Every day, visitors ask me if I would ever move back to Hawaii after my mission. Almost before they get the question out, I have already answered NO. Then I feel bad because so many people would love to be here right now....especially because its cold in Utah haha....So, I would like to share a little behind the scenes information about living in Hawaii.
There are creepy crawly things EVERYWHERE and these are my adventures just in the past week. A couple of days ago, we were deep cleaning our apartment. It's been sprayed, so there are dead ants and spiders everywhere. Occasionally we would find some live ones but we would just go ahead and vacuum them up with the dead ones, figuring that they will die when they get sucked into the vacuum. I used to do this all the time at home and I thought for sure it would work. We decided to empty the vacuum the next morning so that everything would be dead before we began vaccuuming again. The next morning I went to empty it and there were 4 live spiders and they had built their own series of webs inside of the other parts of the vacuum! So gross. These spiders are indestructible.
Almost as indestuctible as Hawaiian ants. They don't even die when you nuke them in the microwave for 2 minutes. They are breeding their own mutant ant colony in our microwave.
There are geckos everywhere, which I don't mind for the most part. They crawl around our walls and they are kind of cute so it's not a big deal. While I was sweeping the other day, I found a dead one :( There is one that hangs out on the gate that leads to our front door....he's jumped on me a couple of times. One night while I was writing in my journal, one landed in and got lost in my hair. That was awesome.
Cockroaches....yuck. We have them and I just hope and pray that they don't crawl around in our food. The only thing I'm going to say about roaches is that it's definitely not a good idea to try to suck them up in the vacuum. They get stuck! We had to use q-tips to pry one out of the vacuum hose and it was nasty.
I saved the best creepy crawly things for last. Centipedes. I'm not talking about the little ones. These ones are huge and they have pinchers and they bite. We found one in our bathroom the other day, well actually, it crawled over Sister Muller's foot while she was brushing her teeth. You can imagine 4 sister missionaries screaming and trying to figure out how to kill it. After much confusion and chaos, we got it outside and sprayed it with bleach. It jumped in the air and started curling up but it never fully died. Apparently the only way to really kill them is to cut them in half with scissors. Yeah right. We just left it outside in the bleach and came back a couple of hours later to find that it was gone. Is it still alive? I don't know. Probably.
I'm grateful to be in the Hawaii Honolulu Mission! I'm also grateful for the many adventures that I've had since I've been here. The next time you complain about the cold Utah weather, you can think of me over here with all of these nasty bugs and you can be grateful that you live in a cold climate so that there are not 6 inch long centipedes in your house! Mission life is awesome and I'm so grateful for all of the many wonderful experiences I've had.
I love you all,
Sister Stringer
