my neighborhood

I thought it might be useful to give a better impression of my neighborhood by describing a mundane trip to the mall.

    I pass the turtle's bathtub in the afternoon as I walk through the playground, then around the back of the school, lined with ferns, bamboo, and smells. The brick walkway is crowded with snails and the occasional frog, that I only notice as it hops out of the way. The school cook is laying on a desk behind the kitchen, sleeping. In the new building across the courtyard, the construction workers sleep each night in the rooms they build during the day. Something darts below the grate of the open sewer. Whether cat or rat, I'm not sure. As one of the few places in the neighborhood not overrun with stray dogs, the school is a haven for cats. A one-eyed calico kitten has joined the cloister recently. Out the front gate, the neighbors live in one or two room shacks, more or less. Fences of woven reeds and jumbled sticks mark their spaces, which can be hard to distinguish from one another. Their houses are doorless, made of boards, rusted sheet metal, things like that, and roofed with plastic tarps that hang down over the sides. One hut has the front end of a rusted truck incorporated into the wall, as if it were cut off for that purpose. Out on the little road sits the roof of possibly the same truck. Two girls lean against the wall nearby while their brother kicks a soccerball at them. A toddler tools around the street in what appears to be a powerless Power Wheels hot rod. Plastic bags full of gravel are stacked up to the top of the wall. The largest building beyond the monastery wall I had long thought an abandoned shell, but it now appears to be under construction again.
    It's the rainy season now, which means the temperature has gone down, the humidity has gone up, and our modest sewers are overflowing into the streets. Grey water slides across my sandals.
    Several cabbies lounge on their giant tricycles at the corner, waiting for fares. A small hut is dark inside but for the fire lit on the ground. Two oversized speakers blast dance music out into the street. Stray dogs lounge everywhere, panting in the mud. Late in the afternoon, the air is pale and hazy, probably from fires burning. Last month, during a holiday, the telephone pole was greased and a contest held to see who could climb to the top.
    Beyond a moldy stone wall, the pagoda is visible through the treetops and greenery which encroaches on every manmade structure. Aside from our school, probably the nicest buildings in the area are the monasteries across from the pagoda. Colorful, clean, and recently painted. Monks in crimson robes stand out by the gates and stare up and down the street, or toss water from buckets onto the roadside. A ditch runs along to the right, filled with ferns and trash (a blue umbrella, plastic bags, rotting food, old furniture, burnt paper, and just about anything that someone might throw away). There is trash everywhere, in fact. Next to an ancient, spreading tree on the pagoda grounds, a whole field of it is packed into the dirt like a budding landfill. 
    The traffic gets thicker down the street. Of the cars on the road, about 80% are cabs. Also of the cars on the road, I've been told that almost all of them are less than three years old. There were no imports allowed before that, so any car had probably been running for a few decades or more. The change has likely brought in a lot of business, and also a huge increase in traffic. And honking. Dear lord, the honking...

    Where two streets merge, the traffic thickens, both cars and people. A fenced off old hospital is to the right. The monasteries give way to old apartment buildings. Actually, they probably aren't that old, but the mold that grows on everything makes them look it. By sundown, the right side of the street is crowded with market stalls and blankets covered in merchandise. Jewelry, fried foods, childrens' clothing sporting the Union Jack.
    At the first cross-street, one of the tricycle taxi drivers squeezes his left nostril with a finger and blows snot into the gutter. The pedestrians run the gamut of styles and tax brackets. To some degree, I feel the latter can be determined by the smoothness of their skin. Most people wear longyi, though the younger ones are that much more likely to be wearing Western clothes. The shops begin. A vitamin counter (they seem to be everywhere), Mr. Boy's hair salon, internet cafés tucked in under mottled drywall and balconies draped with laundry. A counter of flowers in the street and a man chanting through a megaphone while rattling his bucket of change. Instead of a sign with their name on it, every restaurant seems to sport the same billboard, the green and red logo for Myanmar beer.
    At the next corner, I pass another school, a large courtyard behind a stone fence, the sidewalk lined with covered pickup trucks to take the students home. A young man with frosted, spiky hair and skinny jeans kicks a passing dog in the rib cage between struts. Beyond the school is a woman whose entire store is made of bananas, in all sorts of colors. Next to it, the yard of a small house is crowded with debris, as if part of the roof had been blown off in a storm.
    The mall dwarfs its surroundings, a mass of neon lights and air conditioning which must use more power than the rest of the neighborhood combined. The doors stand open on the metal detector and uniformed security guards who never check my satchel for some reason. Other than that, the whole building feels like it's been cut out of a neighborhood in Seoul and airlifted here.