Not super cheerful about my first impressions

7/7/07
I think I remember reading that today as some ridiculously popular day for getting married. Makes me want to watch "Lucky Number Slevin."

I don't have too much time to write right now. My laptop is broken, and that puts a serious cramp in my style. My life is kind of boring too, since I have just been teaching a lot.

Everything is dirty. This country smells like old trash. Not everywhere, exactly, but a lot of places, a lot of the time. The places that don't smell like trash often smell like my grandmother's summer house at bible camp. A whole city that smells like trash and bible camp. I guess I'll get used to it, no one else seems to mind.

I asked my neighbor where I should take my trash out to, and she showed me the trash bins out in front of my building. She made sure I knew that the bins were emptied every day, but I am not sure why she made a point of it, because it appears that the bins are just emptied into a big pile a half a block away. There, the big pile of trash festers. Then the foul stench that arises from the trash attacks when you least expect it.

There are a lot of piles trash. But they don't seem to grow, they stay at an even level. I don't know what to make of this. I guess the piles get gathered and taken away at some point? -It doesn't matter that the pile is gone though, the places where they grow are always wretched. I call one lane I have to walk down to get to work Stench Alley. Then there is The Foul Stench, on my way to the store, and The Stench Ghost, which lurks all over the place, invisible to the eye but terrible to the nose. He appears even when there is no garbage to be seen.
***
I am reading "Maximum City," a book about Mumbai. The author makes the observation that public spaces in the city- sidewalks, streets, even the common stairwells in buildings- are disgusting. Private spaces are beautiful and clean, but the clean line stops at the door. I think this is probably always somewhat true, no matter where you are in the world, but here the clean/dirty line is stark. Beautiful offices and homes, but filthy streets and sidewalks. I was really surprised to see a guy sweeping the sidewalk in front of his business this morning, it was the first time I had seen anything like that. The two office that I work in are very nice, but the buildings they are in, from the outside, look crappy. Peeling paint, rundown stonework, unvarnished wooden stairs. Then on the inside, nice wooden flooring, clean walls, plants, airconditioning. It is like night and day.

There are a lot of slums. Slums are a fact of life here. The buildings in the slums are knocked together with corrugated metal and wood, and then they are wired with electricity and hooked up to water. The constructions can be 2-3 stories high, and they look like a solid wind would knock them to rubble. But they stay up, held together by rope and habit. I think it simply hasn't occured to most of them to fall down. Or maybe it is that falling down would be more trouble than just staying where they are. I don't know what kinds of lives are led there, in that kind of housing, and how it affects the rest of your life. I get the impression, from some of my reading, that they are like little villages within the larger city, little neighborhoods. Especially since you are so close to everyone who lives around you. My boss here was telling me that there was a plan to try to get people out of the slums and into subsidized/free housing on the outskirts of town. The government built the housing, and offer rooms to people in the slums. So people from the slums would take an apt, and then rent it out to someone else, and then go back to their place in town, because that is where their neighborhood was.

There are also a lot of homeless people here, or rather, people making their homes on sidewalks. All it takes is a tarp lying around, and you have shelter.

I will try to get some pictures up soon!