Living with lizards

We’ve been pretty busy since I last posted an entry here. We did end up going to Can Tho for the weekend. We spent our time there eating, drinking and shopping. There was a certain restaurant in Can Tho that we always went to, a lovely old two-storey wooden building on a corner site overlooking the river and the busy street. We were really looking forward to going there again and having pizza and tuna and salad sandwiches. Unfortunately that place has been knocked down. So we went to a different place, also overlooking the river but without the street view. Hopefully our favourite restaurant will reopen again somewhere else, but we hold grave fears for what will be built in its stead...

This is a very-Vietnamese cafe in Can Tho. Bright neon lights and super-loud karaoke are very popular here. This cafe is just down the street from where our favourite restaurant was. Hopefully they don't replace the restaurant with something like this!

The other news is that we have moved into the new house. The location is good, being right near the centre of town, and it has a covered outdoor area out the front where we can sit and watch the passing traffic and storms go by. The rest of the house does need a bit of work though. We are planning to:

• Install a second-hand air-conditioner. We’ll probably only use this at night, at the moment the heat is making it hard to sleep.
• Install a door in the hallway leading from the kitchen and bathroom area to the bedroom and lounge room. This is so that the air-conditioner will only cool part of the house. It will also help block bad smells coming from behind the house.
• Cover up the back window with glass or clear plastic. The window at the back of the house only has metal grilles in it. It also is directly above a stinky cesspit (the source of the bad smells mentioned above).
• Install cable television. Dan is particularly looking forward to watching the World Cup.
• Install/build a kitchen sink. The kitchen is odd; it has two big cement tubs (one on the ground floor, one of the roof of the bathroom – but still inside the house) which have gutters and pipes leading into them to collect rainwater. We have already stopped the flow of rainwater into these tubs (which involved Dan climbing onto the roof of the bathroom and pushing the gutter so that it directed water outside), now we have to decide what to do with them. They are a bit of an eyesore and a potential breeding ground for mosquitoes.
• Paint. The whole house could do with a decent paint job, but we might just paint the lounge room and bedroom. The kitchen and bathroom would be too much work!
• Fix the plumbing. At the moment the toilet is not working, there are also pipes leading everywhere. Maybe these could be somehow used to install a kitchen sink.
  

We have also realised that we are sharing our house with a big lizard. He/she is about 30cm long, looks like a gecko, sounds like a gecko and clings to walls like a gecko but can geckos get that big? Maybe it’s a cross between a gecko and a crocodile. I’m paranoid that the gecko/crocodile/monster lizard will try and eat the flesh off our bones while we sleep. Although one of our Vietnamese friends told us that this type of lizard is edible, so maybe we will eat it before it eats us.

Our in-house gecko/crocodile/monster lizard