Today my team and I worked on a construction site, which included: some small hand shovels, and large ‘plates’, “now move that huge pile of buffalo poop/rocks from there, to there.”
So after sweating through all my clothes, busting the blisters open on my hands, and crashing my delicate hands into a huge thorn bush several times (leaving my hand bleeding)….it was time to go home. So we piled into our rick-shaw… there was one too many in the tiny rick-shaw and they needed one volunteer to go back on a little motorcycle.
I jumped out the rick-shaw window and onto the moto (as a passenger…); down the bumpy, windy dirt road we went. Ipod was set to the best playlist I have, wind blowing through my hair, it was perfect. As we were driving through the village we passed herds of water buffalo, pigs eating trash off the side of the road, tons of goats, and, of course countless number of brown faces watching me go by with a look of confusion and facination; most of the people in this village have never seen a western before, most smiled and waved, some pointed, some just stared.
On both sides of the dirt road were crops: corn, cotton, rice, cabbage, and who knows what else was growing in rows casting every shade of green invented….there were palm trees beyond the fields, and beyond the tall California looking palm trees were rolling hills that were a dark grey color. In the fields were woman working hard; bodies in a 90 degree angle picking their harvest, covered in 7 yards of beautiful, colorful, hot fabric that makes up their ‘sari’, which is tradition Indian wear. Men were out plowing the fields; enormous, white cows or shiny black water buffalo pulled those tracker things leaving rows for new seeds…I guess that was what was happening….I’m a city girl, I don’t know about these things. Anyway, as the sun was setting the roads became busier with woman dressed so bright and colorful carrying silver jugs of water, piles of sticks, or huge bunches of greenery tied together on their heads while chatting with a friend on the daily walk home.
As I was taking this all in, I noticed the huge orange sun. It was a perfect circle, and like it always is in Asia, it was a soft glow of bright orange. Due to smog, the Asian sun seems soft around sunrise and sunset. You can look right at it and not squint. As the sun was sinking behind the mountains the temperature dropped and the sky began to turn shades of pink and purple with a few white, wispy clouds and one thin fingernail looking moon.
The further we got from the village, the crazier things got. Traffic picked up and horns were making their way in past my ipod music. Cars, rick-shaws, buses, tractors, 18-wheeler trucks, bikes, cows, and walkers all shared the small two lane paved road. India is notorious for having men just pee on the side of the road, so that happening about every 500 feet. Small rick-shaws would be full of banana trees or people…they seat 3-5 (depending on your size) comfortably…there would be about 12 in a single rick-shaw, men hanging out the back, people on top of each other—it was crazy.
As we made it back into the city, the sky had fallen completely dark and the air was chilly, traffic was sketchy (to say the least), street venders had lines of people waiting for a quick fried snack, and at about this time everyone burns the day’s trash on the side of the roads, so air was nasty smelling and burning my eyes.
My nice moto driver dropped me off at the elevator of the apartment I am living at and up to the 6th floor I went. It’s an outdoor elevator, and once I made it to the roof-top, I grabbed my clothes off the clothes line, looked over the city and it’s small skyline, took my shoes off at the door, and went in for a nice cold shower.
Not too bad of a day!
