On Target

I woke up- and I am still here. Yesterday, after eating at a Pizza Hut (not my choice). Backup- pepperoni has been banned by the government here, and most of the pizzas had chicken. The entire place reeked of curry and India spices. India pop music was playing on the speakers, and the TVs showed American professional wrestling. The Pizza Hut logo was the only thing this restaurant shared in common with its American cousins. Actually, I hate Pizza Hut- they are the McDonalds of pizza-- but I despise all pizza chains. I despise it so much that we we went to the hotel for dinner later that night, I ordered a real pizza. BTW- I am not staying at a hotel, but hotels offer safe food, and they are cheap by US standards, and dirty cheap by Norwegian standards. A decent restaurant meal in Norway can easily set you back by over $100us for a couple- if not per person. Most of your business meals are more like $150 per person. Here we pay closer to $30 for what is a fine dining experience most other places.

Anyway, the logistics are that I am staying upstairs abover our office. It is like having two hotel rooms. Each has a very large bedroom and a private bath- and AC- which is great as long as the power works. I feel like a prisoner here. All the windows in the house have frosted glass, so I cannot see out. There are bars over the windows, and no screens. I do not want to open them and let malaria infected mosquitos in. Our compound has high walls, gates, and a guard. I have been rather inactive, so I thought I would go for a walk. About two blocks away I realized how ridiculous this was. The sidewalk didn't exist. Cars, scooters, rickshaws, motorcycles, and bikes were passing within inches of me. It was a stressful few blocks before I turned around and headed home. It is impossible to cross the streets. There are no stop signs or traffic signals around here. At the major roads, they turn them off at night.

To give you some perspective, according to wiki, there are over 20,000 people per square kilometer here. I don't know how many that is per square mile- but it is a lot! There are literally people everywhere. There is also a strange class of technological eras. I see women holding huge objects on their heads, people pushing or pulling huge wagons, ox carts, flat bed trucks packed with maybe 100 people- all standing and holding on to the roof, buses leaning to one side as people are hanging on the outside, trucks packed sky high with strange goods. I have seen strange open warehouses packed to the roof with giant bags of rice. They appear to have no doors, so they are guarded constantly. With this amount of people, everything has guards.

As we were eating last night, and I contemplated the huge buffet that was set up, I thought about all the people sleeping outside the hotel. There are no buffer zones between neighborhoods. The buffer zones end up being a series of walls, gates, and guards. Many of these walls have broken glass imbedded in the concrete to discourage people from climbing them. Some have razor wire. Many of the walls are very oddly textured to discourage the "posting of bills"- which generall occurs everywhere. Walls are everywhere here. There are no parks, no green zones, no buffers. The river looks more like a cess pool than a recreational area. Today we will escape the city and head along the coast. I look forward to making a brief prison break.