Death by Shampoo

A couple of nights ago, I went to bathroom like I usually do before going to bed. As I was doing my business I decided to slide shut the shower door. As I was doing this I noticed a gigantic COCKROACH! I quickly shut the door. I decided to just leave it like that, since my host mom had told me that she sprays the place with “anti-bug spray”….(not quite sure what the proper name for that is….i’ve lost some English vocab since being down here)….so, even if bugs get in, they’re usually die pretty quickly. So I thought that it would die over night or crawl somewhere else.

The next day, I decided to take a shower, go figure. I got all of my stuff ready and I went into the bathroom. I remembered that I had left a cockroach to die in the shower the previous night, so I cautiously opened the shower door, carefully examined the shower and saw that the cockroach was nowhere in sight. So I turned on the water and waited until it got warm. I hopped into the shower, started to get my hair wet before putting in the shampoo, and felt something slightly feeling like tickling on my right foot. I thought it was just the water trickling down, but when I looked down I freaked out because there was my lovely pet cockroach just trying to get some love.

Needless to say, I jumped and let out a slight yelp. The cockroach was now on its back (with my many experiences with cockroaches here in Mexico, I have learned that they get stuck on their backs an astonishingly large amount of times). So I cupped my hands together to collect water and I poured it on the cockroach, hoping it would drown. I did this frantically for a minute, but the water never collected fast enough and I never got the aim quite right, so the cockroach got back on its feet and started scurrying about in the shower. I was jumping around trying to be as far away from it as possible but still trying to stay in some sort of strategic position to figure out how I was going to get rid of this monstrosity.

Finally, I cornered the cockroach….in the corner of the shower. It tried crawling up the wall. Since I really wasn’t into squashing it (I’ve had bad experiences with doing that here…) I did the next best thing I could think of. I grabbed my shampoo bottle and began squeezing the contents out onto the cockroach. Again, my aim wasn’t the greatest, so for a while I thought he was going to escape his gooey doom. Once all but one squeeze was left in my shampoo bottle, he stopped moving. The site of a dead cockroach covered in a white gooey substance covering a good portion of the corner of a shower is quite gratifying and disturbing at the same time. I finished that shower in record time in fear of it coming back to life or it dead body sliding eerily close to my feet. I can’t wait to get back home and not worry about cockroaches the size of my iPod nano…….