Day Seventeen
Tuesday 15 Sep 09 - Wandering
The morning is not a busy time here. It has taken me a few days to get used to that. Actually, I’m not sure I’m used to it yet. Breakfast is all good though. Aunt Patsy – Keith’s sister-in-law – is up and cooking me breakfast every morning. At this stage breakfast is a diet of toast, sausages, eggs and fruit along with copious quantities of water and fruit juice. I find it a little embarrassing to be looked after like this, but it is rather nice too.
Tuesday is my day off on my timetable – actually pretty much every day feels like a day off with a little bit of a wander each evening, remarkably similar to India in many ways. Anyway, I found my way into the market – I wanted a few props for my talk on Wednesday and spent a couple of hours wandering around just looking.
Starbroek market is quite large – imagine a Mega Mitre 10 size store – but it contains literally hundreds of small stalls. They sell most things you can think of, from handbags to toiletries, shoes to mangoes, pork to cellphones, jewellery to underwear…you get my drift. The other side of the coin is that there might be 15 vendors selling the exact same things. And then you go outside and the area covered by stalls and shops is about the same as that inside.
The music sellers are something else. A lot of them walk around with a large box on wheels – kind of like an icecream man, umbrella and all. The box has a large set of speakers – mostly 10 or 12 inch – and they are wound up loud with the particular music they are selling. It gets most weird when 3 or 4 of them converge on the same corner and there is a kind of informal play off. Eventually the loudest one gets to stay – at least I guess that’s the measure – and the others turn theirs down for a while and head for another spot. As best I can tell none of the music for sale is legal. Same goes for the dozens of DVD vendors – everything has been ripped. I was invited into one stall to have a look at a whole pile of ripped software. The funny thing was that the installation instructions came with a description of how to crack the software printed on the case. I guess it represents something of a dilemma for the various distributors – they could come in and clamp down, but no-one could afford to pay for the real thing so the clamp down would only last for as long as someone had sufficient enthusiasm, and it would only push the vendors off the street corners – they probably wouldn’t go far. So the distributors expend large amounts of effort for little if any real gain.
I stopped off and bought myself a mango smoothie at a fast food place – NZ just doesn’t do mango like its done here! Then I picked up my supplies and headed for home. When I got back Keith took me down to the National Art Museum. There are some wonderful sculptures – they had a large Amerindian display as part of Heritage Month but a lot of the paintings were, I thought, pretty average, artistic Neanderthal that I am. When you added to that the fact that much of the work was situated so that direct sunlight was shining on it for at least part of the day, and with the windows wide open they were being blown around, in some cases quite a lot, you have to wonder how long much of it will last. A pity. Still, I enjoyed the experience and for all that the artwork is not awe-inspiring it still gives some insights into the culture of the people who created it.
When we got back to the house I went down to the internet café and organised some of my emails. Came back for dinner, we talked for a while, and then I headed for bed – an early night – I was in bed by 10pm after having a cold shower. Actually cold is the only kind I can get here. Which is a little disconcerting until you realise that hot water would be a waste when what you really want to do is cool down anyway.
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