Odds and Ends 5
Saturday, February 16th, 2008I was browsing through some old files and realized that I wrote quite a few notes from various parts of the world for my O & E section that were never posted. So, consider this an O & E “international edition.” (Notes from Italy are coming soon.)
• In Hyderabad, India, there appears to be a trend of photographing your baby/toddler in a variety of costumes, such as a doctor, a god(dess), a policeman, or even (my favorite) Gandhi. Some people put all of the images together to create giant posters to hang in their homes. Very, very funny.
• I passed by a kindergarten in Kenya that had painted the alphabet, and images that corresponded with each letter, on its exterior walls. What image do you think they used for the letter “G”? A giraffe? Nope. They used a gun.
• While a friend and I lounged on a beach in Lamu, a Kenyan man told us a nice story about the baobab trees that can be found around the country. One legend says when a god gave each animal a tree or bush to plant into the ground, the hyena planted the baobab tree upside down (which is why its branches appear to be roots). When the hyena realized his mistake, he began laughing and continues to laugh to this day.
• A friend I traveled with in Tanzania had a Swahili phrasebook that provided sentences for interactions with market vendors, waiters, taxi drivers, and so on. One of the sections was for sexual interactions. Phrases that you could murmur to your Swahili lover whilst in the throes of passion included “Easy lion!” and “It helps if you have a sense of humor about it.”
• In Kigali, Rwanda, you can make a “cell phone call” by stopping one of the young men and women wandering the streets with full-sized desk phones that are somehow wired to the mobile network.
• Pigeon is a popular dish in Egypt. I consider myself an adventurous eater, but I couldn’t bring myself to try pigeon, a bird that I believe is popularly known in the US as a “sewer rat with wings.” I am also amused (and a little disgusted) by the similarity between the Arabic words for “pigeon” (hamam) and “toilet” (hammam). Coincidence? Probably not.
• Cairenes have an awesome(ly scary) way of asking for directions: rather than safely pulling over and directing their question to one of the thousand pedestrians on the street, they will drive alongside another car and, as the two vehicles weave unsteadily down the road, converse with the other driver for a minute or two.
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