Bumbling Tourists April 17, 2010

So often, in tense cross-cultural situations, I try to remember that they are almost always based in misunderstanding. Something may seem frustrating and ridiculous to me, but so often it seems that way because I’m missing a critical piece of information. I’m missing language, tone, or something else entirely that is resulting in anger and frustration all around. Case in point:

Kelly was headed out of the country back to the US on the same day that Matt and I were headed to Phnom Penh. This was handy, because it allowed us to take a taxi to the airport together, rather than catching a shuttle. Kelly felt better heading to the airport with us. I felt better about not riding in an unknown shuttle. Matt was just fine with whatever plan we worked out.

Being the Thailand-travel savvy person that I am, I have a bias against waiting taxis. In my experience, the waiting taxis hanging out around touristy areas exist to rip-off tourists who don’t know any better. Flagging down a moving cab is much more likely to result in finding a fair, metered ride. So when we headed out from our hotel at 4 am to catch a ride to the airport, I scanned the road for moving cabs, ignoring the crowd of cab drivers who were poised at the mouth of our guest house alley.

“There’s one!” said Matt.

He was correct, in that the taxi was moving. But I had just seen it take off from down the road. I was wary. Still, I was ready to be in a cab and on our way, so I opened the door of the cab and asked, “meter?”

“Where you going? Name a price,” the driver replied.

“No.” I said, shutting the door of the cab, and turning to walk away. When a driver has a fair, standard way to charge you that he chooses not to employ, you had better believe he’s doing it for a reason. The reason being that he can rip you off. I don’t deal with fixed price cabs.

“Okay! Okay!” he shouted after me, pushing the door open again.

We piled our things into the trunk and settled in for the hour long ride. And then Matt glanced at the gas gauge, which was hovering just below empty. The gas light was lit. Oh dear.

“You need gas?” Matt asked, pointing to the gauge.

“Yes, yes,” said the driver smiling.

“You’re going to stop at a gas station?” Matt pressed, frowning. The driver nodded a bit, and then continued to drive.

Five minutes later, I looked at Matt nervously. We had not yet stopped, and we were just about to head out of the city, making finding another cab difficult if we ran into trouble. I pointed to the  gas gauge again, and said, “We need gas.” He nodded, pointing to the gauge. “Yes,” he said.

I watched Kelly’s eyes turn worried. Matt looked at me. We were stopped at a red light. I looked back and saw an unoccupied taxi behind us. “I think we should pay and get out,” I said. Matt and Kelly quickly nodded in agreement. Matt dug through his pocket for the amount on the meter. I tapped on the trunk, as Matt and Kelly asked him to open it. I flagged the cab driver behind us.

Small problem, the cab driver refused to open the trunk. We started out one at a time, asking him to please open the trunk. He gestured to the gas gauge, and said, “No.” Our chorus grew louder, until we shouted in angry unison, “Open the trunk!”

“We’re going to call the police,” said Kelly, and Matt started to pull out his phone. The trunk popped open. We grabbed our luggage and scuttled quickly to the waiting cab, all three of us shaking. The new driver quickly flipped on the meter, and we settled in for the ride, coursing with adrenaline. Matt and Kelly equally conceded that my gut feeling had been correct. I hadn’t felt good about that driver. I told Kelly that perhaps her initial instinct was right, we should’ve taken the shuttle. We all felt very unified by our Bangkok Taxi Driver Bad Experience: Take 2.

Cut to three days later. Matt and I are in a restaurant in Cambodia, recalling the incident over a french dinner in a cute little cafe.

“Wow, that was…” Matt said shaking his head, recalling the moment of our escape.

“Ya, I know,” I said, “I mean, I think we were generally safe. I’m thinking maybe he would have taken us out to a more remote gas station and made us pay for the gas or something. ”

“Ya, probably. One thing I just can’t figure out, he kept pointing to the right side of the dashboard…oh…my…gosh…” Matt trailed off, his eyes widening in a moment of clarity. “It was natural gas.”

“What? What does that have to do with anything.” I asked.

“The taxi…it ran on natural gas. I saw the fuel tank in the trunk…oh..” Matt said, shaking his head, “He was pointing to the side because there was a separate meter. He was trying to tell us that he had plenty of gas.”

“Oh. Oh no…” I breathed out, as I replayed the moment in my head. The indignation. The righteous anger. “Bummer.”

We continued to shake our heads for awhile. To be fair, our defenses were raised by his first refusal to use the meter. And our defenses were further raised by the language confusion surrounding the gas meter. But still, I think about the confusion that the driver must have felt. The frustration at losing a lucrative business deal for no apparent reason. And I wince still.

How many times must it happen? Someone thinks they have been ripped off, taken advantage of, cheated. When really, they are just thoroughly confused. The other  day, I read rant on a Chinese hotel review website from a woman who was convinced that people at the front desk were pretending not to speak English when she wanted to hire a taxi not associated with the hotel. Her complaints piled up one after the other. She hated the reserved room she was shown and then they “conveniently” showed her a different more expensive room, which was “worse than the first.”

Coming off of my own bumbling tourist trip up, I read that review with different eyes. Maybe she was getting ripped off. That’s pretty much standard dues for budget travel in Asia. But I’m willing to bet that at least some part of it was the same old language/cultural misunderstandings that caused me to shout at a taxi driver who was just trying to give us a ride to the airport.

Kittens in Cambodia April 11, 2010

We’re in Cambodia now, safe from the red shirt protests. We spent the day touring the killing fields and interrogation prison of the Khmer Rouge era. So…not the most uplifting day.

Cambodia can be draining. I remembered it being draining last time I visited, at least in Phnom Penh, so I tried to develop a general emotional strategy for this time. I keep telling myself that this poverty, these children pleading for money on the streets, it all exists all the time, regardless of where I am. I am just as responsible to this suffering at home as I am right here and right now. I need to take the actions that I would take in any normal circumstance, and then I need to let it go and have joy at this incredible experience that I get to have. We’ll donate to an organization, we’ll treat people kindly, and we’ll pass out spiderman and hello kitty stickers to the kids on the street. And we’ll let it go. Or try to.

Last night we ate dinner at a little sidewalk café overlooking the Tonle Sap River. We watched the motorbikes pass, crammed with bags of rice, or blocks of ice, or maybe just an extra passenger or five. We watched tuk tuks filled with white tourists clutching copies of Lonely Planet as they scanned the storefronts for their destination. There were Lexuses (Lexi?) filled with wealthy Khmers headed to night clubs, bicycles teetering with fruit for the market, and motos driven by teenagers who were texting when they should’ve been watching the road (a new cultural universal).

We also watched a little girl down on the sidewalk in front of us, not more than six. Her pink shorts and mickey mouse shirt were scruffy and coated with dust. She sat stretched out on a beat up lounge chair, tapping away on an old nokia cell phone. I think she was playing snake. A tiny kitten was curled in her lap. The kitten looked like it hadn’t seen much food in its short life. It pawed at the girl’s stomach. She picked it up roughly, held it tightly to her shoulder, and patted its tiny kitten bottom. Then she flipped it over and cradled it like a baby. She pulled at the kitten’s paws, then wrapped her hands around its mouth briefly suffocating it. I expected the kitten to protest eventually. It didn’t. She would slap it—hard, then gently kiss its head. She bit its paws, and then left it for a bit to play on the cell phone. It slept curled in her lap every moment that she wasn’t flicking its ears or pulling on its legs. It was alternately adorable, horrifying, and fascinating to watch.

The girl was sitting at a book stand, and we soon realized, was the sole book seller. Her parents were nowhere to be seen. Eventually they did return briefly, at separate points. Her mother brought her a bowl of soup. Her father and brother stopped in to chat for a moment and play with the kitten, each of them carrying their own basket of books to hawk to tourists. The little girl picked up the kitten by one leg and let it dangle for a moment. Her dad saw her and grabbed the kitten, showing her how to hold it by the scruff of the neck. He handed the kitten back and walked away. She grabbed the kitten again by one leg, and hoisted him onto the table full of books.

That’s the thing about Cambodia, and so many foreign places really, it’s so hard to know what you are actually seeing. Am I watching a little girl who is copying the abuse that has been done to her? Or just seeing a little girl playing roughly with a kitten? Is that lovely, young Cambodian woman eating dinner with that old, white man because she enjoys his company or because… It’s so easy to make up stories in my head. To look at every snippet of life that I see and assign it to right or wrong. But I don’t know the story. For right now, I have to just keep letting it go.

Tigers and Trains April 8, 2010

The other day, we played with baby tigers. Anyone who knows me will recognize my expression in the picture below–unbridled joy reserved for up close contact with baby animals. The more exotic the better. The tigers live at a place called Tiger Kingdom, close to an elephant camp and about a dozen other tourist attractions. Considering the sad chains and sharp training sticks present at even the best run elephant camp, I was a little nervous about the state of the animals at a tourist attraction that allowed people to pet full grown tigers. Still, on the website it stressed that no tranquilization was used, and the animals were treated well.

The website seemed to prove true. The grounds were lovely, the animal enclosures were very green and relatively large.  We only hung out with the baby, baby tigers because we are wimps, but the trainers were very gentle with them. They hold a little stick that they tap on the ground when the tigers misbehave. When a little guy nibbled my finger, the trainer tapped his nose softly.

The cuteness:

BABY tiger.

The next day, we went on a zip line course through the treetops outside Chiang Mai. Incredible, and so fun. The group behind us included one guy who chose to scream like a wild banshee on every jump. I think he was trying to entertain the rest of his group. Get it? High pitched screaming is internationally hilarious, right? I’d share more, but I’m guessing it’s more fun to go on a rainforest zip line adventure than it is to read about a rainforest zip line adventure, so I’ll leave it at that.

The train ride back to Bangkok was uneventful–until the train stopped about an hour outside the city. I figured it was just another stop, until we failed to start again. Eventually, one of the train workers told Kelly that we had to get off the train and go to another train on the next track over. We were on a sleeper train, and the train he pointed to was a much more crowded 3^rd class train. “Move quickly,” Kelly said, wheeling her suitcase down the aisle. I grabbed my things and hurried to the next train, figuring the train had broken down.

After we’d settled into our seats, Kelly leaned in towards us. “Someone died in our train car,” she said. The train worker had told her. That’s why the train was stopped. I’m realizing as I write that I have no way to transition away from “and then we realized that someone had died in his sleep mere feet from us.”

So that was strange.

Here’s a picture of Matt drinking like five different things at breakfast:

Papers April 6, 2010

Two nights ago, Kelly, Matt and I took an overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. We were feeling pretty self-congratulatory during the day that we’d brushed off the jet lag. We’d all slept on the plane for several hours, and then at the hotel for another few hours. Still, by the time we reached the train station at 7 pm, we were each walking in a haze of drowsiness. Kelly drifted in and out of sleep on a hard plastic chair in the train station. Once on the train, she curled up in her seat and immediately fell back asleep.

A girl from Holland was her seat mate. Since Kelly wasn’t talking, she turned to us to chat. We talked for an hour or so about life and politics. She was 22, graduated, and exploring the world for a year on her own. We asked if it was lonely, and she said she’d picked up friends along the way until this leg of the trip. She’d just arrived in Thailand. “To be honest, yesterday was my first day alone,” she said. She sounded confident, but her eyes showed a little flicker of fear. Traveling alone in the US when you are  fluent in English is one thing, traveling alone in Thailand is another. It’s very safe, and relatively easy to get around. Still, when you get off a train and twenty tuk-tuk drivers are crowding your personal space, begging to drive you to the next guest house, it’s nice to take it as a team.

The train worker set up our sleeping bunks, and Matt and I settled in to watch a movie. The girl from Holland rustled through her bag. “I can’t find my ticket,” she said as she began to dig through her wallet. “Oh no, bummer,” we murmured sympathetically. I watched her a bit longer, unsure what to do. “I just had it,” she said, her voice cracking a bit, “it was right here. I showed it to the man before I got on the train.” Her face started to look a bit sick with worry as she searched the ground. “Maybe it fell under the seat when they made your bed,” Matt offered. “I already checked under the mattress, and behind the seat,” she said.

I know that sinking feeling. You know it will be alright eventually, but at that moment, all you can think of is being deposited at the next stop at 11 pm with no way to find a guest house. You know that you don’t have the words to speak your case, to tell them why you don’t have the ticket that you need to be on this train. I’ve never lost  a ticket, but I’ve had my moments of panic, when the train, or plane, or bus ticket seems lost. In those moments, you just want someone in it with you, someone you can make it okay.

I watched her, helpless, unsure what to do. I was pretty sure they would just have her pay for a new ticket, perhaps let it slide, but you can never really know until you ask. In travel, it feels so frightening that little slips of paper hold so
much weight. Eventually, after giving up the hunt for the lost ticket, she did ask. The man she talked to just told her to go to sleep, told her that it would be alright. I sighed in relief on her behalf, and checked my bag again for our tickets. And passports. And future hotel reservations.

I thought about foreigners, and what it feels like to be one. I hope that I will always help.

When Money Doesn’t Matter–or When It Does April 3, 2010

We are here and safe. Coming off of 6 hours of sleep, some pad thai, and a thai tea, I’m feeling much better about life. I was shocked by the smooth travel–no delayed flights or visa confusion upon arrival. All of our bags arrived. We easily waved off overpriced hired cars and headed straight for the public taxi stand.

Our 3am taxi driver from the airport seemed proficient until we hit the long, smooth freeway into the city. We were quiet in the car, tired and ready to reach the hotel. Then I felt the car swerve a bit. I glanced at our driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He was falling asleep. I said “hey!” and then poked matt to tell him to wake up. He kept drifting, as the three of us kept glancing at each other in fear. Then Kelly started speaking to me loudly in Spanish. We were pretty sure the driver didn’t speak english, but it felt better to speak in a language we were sure he didn’t understand. The voices kept him awake well enough. I poked his should and said “don’t sleep” a few times. He rolled down the window. I told him to turn on the radio. Matt started clapping along to the tune. He started dancing a bit. We eventually made it to the hotel, each of us shaking. Really, once he got off the freeway he was fine and awake, but our lack of an exit strategy was terrifying.

The first hotel that I had tried to reserve through email was full. Thankfully Bangkok never sleeps, so we were able to walk to another guest house. Guest house number two was recommended by Lonely Planet…we thought. Turns out there is a significant difference between Merry V Guest House and NEW Merry V Guest House. A difference that involves the presence of sheets in the rooms, and private bathrooms. When you need a flashlight to find your room, you know it’s time to pick a new hotel. So we did.

We walked up to the desk of the new hotel. “It will be 1800 baht…” she said. “Fine! Perfect!” I said. “…but I can give you a  discount to 1500…” My bargaining skills were turned off. I’m glad she had pity on me. Not that we cared at that point. The previous hotel had been 200 a room (<$10). But at 3:30 am, $42 for a clean bed and a shower sounded like a fabulous deal.

We’re regaining our traveling legs. We’ve managed to purchase tickets for the train tonight. Purchase food. Call taxis. I forget how hard it is not to be understood. I keep trying to speak in Spanish, my default foreign language, much to Matt and Kelly’s amusement.

Adios!

ps-Last night on the street I saw a kitten and a rat. They were the same size. Kelly validates this story.

Fruit Trees January 5, 2010

Who, I always wonder when I go on runs, would be the type of neighbors who would mind if I relieved them of a bit of the fruit hanging from their trees. Between the overladen persimmon, orange, tangerine, fig, grapefruit and lemon trees all within a three block radius of our apartment, we could nearly knock out our weekly fruit budget. Considering we go through 5 lbs of oranges a week, stealing fruit from the neighbors would almost be like getting paid to run.

I tend to think that the houses with couches on the porch and peeling paint jobs, clearly inhabited by college students, wouldn’t even notice if I stole their fruit. Bob Marley curtains should be license to rescue those persimmons before they all fall to the ground and rot. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between college student house run down, and elderly person house run down. Maybe all those lemons really belong to a grandmother, who looks out her window all day long, wishing she still had the strength and agility to pick her lemons and turn them into curd or lemonade. Or the money to pay someone to fix her broken porch swing. I can’t pillage in the yards of the invalid.

And the well-kept homes are just as hard to distinguish. Is it well-kept rich and snooty who aren’t ever going to actually eat the fruit of their tree, but don’t want you touching it either? Or well-kept because they love their neighbors and want them to have fruit?

I tend to believe that houses with lots of Christmas decorations want their fruit stolen. Because people who have lots of Christmas decorations must like their neighbors, or else why would they pay ridiculous electricity bills for all of November and December? Unless they are just showing off, in which case, they are just asking to have their grapefruits taken away. Nobody likes a show off.

Also, that one house with the tie dye sarong hanging in the front window and the Volkswagon with the “Marriage=Love” bumper sticker parked out front? They are clearly hippies and want to give me their fruit. Too bad they don’t have any good trees out front. What kind of hippies don’t grow fruit? Hippie fail.

So far, I leave the fruit alone because I’m too chicken to steal, or ask nicely. The only citrus theft I engage in is pulling down the lemons off the tree that hangs over from the neighboring apartment complex. Actually, I mostly leave that work to the seven year old downstairs, who gets the lemons down either by throwing rocks at the tree or climbing the fence, because they are always far higher than he could ever manage on a chair. I don’t worry about it, I just thank him for the sad little green fruits that he delivers to the doorstep.

Off By a Couple Thousand Miles June 3, 2009

One of my friends here works in a call center. A lot of the students we know do as well. It’s a stressful job. In fact, I’ve decided it’s kind of my worst nightmare job. If someone sat me down in front of a phone and told me that I would be answering back-to-back customer service calls in SPANISH I would run. Answering customer service calls in my native language would be no picnic, I’m sure. In Spanish? Just fire me now because I’m not going to be a service to anyone.

So, the job sucks, I have been told. It’s stressful. The shifts are either start or end at abysmal hours. The pay is…eh. Still, for my friend Ivonne, she of the flawless English, soothing voice, and financially struggling family, it’s not a terrible option.

I was grilling her this morning about the ins and outs of answering calls, because I think it’s so interesting. She works on a hotel reservation account. She told me about the scripts they use, about the times when English words eluded her in moments of nervousness, and about the notes she has to type up before the next caller pops into her headset. Mostly though, she enjoys the work. It’s not hard to imagine why. She’s just the sort of capable, kind person I’d want sorting out my hotel reservation.

The other day, she accidentally forgot to hit the hold button after she hit the mute button while she worked on a woman’s issue. This meant that as Ivonne looked up room fares she heard the woman talking to someone else in the room.

“I think I got an Indian,” the woman on the other line said. Ivonne recounted the story simply, and without anger or mockery. “So for the whole call I was very polite. I told her, ‘I want to help you with this,’ and ‘I’m working on your issue and it will be just another moment,'” Ivonne told me. I shook my head in disbelief. Towards the end of the call, Ivonne overheard the woman telling the other person that the Indian girl was actually really helpful.

I swallowed hard, pushing down all the angry, sarcastic comments I wanted to offer in support. Ivonne had done the kind thing, and I would try to follow her example. Instead, I’ll use my teeny, tiny platform here and say: be nice. Be nice to people on the phone who are doing their best to help you. You have no idea what their story is. Most likely, their doing the best they possibly can with the opportunities presented to them. I don’t care what your political views on customer service outsourcing are, there is a human on the other end of the line who could likely use some kindness and respect.

Also, she’s SALVADORAN.

Can I see some ID? November 9, 2008

At the grocery stores here, they have little miniature carts for kids to push while their parents shop. The little carts are adorable, but giving a three-year-old a metal contraption with wheels that hits at shin level just seems like a bad idea. Mostly, the collisions happen with other carts, though I have had to move my legs out of the path of out of control mini cart drivers.The parents tend to look horrified. I make sure to laugh and tell them their child is cute. I am universally amused by the little children and their carts, despite the havock they sometimes wreak.

None amused me more than the little girl I saw pushing a tiny cart in the grocery store yesterday. Usually, the mini carts are empty, or hold a few items that the child has grabbed off low shelves. But this little girl, no older than four, was pushing two bottles of wine.

Keep Off the Lawn, Por Favor September 27, 2008

It turns out that home-owner’s associations are a cultural universal. I just got back from our neighborhood meeting where the following issues were discussed:

• Dogs pooping on other peoples’ lawns. After deliberation, it was decided that a strongly worded letter would be sent to house 22. We all know that little white fluff ball is trouble. It’s time someone took action.
• Teenage hooligans hanging out in the park at night drinking and smoking. The neighborhood park will now close at 7 pm–if you are a teenager and/or a hooligan, that is. Otherwise, you are free to visit the park at any hour.
• People playing their music too loud late at night. Now, don’t misunderstand, the woman bringing up the issue has no problem with the occasional loud birthday party. But loud music until 4 am many nights is excessive. Her solution was to send the guards to the house on behalf of the neighborhood. To which another man responded that perhaps knocking on the door and asking that the music be turned down would be a good first step. It kind of cracks me up that we even have guards to send to the houses of non-compliant neighbors.
• The number of cars parked on the street. Yesterday there were at least four cars parked on one street in such a way that made it difficult for other cars to pass through quickly. Strongly worded notes might be sent to the owners of these cars as well.
• The purchasing of a large sign for the neighborhood entrance. Should it be made out of ceramic? Wood? Some kind of laminate material? Decisions.
• Raising the salary of the guards. This one nearly came to blows. The woman running the meeting, clearly the woman who runs the whole neighborhood, was clearly in favor of a wage increase. She would like us to consider the numerous responsibilities of the guards. Also, she would like us to consider that she has lived in this neighborhood 20 years. The man doesn’t believe in using the guards to reprimand individual residents piped up that he failed to see the relevance of that comment. We all live here now. Also, what are guards in other neighborhoods getting paid? More? Less? Shouldn’t we consider that a wage increase might put an undue burden on many of the neighbors who couldn’t make it to the meeting? At which point Neighborhood Boss rose from her chair and stabbed at the paper in her hand while uttering a long string of very fast Spanish. Someone else jumped in and moved the conversation back to “friendly neighbor” level.

We also discussed painting the playground equipment, installing an intercom system, painting a wall, and installing electricity in the guard station. Little kids ran around the park. A sixteen-year-old came by after an hour or so to see what was taking so long. He wanted his mom to drive him to hang out with friends. We chatted about lightly about jobs, gossipped about neighbors who weren’t in attendance, and sipped coffee.

I followed along with the meeting as best I could with my limited Spanish knowledge, but in the end I was outed. Neighborhood Boss closed out the discussion part of the meeting with a hand wave in my direction. “These girls are from California. And this one doesn’t speak Spanish. We’ll give her the first tamale.” That’s not an exact translation, but there were sympathetic smiles, and then somebody gave me a tamale.

20 Things About My House in San Salvador September 20, 2008

1. Our house is on a hillside, the base of a volcano actually, and it overlooks all of San Salvador.
2. My sheets are from Pottery Barn Kids.
3. Our neighbor across the street is “important,” and therefore no one is allowed to park next to her house. I speculated that this was due to the risk of car bombings. The truth is, she is probably just important enough to force people to park on the other side of the street.
4. We don’t have large outside trash cans. We just set our trash on the curb. It is very important that there be some trash on the curb when the trash man comes at 7 am three days a week. Otherwise, the trash man will knock on our door and inquire about our lack of trash, waiting at the door while we grab whatever trash we have.
5. We essentially live at the end of a cul-de-sac, at the top of a hill, in a very private neighborhood with few people coming in and out. Still, there is a constant stream of noise. Roosters, jackhammers, men drunkedly singing, that one bird that sounds alternately like a crying child and a goat being strangled.
6. Despite the fact that no one had asked for permission, our landlord was insistent that it was perfectly  and totally fine for us to light candles, incense, blow torches, etc. Okay, not the blow torches, but from Kristen’s notes (our house translator) it would seem that he went to extra lengths to flame-proof the house and he is just dying for us to test it out. Or something.
7. Also, good thing he’s down with the flame throwing, because our oven/range runs on propane. Meaning that to cook we have to flip the opening on our hideous, bright yellow propane tank, and light the burners with matches. I haven’t quite…mastered this just yet. In fact, the first week we were here, three of the six of us sported small burns on our arms.
8. Still, I’m in love with our 6-burner range. And our oven heats in about two seconds flat.
9. From our balcony, I could reach out and grab the power line running into our house.
10. Despite being quite tastefully decorated, with a few notable exceptions, the paint in our house looks like it was slapped on by a three-year-old. There are sprays of paint on the tile floor, a loose interpretation of where the wall stops and the ceiling begins, and a random streak of white paint on a certain red wall.
11. There is a bird’s nest above the air conditioner outside my bedroom window.
12. The streets in our neighborhood are fake cobblestone. I like it.
13. Our entire house can be enclosed in metal bars. All the windows have decorative metal bar covering. Our downstairs patio and front carport have rolling metal gates that can be pulled across all openings and locked.
14. The gardeners sweep with brooms made out of vines and cut the grass with machetes.
15. We have housekeeping corridors, but no housekeeper. This area consists of a hallway connected to the kitchen with a bedroom and bathroom off of the hallway. The washer and dryer are at the end of the hallway opposite the opening to the kitchen. We call this area the dungeon. We keep the doors to it locked at night, despite the fact that it is just another hallway inside the house and has no doors leading outside.
16. We’re not supposed to flush our toilet paper. We follow this rule haphazardly at best.
17. It is abundantly clear that the homeowner has two little girls. There is a giant pink bookshelf in the upstairs loft packed with toys. My room used to contain two very whimsically shaped twin beds, a framed “Guess How Much I Love You” print, and, oddly, a children’s hamper containing little girl clothes. I still sleep on one of the whimsical beds. I took down the “Guess How Much I Love You” bunnies two weeks ago.
18. Our neighborhood has a private park with swings, a little basketball court, and a picnic area. I’ve never seen children play there.
19. We have a cistern in our driveway in case the water ever shuts off.
20. Despite being able to run around with matches inside our own home, we are not allowed to light off fireworks because someone in our neighborhood has a heart condition. This was also made clear to us several times. I’m quite obliged to follow this rule, especially considering that the kind of fireworks to which they are referring are the kind that I am certain I would never, ever choose to detonate. Still, it seems to be a rather pointless rule considering the neighborhoods on either side of us seem to have no such restriction.