We drove all the way to the city last night to have dinner with the girls and finally to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 as a family. Because of the stormy weather, we decided to go somewhere near the girls’ condo. The Mall of Asia was the nearest so we went there.
After a Japanese dinner and a little food shopping, it was time for the much-awaited movie date. It was almost too good to be true. Very few people are inside the movie house. But, as it often turns out, things too good to be true are no good at all. Sam said there was a cockroach on the floor. When the thing passed by her foot again, she realized it was larger than a cockroach and had a tail. Damn. I hate people who put their feet up on the backrest of the seat in front of them in the movie house but Alex and I automatically put our feet up (the seats in front of us were unoccupied). No insect nor mammal was going to get near my feet in the dark. I was not about to ruin our Harry Potter date by screaming my head off and disrupting the screening.
Fortunately, whatever it was that was crawling on the floor did not make its presence felt again. We watched the movie, enraptured. No spoilers in case some of you plan on seeing the movie. It’s really the gecko that I want to write about.
So, we were driving the girls back to their condo when the talk turned to geckos. How did we get there? We were still talking about what was crawling inside the movie house and vowing never to see another movie at any of the Mall of Asia cinemas again. From cockroach to rat, suddenly Speedy and Sam were talking about geckos. Gecko, of course, is taken in Filipino those lizards whose calls sound like they’re mouthing “Zuko.” We have a lot of them in the neighborhood. We don’t really see them but we hear them, especially at night.
As usual, I’m behind with the news. According to Speedy and Sam, the gecko is big business these days because it is reputedly a cure for AIDS a single gecko sells for tens of thousands of pesos. I listened to their discussion for a while then suggested that, perhaps, we should start catching the geckos roaming around the neighborhood and, you know, start breeding and selling them. Speedy said there was a government warning that trading geckos were illegal. After a few minutes of gecko talk, Alex who has a phobia of lizards freaked out. So much for gecko talk. I did a little research though after we got home.