I like how this city surprises me. Okay, sometimes I like how this city surprises me. I can live without the human feces on the side walk or the horrifying number of men I’ve seen urinating. But, I like how, walking down the streets, I can be in any number of worlds or centuries. Can see something that you can only, well, see here.
Peeking into a road side tea stall kitchen, you can see a voluptuous man, with his ‘vest’ (wife-beater) rolled up to his neck, slowly rubbing his expansive stomach. Next door, five men sit huddled around a coal fire with an anvil and hammer, beating metal by hand. One night, during a load shedding electricity outage, I saw people laying asphalt by hand, silouetted by the flames heating the asphalt.
I think most of all I like the little glimpses of beauty that catch me off guard (massive gut scratching not included) or the funny moments that make me smile. I ate pink cotton candy the other day. It was so hot it started to melt, so I had two choices. Let my cotton candy shrink before my eyes or inhale it. The choice was obvious. My tongue was hot pink.
The other day I saw a fat school kid scratching an even fatter street dog’s belly. There is a roll stand near where I work and a particular street dog lives by it. I remember taking my dog Chloe to the vet and having the vet direct our attention to a chart on the wall. The top left was a cartoon picture of a sad, emaciated dog with serious nutritional needs. The picture changed slightly from square to square as the dog’s weight improved until you reached the bottom right. Chloe’s square. The dog by the roll stand’s square. This square’s picture resembled a dog even less than the first. It looked like a sausage with toothpick legs that you would make on the 4th of July. I find the sausage dog by the roll stand to be fantastic advertising. Kind of like the pork shop that has pictures of piglets frolicking in a field of white flowers. Clip art is a beautiful thing.
So, I think I had some beautiful thoughts in mind when I titled this post “Fairies”, but what you get is fat belly scratching and sausage dogs, which is kind of like life here.
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