Spiders the Size of My Hand

Sorry I have not written much recently...Looks like it will rain for the next few days or so, so I should be able to catch up!

Earlier I posted about my distaste of snakes, now it is time for me to write about the other critter I don't much care for: Spiders.

When I worked in Florida, I had a reason to be cautious of spiders. It wasn't uncommon to reach in to a secluded control box only to find a black widow creeping around in there. Spiders just have way too many legs to really be liked by anybody.

I used to be slightly scared, and intrigued by the big "garden" spiders I would find around my house. I'm not exactly sure what they were called, but their body was about an inch long and they were yellow and black striped. I liked to catch other smaller bugs and chuck them in to the web to watch the spider scurry over and quickly wrap it up to make a meal out of the bug I sacrificed for my own sense of wonder.

When I fist came here, I didn't realize them right at first, until my boss pointed them out to me. It seems that here in Hong Kong, we have the yellow and black spiders, but they take steroids here.
Normally when I take a picture and need to show the scale of the object, I'll place my pen or a golf ball right next to it. Well, I tried to muster up the courage to hold my pen next to the spider to show the size, but as I got close, I could see it moving its mouth parts, getting ready to make my whole hand in to its supper, so you will just have to take my word for it. This spider was pretty large. The body of it was about 6-7" in length and if I spread my hand out as wide as it would go, the spiders legs would easily reach farther. Not all these spiders are this big, but they are much larger than the ones I used to play with in the gardens growing up.

It seems that every morning on my walk to work, I walk through a web they have spun during the night. The webbing seems to be unusually strong and is terribly hard to get off me. Then for the next while, I feel like a spider is crawling all over me until I shake off all the web.

Thank goodness these spiders are not poisonous (from what I've heard) and I don't believe there are any spiders to be really scared of here in Hong Kong. I just don't like the idea of something that looks like it is from a sci fi movie walking all over me.