The mall as oasis

While living in the Mega-City one of the oases is the mall.

Malls have essentially taken the place of public parks. Many people come not so much to shop as to hang out in a cool place. The malls are particularly crowded on Sundays as people generally have the day off and like to go out as a family or with a group of friends. The bottom level of my favorite mall has a bumper car section which is usually open on Sundays and holidays with little kids screaming, squealing, and laughing as they bang around in the cars. Indulgent parents smiling from the outside of the ring seemingly oblivious to the sensory overload.

Malls in the first of my world sprawl horizontally, but here they soar vertically. My favorite mall is at least 8 stories high with an open center. Each floor is connected by slow-rise ramps making it like a corkscrew. It is possible to walk from the second floor all the way to the top without having to use the escalators. Of course it is faster to use the escalators but if you want a cool place for a walk this is ideal!

Several Sundays I met friends for lunch after church at the corkscrew mall. There are several restaurants and fast-food places all through the mall but on the very top floor is a food court with tables in the center and food stalls serving a wide variety of relatively inexpensive food ringing the outside. Several churches rent the auditoriums on the upper and bottom levels (as it can be extremely difficult to get building permits to build new churches). So many of those people also filled the eateries before or after their services. I did also shop a little as there were a couple of decent bookstores and a largish supermarket but I usually made sure I got a good walk in as well – up to the top and down twice!

Many if not all malls have a hotel and/or condominium tower connected to it. They tend to have a lot of higher end shops and boutiques but also an assortment of medium ranged goods and services and typically include a supermarket, pharmacies, hair salons, fitness centers, banks, and electronics. There are also seasonal "events" in the central area. These can be related to holidays, but can also include appearances of celebrities, promos, contests and the like. The picture at the right shows a cosmetics demo/promo taking place on the ground level.

There is another mall which is a bit closer to where I was staying, though harder to get to because it was located at the intersection of two major toll roads and was accessible only by crowded narrow service roads. That mall was fancier but I found the ambient quickly overwhelming. There are a lot of shiny surfaces, glass, mirrors, marble floors, and particularly harsh eye-hurting lights which had the impact on me of me wanting to get out of there as soon as possible. I mentioned it to the land lady  and she said she too felt the same way about that mall and so usually shopped at one further away.  I wonder if the mall owners have any idea.........

Choices, TV, Noisy houses and snow removal

Sometimes people ask what my impressions are of the first of my worlds after having been away for awhile. There are many but here are a few:

People seem to value lots of choices, unending choices in fact, at least over trivia. Coffee shops added another choice since my last visit: dark, medium or light roast. Even sandwich shops- you think you ordered a number 2 and solved all the choice issues? Oh no, you are still asked what kind of bread (6 choices) what kind of cheese? (4 choices) what do you want on it? (10 items to choose from, onions, olives, pickles, tomatoes, etc) What sauces? Mustard? What kind (3 choices of mustard). But not done yet, do you want it heated? Here or to go? Yikes!

Go down the cereal aisle in the grocery store or the soft drink aisle. Guess that says a lot about people's diets, huh? (Here it would be the powdered milk aisle or the junk food aisles.) It's not just food, there are endless cable TV channels, books, movies, magazines.

Some things, however, offer few choices such as the color of cars or the color of siding on new homes. Curiously clothing also offered few choices in style or even color. Example, women's winter tops were long sleeved but way too low in the neck. What's with that? This isn't Florida! And there were only certain colors available, didn't matter what store.

Yet other things offer no choices, such as political parties. The only thing different is the rhetoric. Actions and outcomes are the same.

Television? Unbelievable. Does anybody really watch it anymore??? News-tainment about the fallen hero of the day. And scaring people about the flu. Commercials? Lots of prescription drug ads, all of which have long lists of horrendous side effects including death and suicide.

Noisy houses. Furnaces, water heaters, sump pumps, blowers, beepers, buzzers, dingers, etc. My first nights back here– as I wake up at 2 and 3 am – by contrast were pretty quiet. The house was totally quiet other than my fan and out my open window all I could hear was the Swiss neighbor's cuckoo clock, a distant dog barking, a few leaves rustling in the breeze. That's it.

Snow removal is amazing. After the Christmas storm I saw thick ice on the highways mysteriously GONE overnight! I saw snowbanks being loaded up in trucks and carted away, and other snowbanks literally shoved back from the edge of the roads.

Nothing new in the public bathroom scene. It seems that everything that could be automated already has been. I did notice that in my home state 9/10 bathroom stalls had the TP very low down making it difficult for tall people to reach. Not so in other states. Maybe the state legislature was bored last summer???

On fragrant canals

Some things never change. Way back in 1971 John Perkins, the author of The Secret History Of The American Empire, went for his first stroll in the capital city of the second of my worlds. Here is his first impression:

...In an attempt to avoid being run over I nearly stepped into a gutter that was black as tar, littered with garbage, and reeking of urine.

The gutter drained down a steep incline to one of the many canals built by the Dutch during the colonial era. Now stagnant, its surface was covered with a green and putrid-looking scum; the stench that arose from it was nearly intolerable. It seemed preposterous that the inventive people who had turned the sea into farmland had attempted to recreate Amsterdam amid this tropical heat. The canal, like the gutter that fed it, overflowed with debris. I could even distinguish the two by their distinctive stenches. The gutter had an immediacy about its odor, rotting fruit and urine, while the canal carried a darker, longer-term pungency, the mixture of human excrement and decay.

I continued along, dodging the bicycle cabs that hugged the sides of the road. Beyond them, in the mainstream of the thoroughfare, was a frenzy of automobile and motorbike traffic; the sound of honking horns, backfiring engines, and muffler-deprived cars was overwhelming, as was the acrid stench of oil on hot pavement and gas fumes in the humid air. The weight of all this began to impact me physically.

Well said. He could write the exact same thing today in 2009.

Tales from Dubai

The other day Connie stopped by having recently returned from 4 years working overseas as a maid. She looked healthy, maybe a little bit fatter even. She regaled us with tales from her job as a domestic helper in Dubai for a family with 5 children. She said she had a good family and mostly enjoyed her time there. She said the bad thing was that her actual pay was only half of what the contract she had signed said. That was very disappointing, especially as her own family back home had many needs - her own daughter's schooling plus the higher education of her siblings. She said the lady she worked for wanted her to come back and was willing to increase her salary but Connie's husband wasn't so keen on her going back after hearing some of her tales. So she is now applying to go to Hong Kong as a domestic helper and she hopes the pay will be better.

Connie said the house was huge, nearly a hectare in size and entirely air conditioned. Her jobs were varied but because of her English speaking ability, she was the one who interfaced with the childrens' teachers at the international school they attended. The older girls also had tutors at home but if the tutor was a man, then Connie's job was to chaperon them.

She said that when the family had parties it was exhausting. Men and women met in different parts of the house. The hired help would spend all day cooking and then would serve the men first, then the women. After the party was the long clean up. She said they were supposed to have one day off a week on Fridays but often it didn't happen because the family would entertain and all hands were needed.

Whenever men were around they were supposed to cover not only their hair but also their faces. Early on she found the husband peeking at her through a window when her hair was uncovered from just being washed. She angrily confronted him and told him she was a married woman and if she ever caught him doing that again she would punch him in the face. She also informed the wife that she was a Christian and Christians were only allowed one spouse and that if she was unfaithful to her husband or if her husband was unfaithful to her then they would be breaking the law and would be jailed. That seemd to go a long way in mollifying the wife and in time Connie became her favorite.

Connie said there were several employees in that household from different countries. Her least favorite was the Indian driver who seemed to have only one thing in his mind. (Pornography may be forbidden but talk isn't.) She avoided him as much as possible. In fact she was often the one sent to take him his food because the lady of the house observed that Connie took his food and came back promptly, she didn't hang around and chat while he ate.

Phone calls were also monitered. The Mrs. seemed especially concerned that no sexual hanky panky was going on. Connie said that even when trying to call her mother back home the Mrs would be hovering in the background wanting to know if she was talking to a man.

Connie said many of her fellow employees were one-task only. Like the Indian driver who wouldn't do anything but drive. Connie became the household "electrician" because nobody else could or would do it. Whenever the circuit breaker got overloaded, she is the one that climbed up all the steps to the top of the house in the heat and flipped the switch. She said it was murderously hot most of the year and only in December and January was it really cool.

Connie is just one of hundreds of thousands who work overseas to send back money to their families (and to their government) . They are this country's largest export. But it is not yet known the impact that this is having on their children. Another friend is due back any day now, returning to her husband and two children after working for two years as a maid in Hong Kong.