Frog surprise!

Arriving around 11 pm after a 2 hour delayed flight from New Delhi and a more than 2 hour taxi ride to the hotel in South Goa, we quickly check in to a room and I rush to the bathroom to go pee.  I lift the white toilet seat carefully with toilet paper.  Thankfully, I peer inside the toilet before plopping down on the seat.   How can there be a clump of greenish-brown turd on the edge of the toilet bowl?  Did the maid really miss this when cleaning?  I assume this hotel is worse than I thought and doesn’t deserve the 3 stars it claims.   I call happy guy over to take a look of this sight and I have a look of disgust on my face.  As soon as he stands up to start walking over, I scream “Oh my God, the turd has eyes.”  I looked closer and saw two black eyes located equally apart near the top of the greenish-brown clump.  I breathe a sigh of relief…the hotel isn’t as dirty as I thought…it’s just that there’s a frog in the toilet! 

happy guy finally enters the bathroom and suggests brilliantly that we push the circular flush button above the toilet.  Perhaps it would just disappear like what we excrete…just flow down with the water into the mystery world down below.  We just wanted a quick solution to the problem, but we must have forgotten that frogs have legs and can jump!  So we flushed the toilet and the frog simply hopped a few centimeters closer to the edge of the bowl and didn’t seem excessively bothered.  So we needed a better solution.

I entered our friend Jesse’s room since I still needed to use the bathroom.  Meanwhile, happy guy told the small lady working at hotel reception that there’s a frog in the toilet.  She looked a little surprised but quickly headed to the bathroom to resolve the problem.  At first, we heard the toilet flush.  She shared our idea, but of course the frog simply jumped out of the toilet bowl onto the floor.  The second round involved stomping.  So she stomped on the squishy frog multiple times, but somehow it managed to jump out from under her feet unharmed each time.  At this point, we could no longer watch.  We next heard the garbage can being used as a weapon, the third round.  It seemed as though the battle of short Indian woman against frog continued for an eternity.  Until finally, we heard the sound of the toilet flush again.  So we knew who won the battle!

She entered the room victoriously with a grin from ear to ear across her face.  We knew she had taken care of the problem, even though we imagined a much more peaceful solution of perhaps taking the frog outside.  And then I looked down to see what footwear she used for the battle, and I noticed she was barefoot!  I cringed with the thought of stomping barefoot on a squishy turd-like frog.  But she looked proud.  Her lazy eye didn’t prevent her from losing the battle.

And I remembered the many mosquito battles I had lost around the world.  Thanks to this woman’s bravery our problem was resolved and we had a very restful sleep that night!