Monday, July 07, 2008

five legs

My wake up call in the morning is a five legged cart. Where we live people go through the neighborhoods with a two wheeled one leg cart (3 legs) to sell food or snacks. The cart has a gas cooker, a little cabinet where food stuffs are kept, vegetables, noodles, a type of local minced meat, and a prep counter. A man (2 legs) pushes the cart through the neighborhoods and bangs on a dish, pot, bamboo to get people attention. He'll sometimes call out the name of what he is peddling "Noodles", "Soup", "Rice" and people can stop him and get a meal. He'll wait while you finish if you take one of his bowls and silverware or he can put it in a plastic bag for a "to go" order. Typically kids eat from the five leg carts. Its easy for them to get a snack for cheap money. But the other favorite customer is the construction worker. And as I have a construction site across the street, we have an amazing number of these guys stopping in front of our house, standing under the shade of my bamboo, banging on a porcelain bowl, waiting for some construction worker with a vague feeling of munchy to stop and want a bowl of noodles. And this starts around 6:30a.m. now that the house under construction is being guarded at night. It can continue until 9:00p.m. and sometimes later. A few weeks ago we started looking for fire after smelling smoke. Walked through the house couldn't find fire but then we opened the front door and found a man selling kebabs from a charcoal grill on a cart.

The other morning Jonathan was sneaking out to get donuts when one of the five legs stopped under the bamboo to bang, it was 6:30 a.m. I politely leaned out the front door and told him the baby was sleeping. Fortunately this seller still had some humanity, and bowed apology as he hot footed it down the street, minus banging. No one wants to wake a baby.

Question: Is the baby still a baby at age 4? For the purpose of people on the street, ABSOLUTELY

2 comments:

Gretchen Magruder said...

I wonder which is more annoying....the banging guy, or the music of the ice cream truck?

Jonathan said...

Amanda didn't mention the multiple calls to prayer (some staggered, some overlapping) that start around 4 am.

And we get the icecream man here too, only since he's walking or biking, the music sticks around much longer.