I am a creature of habit. Always have been. I will find a routine that is comfortable to me, and then I will repeat the same routine pretty much every day (if left to myself) until some catastrophe strikes--getting married, for instance, or getting divorced, or getting ill, or having to move, and so on--at which point the old routine will go into the dustbin of history and a new one will eventually take its place. It must be this reliable predictability that throws people a jarring curve when I suddenly do something outside my nature, like move to the other side of the world, for example.
In staying with my baseline character, I always take the same route on my morning walk and much the same route on my evening walk (in as far as I choose to walk on the beach in the evening, although the particular beach may change, within a range of a couple miles, anyway).
But I had one of those 'let's do something new' moments yesterday evening and decided to walk not on the beach, but in a different part of my neighborhood. In short, I turned left instead of right, and went up instead of down to the next street.
And my goodness, the things you don't see when you take the same route every day!
The surprising thing about this alternate route, one street north of my house rather than one street south, is that you find yourself walking through areas that are as different as day and night. Who knew?
The street to the north is a very thin one, yet a very heavily traveled one, making walking at the edge (there is no sidewalk) a bit of a sketchy idea. Motorbikes blast by close enough to where you can feel a gust of wind on your cheek, and when a car comes, you have to just damn well move! The farther you travel, however, the lighter the traffic becomes, ultimately trickling away like water in a spent streambed.
Little businesses and homes and apartments are crowded onto both sides of the street--laundries and warungs and little shops and little food stands--and as the traffic thins, the ambulating people thicken--children and parents and aunts and uncles and grammas and grampas and, of course, dogs (although how the latter have managed to survive this street, I do not know).
Upon turning back toward home, I managed to take the wrong street, finding myself in a maze of gravel roads and alleys leading first this way, then that, and it becomes clear that this is a very poor neighborhood indeed--again, like night and day next to the route through my rather well off neighborhood just one street away. The homes and small apartments are in a general state of dissolution, a few having fallen down altogether. Moreover, in my own neighborhood, one will see only a handful of people on the usual walking route, while here the streets are full of children running about and adults sitting outside their humble dwellings, shootin' da breeze.
A certain group of children, playing a running game of badminton, decide to tag along with me, singing "Hello, hello, hello!", this being apparently the only English word they know, although it is rather like the Indonesian 'Halo' (pronounced hollow).
I ask whether I can join their game for a minute, to which they gleefully agree.
"I used to play badminton in college," I tell them, a fun fact which fails to significantly impress. Less impressive yet is my attempt to serve the birdie, wherein the racket has completely missed its target. Eye-hand coordination suffers with age, I guess. So much for badminton.
Leaving the children, I come upon a little roadside conference between two older men and two older women (though none is quite so old as I). "Hello! Hello!" they sing.
And so we hobnob a little bit, and then I'm on my way again, pretending that I know exactly where I am and where I am going. I do know where I'm going--home. I'm just not sure at this point where it's at.
As it turns out, I get fed back onto the main street from which I had come--the thin, traffic-filled street--and so retrace the original route back home, and find the big fat brown dog with her nose out of joint for getting left behind--but that's all for the best, because I'm afraid that little street with its rushing traffic would have spelled the end for her.
In staying with my baseline character, I always take the same route on my morning walk and much the same route on my evening walk (in as far as I choose to walk on the beach in the evening, although the particular beach may change, within a range of a couple miles, anyway).
But I had one of those 'let's do something new' moments yesterday evening and decided to walk not on the beach, but in a different part of my neighborhood. In short, I turned left instead of right, and went up instead of down to the next street.
And my goodness, the things you don't see when you take the same route every day!
The surprising thing about this alternate route, one street north of my house rather than one street south, is that you find yourself walking through areas that are as different as day and night. Who knew?
The street to the north is a very thin one, yet a very heavily traveled one, making walking at the edge (there is no sidewalk) a bit of a sketchy idea. Motorbikes blast by close enough to where you can feel a gust of wind on your cheek, and when a car comes, you have to just damn well move! The farther you travel, however, the lighter the traffic becomes, ultimately trickling away like water in a spent streambed.
Little businesses and homes and apartments are crowded onto both sides of the street--laundries and warungs and little shops and little food stands--and as the traffic thins, the ambulating people thicken--children and parents and aunts and uncles and grammas and grampas and, of course, dogs (although how the latter have managed to survive this street, I do not know).
Upon turning back toward home, I managed to take the wrong street, finding myself in a maze of gravel roads and alleys leading first this way, then that, and it becomes clear that this is a very poor neighborhood indeed--again, like night and day next to the route through my rather well off neighborhood just one street away. The homes and small apartments are in a general state of dissolution, a few having fallen down altogether. Moreover, in my own neighborhood, one will see only a handful of people on the usual walking route, while here the streets are full of children running about and adults sitting outside their humble dwellings, shootin' da breeze.
A certain group of children, playing a running game of badminton, decide to tag along with me, singing "Hello, hello, hello!", this being apparently the only English word they know, although it is rather like the Indonesian 'Halo' (pronounced hollow).
I ask whether I can join their game for a minute, to which they gleefully agree.
"I used to play badminton in college," I tell them, a fun fact which fails to significantly impress. Less impressive yet is my attempt to serve the birdie, wherein the racket has completely missed its target. Eye-hand coordination suffers with age, I guess. So much for badminton.
Leaving the children, I come upon a little roadside conference between two older men and two older women (though none is quite so old as I). "Hello! Hello!" they sing.
And so we hobnob a little bit, and then I'm on my way again, pretending that I know exactly where I am and where I am going. I do know where I'm going--home. I'm just not sure at this point where it's at.
As it turns out, I get fed back onto the main street from which I had come--the thin, traffic-filled street--and so retrace the original route back home, and find the big fat brown dog with her nose out of joint for getting left behind--but that's all for the best, because I'm afraid that little street with its rushing traffic would have spelled the end for her.
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