left in the dust...
Getting around here is a bit of an adventure.
Most roads aren’t paved, and you spend a good amount of your day walking up and down hills. This place is an off-roader’s dream land, and the easily nauseated's nightmare. Everybody owns a 4x4, and yesterday i was put in the back of a pickup and driven on a very bumpy road on my way back from the Village (more on that later). This Umuzungu provided quite some entertainment...
Buses mostly go on the main, paved roads. But to get anywhere off these, it’s much easier to take the “motos” (motorcycle taxis) and they’re very cheap (about 40 cents to get to work).
The road to my office is a fairly long trek uphill, on a bumpy dirt road. Sometimes, when I have energy, I’ll get off at the bottom and climb the hill. But as most of you've probably guessed this rarely happens and I just take a moto all the way through.
I like to think of riding the motos as a work-out in itself. As I carry a ton of bricks (my laptop) on my back and lean back to hold on to the handle behind me, my abs get an amazing workout.
The downs: You get terrible dusty and showering in the mornings is increasingly sounding like a stupid idea. If it’s not the dust from the dirt road, you’re stuck behind a giant truck’s exhaust pipe and breathing it all in. This morning I put on some lip gloss. By the time I reached the office, my lips felt gross - So I wiped it off with a cloth and saw that the once clear gloss was now black and brown.
So: Never again will I complain about the Jerusalem municipality’s racism for not paving our roads in East Jerusalem. The dirt-road by my house in Beit Hanina seems to me like a freeway in hindsight.
Speaking of which – motos would never work as a popular form of transport in the Middle East, which is a shame because they do have their benefits. But straddling a strange man from behind and squeezing your legs to tell him to stop when you’ve reached Kalandya checkpoint wouldn’t be too Halal.
Most roads aren’t paved, and you spend a good amount of your day walking up and down hills. This place is an off-roader’s dream land, and the easily nauseated's nightmare. Everybody owns a 4x4, and yesterday i was put in the back of a pickup and driven on a very bumpy road on my way back from the Village (more on that later). This Umuzungu provided quite some entertainment...
Buses mostly go on the main, paved roads. But to get anywhere off these, it’s much easier to take the “motos” (motorcycle taxis) and they’re very cheap (about 40 cents to get to work).
The road to my office is a fairly long trek uphill, on a bumpy dirt road. Sometimes, when I have energy, I’ll get off at the bottom and climb the hill. But as most of you've probably guessed this rarely happens and I just take a moto all the way through.
I like to think of riding the motos as a work-out in itself. As I carry a ton of bricks (my laptop) on my back and lean back to hold on to the handle behind me, my abs get an amazing workout.
The downs: You get terrible dusty and showering in the mornings is increasingly sounding like a stupid idea. If it’s not the dust from the dirt road, you’re stuck behind a giant truck’s exhaust pipe and breathing it all in. This morning I put on some lip gloss. By the time I reached the office, my lips felt gross - So I wiped it off with a cloth and saw that the once clear gloss was now black and brown.
So: Never again will I complain about the Jerusalem municipality’s racism for not paving our roads in East Jerusalem. The dirt-road by my house in Beit Hanina seems to me like a freeway in hindsight.
Speaking of which – motos would never work as a popular form of transport in the Middle East, which is a shame because they do have their benefits. But straddling a strange man from behind and squeezing your legs to tell him to stop when you’ve reached Kalandya checkpoint wouldn’t be too Halal.
posted by Diala at 12:35 PM
1 Comments:
"straddling a strange man from behind and squeezing your legs to tell him to stop when you’ve reached Kalandya checkpoint wouldn’t be too Halal."
Bravo! you should really start a carreer as a columnist!
Keep on writing !
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