I think suburban perfection is boring. I like big wild cities like New York or tame and conscious cities like Portland, OR. I also love the country side, be it the mountains, the desert, the rainforest, you know. It's all so much more real than Suburbia.
I have some photos posted on www.flickr.com/photos/guneeta . One of these days I will also update this ( WwW.phys.ufl.edu/~Guneeta )page and then you can look at more pictures and such.
I think it is amazing that such places still exist: Sentinelese in Andaman and are wild enough for something like this to happen.
Not much else to say right now, but here's a story. One of the few defining moments of my life:
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Kelley didn't feel the weight of the silence like I did and so she had no problem breaking it. Having been here for two years, she was accustomed to being in the spotlight. She turned and asked the old man where he was going.
He was wearing a rather messy, white head wrap. Behind him, the landscape streaming past the window grew more surreal as we got deeper in the desert. No dunes yet, but less bush and more sand. We were all most likely headed to the same nearly-monthly market in Tanout riding this mass transport vehicle ("auto" as they called it here) that was once a station-wagon most likely last seen in an American junkyard. It was converted efficiently so that nearly 15 of us crammed into the wagon with seats lining the perimeter and they still managed to squeeze in two rows behind the driver. The road dead-ended at Tanout giving way to hundreds of miles of open dunes.
The old man replied and then asked where our village was. It went something like this:
Is it over the river?
Yes. past the river,Kelley informed him pointing west.
what's it called
America
i don't know that one
Kelley explained that our village was definitely over the river and past all the villages that he knew about and then past another very big river (the Atlantic) since they have no word for "ocean".
oh! He appeared to be in partial disbelief but there was no denying the evidence in front of him. It must have taken you ages to get here. Did you take a big boat
No, we flew.
like a bird..?
..In an airplane, she said pointing up. People here had definitely seen those flying over them.
all the way up there? he shouted stabbing the roof with his index finger. His eyes had grown pretty huge. He let out a puff of air and turned away. We didn't exchange anymore glances for the rest of the ride. He was bewildered just as I was bewildered by the fact that the market we were about to go didn't operate on currency but rather was a goods exchange.
And the market, it turned out to be quite the spectacular site. A tiny dot in an endless desert. The sand stretched out to the horizon drawing a big circle around us. Tribal people from all over the place congragated here to trade their goods. A red sunset and long shadows on the sand only added to the upside down vibe of this place.
I had been here for nearly three weeks and yet nothing about this place felt real. I am sure that nothing about me felt real to them. That old man was seated to the left of us and had made no effort in hiding his curiosity. He had been blatantly staring at us and that too with a rather piercing look. It is not to say we didn't stick out like sore thumbs. Most of the others, like me, were trying to be covert about their curiosity. The old man wasn't to blame, on occassion I too caught myself staring at the other-worldly characters that surrounded me. The children were never shy about their throughts. Most, perched on their parents' laps, gawked at us somewhat fearfully for the duration of the ride. They were worse in town where some would poke us with sticks, which I was later informed was a test to see if we were "real".
Apparently, Niger ranks amoung the two poorest countries in the world when measured using the GNP as an index. But.. I've never seen so many genuine smiles in one place. People just seem so much happier. Why do we measure everything in dollars?
