When You've Gotta Go...

The summer between my junior and senior year in college, I was accepted into an archaeological program in Pylos, a picturesque town in southwest Greece overlooking the Navarino Bay.We were part of a team that was excavating the remnants of wall paintings from the ancient Palace of Nestor. Actually, everything had already been excavated by the time our group of six Denison girls got there, and we were just in charge of cleaning the 3,000-year-old pieces, cataloging them, and trying to piece them back together (while drinking enough ouzo and eating enough gyros, souvlaki, and moussaka to last a lifetime).

The program lasted eight weeks, and we had all saved enough money to spend a couple of days in Athens before flying home. If you look it up on Google Maps, the ride from Pylos to Athens SHOULD only take four hours. But I don't think that takes into account the incredibly curvy two-lane roads, or the bus we had to take, which never seemed to go faster than a slow crawl and always seemed juuuuust about ready to fall off the road and plummet into the canyons far below. Altogether, it took a good seven or eight hours to reach Athens, and it was absolutely the worst ride of my life (this, coming from a girl who used to get incredibly carsick as a child, is a big deal).

Either because we didn't understand a word the driver said or because we were just totally stupid, we didn't realize that you had to TELL the driver when to pull over for a pit stop. Around hour four, we were regretting the water we had consumed that morning with breakfast. Around hour five, we were really uncomfortable. At hour six, I was on the verge of tears and ready to just pull down my pants and pee on the dang seat because OH MY GOD never have I had to go SO badly.

One girl had picked up more Greek than the rest of us during our stay, and we finally convinced her to go up to the driver and tell him we needed to stop RIGHT FREAKING NOW. We heard him laugh and say something we couldn't understand, but a few minutes later we pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of the most glorious-looking little set of buildings I had ever seen. I don't know how I managed to hold it walking from the bus to the bathroom, but I did.

And I'm starting to feel the creeping sensation of that experience again. Today, I was the first one in our office. As I was going around and turning on lights, something hit me in the face and fell to the ground. I looked down at it and saw that it was a flying ant. And oh, there's another. And another. And FIFTY BAJILLION MORE OH SWEET JESUS.

So we have a liiittle infestation problem here today. The bulk of the swarm of flying and non-flying ants are centered, where else, in the bathrooms. This is a very small office, so it's just a one-toilet-per-gender kind of deal. It's my only option, but I can't go in there. I just can't make myself do it. There are still two hours until lunch, and I'm beginning to regret all that water I drank earlier before putting two and two together and realizing that the bathroom was out of commission unless I wanted to be attacked by a swarm of hungry, mating ants.

Help. It's not going to go over well if I pee on my chair.