Bats in My Belfry
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We have just a couple more days in Tallinn, Estonia—I’d come back in a heartbeat. It’s a very appealing mix of modern and medieval.
Bats in My Belfry
We’re heading to Edinburgh on Sunday—the day before Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. Monday will be a national holiday, so we’re mentally prepared for a quiet, somber city. This is, as Lee likes to say, not our first rodeo: the last time we landed in the middle of a period of national mourning was a few days after the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand, in 2016.
Bangkok had been leached of color and noise and vibrancy. All the screens had been turned off. Music had gone silent. Every person—every single one—wore black, white, or gray.
Not wanting to offend in my usual pink and purple, I bought a couple of gray t-shirts, and some black ribbons. Everyone wore these: a small snip of black, tied into a bow and pinned to the sleeve, just below the shoulder. I bought several, and they quickly became part of my morning routine—clothes, watch, ribbon, sunglasses.
A friend from the US came to visit that October (hi Amelia!), so we bought her some ribbons as well, and set about showing off one of our favorite cities. She stayed for a couple of weeks, and we had a grand time, in spite of the subdued mood hanging over the Thai population.
Amelia and I took a little day trip to Ayutthaya, which was once the capital of the ancient kingdom of Siam. Nowadays it’s one of those vast complexes of ruins that I’m obsessed with—like Angkor Wat, or Tikal, or Ephesus.
We had a grand time. We clambered around ancient temples and palaces, climbing up and down stairs and peering out ancient windows at the landscape. We stepped carefully on crumbling bricks. We craned our necks to gaze up at sharp chedis, stretching toward the sky. We considered 16th century wall paintings, rendered soft and blurry by the tropical climate. We took selfies and sweated a lot.
Ayutthaya is very well-kept—not overgrown, like many ancient cities—but it still has its share of local wildlife. In a room at the top of one tall narrow tower, just wide enough for the two of us to stand, we used our phone flashlights to illuminate the wall paintings, and I heard a squeaking sound. My heart did a little thump of dread, and I knew what I’d see even before I pointed my light to the ceiling. Bats.
Now, for the record, I am not afraid of bats on their own account. Not like dogs: I’m just flat-out phobic about dogs. The bat itself, as a creature, doesn’t bother me too much.
It’s the potentially lethal stuff that might live inside the bat that scares me. Specifically, rabies. I am terrified of rabies, and the shots you have to get if you have even a potential exposure. Do you know what the fatality rate of rabies is? 100%. If you get actual rabies symptoms, you will die. It’s a death sentence. THAT IS HORRIFYING.
Back when Lee and I first started traveling, I insisted that we both had to get vaccinated against rabies. If you’re vaccinated, and then you’re exposed, you have a bit more time to get the shots. BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO GET THE SHOTS.
When Lee realized that little factoid, he was sort of incensed. Why did we even bother to get vaccinated? It’s not like people are dying of rabies every day—we’d hear about it!
And that was possibly the first lesson we ever learned about ethnocentrism. Yes, people die of rabies every day. Approximately sixty thousand people die of rabies every year, because they don’t have access to those life-saving shots. But they’re almost all in Africa and Asia, so …
Back to Ayutthaya. Our flashlights had woken the bats, and they were rustling and squeaking up by the ceiling. I whispered to Amelia that there were bats, and she shrugged, engrossed in the paintings. I said I’d wait outside the dark room, on the open landing at the top of the stairs.
There was a German woman there, waiting her turn to enter the tiny room with the paintings. She stood in bright sunshine just outside the doorway. I began to relax as I joined her on the landing, jabbering something about bats and fumbling for my sunglasses. Away from the bats, my heart rate returned to normal and I squinted against the light. Then something caught my eye.
A flash of black fluttered at my shoulder, and my lizard brain or corpus callosum or wingardium leviosa or whatever it’s called took over, and I. Freaked. Out.
The German woman stared as I completely lost my shit. I was shrieking and screaming and dancing around, begging this poor stranger to get it off, GET IT OFF!
It was a miracle that I didn’t jump right off the 3rd floor of that tower.
All because of a tiny black ribbon.
Take care,
Lisa
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