From Mosquitoes” and the shame of it was too much to bear so I desperately threw the covers away.  It is precisely at this moment when I realized that sweat, for a mosquito, is probably a lot like barbecue sauce.  Mmm… Tasty.  So, there I lay in the dark, naked, panting and prone, and basting in mosquito-barbeque sauce of my own making.  Get a visual - yea, I’ll wait for it…

Now, for those Americans in the audience, you may be wondering how the mosquitoes are getting past the screen.  The answer is, of course, there were no screens.  For some unknown and inexplicable reason, Europeans have not figured out the glory, the wonder, the practicality of these wonderful devices.  You know, that meshy stuff that allows wind to come through but keeps mosquitoes the size of friggin Benji out of your room at night when you live in a swamp?  Whenever I ask someone from this area why they don’t have screens, the answer is usually something like “We don’t have bugs.”  Well, let me introduce you to the Mosquitador (that’s a Lab sized mosquito) that is boring a pencil sized hole into my thigh.

Ok, 4AM, no sleep, and the B-Mosquita-7 has been attacking for coming on two hours.  She is a cagey one.  She waits.  Waits until she senses that I am about to fall into that exhausted comatose slumber and then WHAM!  She dive bombs into my ear so that she can watch me beat it senseless in a completely involuntary spastic attack while she flies safely away.

You realize, don’t you, that this means war?

I turn on the light, and decide to do what we Americans do best: declare war against a far inferior enemy.  Not having a fly swatter, and not wanting to clump around and wake my fellow guests, I decide to smash these little bastards with my pillow.  I look about my room to spot the enemy, and they are not difficult to find.  The fat sons-a-bitches are lazing all about the ceiling and walls.  And these guys are big.  I second-guess my declaration of war, I mean, I like picking fights I can win.  And these guys look like I might be able to train them to sit or fetch or something.  One of them is lazily scratching an ear with its hind leg while another one is alternately licking itself and giving me the hairy eye.

This is gonna be tough but after considering my weapon of choice, ”the Pillow of Doom” (or as it will become known in campfires across the globe, the POD), my confidence in victory surges.

I started with Fido (I decided to name my kills).  I aim the POD at the mosquito (attacking a mosquito with a POD is as sporting as shooting ducks with a heat-seaking anti-aircraft missile, btw) and swing.  He Exploded.  Oozing Sven goo erupted in every direction as Fido meshed with the ceiling, leaving a blood schmear the size of a pea on my pillow case and the wood rafters.  EWWWWWWWW Grooooosssss!  But, war is no time for the squeamish or the weak of heart.  Rex was next.

Rex gave me some trouble.  He must have heard the final cries and subsequent death-explosion of his comrade Fido.  He flew about, dove this way and spiraled that.  He flew at my face in a seeming suicide attempt to confuse me but then tried to find solace inside my ear (sending me into a desperate frenzy of ear slaps).  I dropped the POD, and he thought he had won the battle - his enemy was disarmed and his bloated body, badly in need of a rest after the aerial acrobatics, landed on the wall.  With cat-like grace I reached down for the POD, grabbed a corner and swung - fluidity incarnate.  Kabloooey!  Sven plasma and Mosquito goo made an inch long trail against the white wall and another red splatch on the pillow.

Feeling the bloodlust now, I dug in, and prepared for the long battle ahead.  The enemy was aware that their comrades had gone down, and battle lines were drawn.  Two, then three began working in concert - some going for my eyes, others my ears and others distracting me in an effort to draw me away from the weak, the landed.  But mine was the superiod intelligence armed with the weapon of catastrophic destruction.  They had drunk their last pint of blood, and after twenty minutes little battle globs painted the walls, the ceiling and my weapon of choice, the Pillow of Doom.  I had killed about twenty of these mosquitadors - Fido, Rex, Buster, Buddy, Max and all the rest came to the same end.  I spent the next 20 minutes hunting for any others that would cower from battle, but my victory had been decisive.

I put the POD aside, grabbed the POS (Pillow of Sleep) and caught about 3 hours before the alarm sounded a new day in Venice.

As I stood in the shower and felt the water-needle blast my retina, I began wondering what housekeeping was going to think of the bloody mess I had made of my room?

Maybe, just maybe, they might think, “Hmm, perhaps if we had air conditioning our guests would not have to sleep with windows open and get attacked by dog sized mosquities?  Or perhaps, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a grid-like substance that allowed air to pass through but kept mosquitoes the size of labradors out of the room?” 

Yea, they might think that. 

<Sigh>  But probably not.
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.