Scorpion

No one mentioned the scorpions in Genova ...

I met my first scorpion yesterday and watched horrified as a young man played with it, just a metre from my foot, trying to pick it up to throw it outside.

Seeing it brought back memories of a Turkish friend’s archeologist husband delighting in telling me tales of his time working in a place where you didn’t leave clothes on the tent floor and where you shook trousers before wearing them because ... scorpions are heat-seekers and the groin of the French archaeologist was where a group of scorpions ended up.

Was he teasing me?
Quite possibly but he was so amused by the French archaeologist's response, I suspect he was truth-telling.

This scorpion was pale black, between 1-2 inches long and looked like a crab maybe ... or perhaps more like one of those scorpions, seen only in books and on television until now.

Apparently the bigger they are, the less poisonous they are ... but how poisonous is less poisonous?  My informant was sorry to tell me but she had found one in her shower.  I came back to the apartment and checked the shower plug-cover was in place, and then popped a plug in the bath too.

It probably explains the small lines of yellow foul-smelling powder along door ledges on this street just lately.

Scorpions ... I hope to see no more with the camera I didn’t have on me yesterday.