The more time I spend in this city, the more I am convinced that here bathrooms and toilets are not anything to care about. Even the bathroom at the University look totally disgusting. Bathrooms, showers and things like this are not a priority here. Of course for me it is a bit of a drama, since after the kitchen the bathroom is my favorite room in a house (in fact in my apartment in the USA the bathroom was as big as the kitchen :-)!
But it is not about this that I want to write. I just realized something. That I saw here something that I saw only in Caracas and in South Africa before. The bars in front of the windows. Every window of the first and second floor (and something also of the other floors if those windows can be accessed in a relatively easy way) is "caged" to avoid thieves entering in the house from there. It is in some way kind of shocking, since it makes me immediately feel insecure. At the moment of deciding which apartment to rent (beside the fact that of the 4 apartment I visited the one I decided to rent was the only decent one), my almost cousin here told me to not rent anything at the bottom, first and second floor. Then we checked for how accessible from the roof is the apartment that I will rent (not accessible fortunately) and then he told me to not leave the windows open....Sometimes I think that I am naive as Alice in Wonderland....so when I realize that actually yes there are thieves also here and yes they normally enter in the apartments and yes I have to be careful, I feel extremely vulnerable, even more than necessary probably. Last saturday a guy came to me. He was quite drunk and dirty and I was just watching the gay pride, so not paying attention to anything. This guy came close to me then and he asked me if I would go to Marseille with him. My thoughts were: a) why the hell of all the people around he decided to come to me b) do I look so innocent? c) is he going to attack me and hit me?
Of course as easily as he came, he also easily and quickly left, so nothing happen. But I was already imagining myself dead on the floor of the beautiful picturesque main square of Montpellier in a pool of blood (my blood of course).
I know I have a huge imagination. And the tendency to always imagine the worst tragedies. I am aware of that.
Last thing and then I go to bed. Here if you are begging for money, if you are homeless and sleeping on the road, if you are drunk BUT you have a dog, the police cannot do anything to you. Which of course is nonsense to me. The result is that I never saw so many dogs like here. Every single homeless/drunk person (I am not able to distinguish if they are both or if they are just drunk and they like to sit on the floor), and there are quite a lot here, have its own dog. Plus, there are also some I would define hippie people who also have dogs, just to avoid any possible problem with the police in the case the policemen would even think to bother them....It is a weird thing, difficult to explain. It just need to be seen....But I have to confess that after my first trip to Paris, when I was still a kid and I went there with my parent, my child desire was to become one of these persons who play some kind of instruments in the metro station and hope to make a living with that. I am not sure how from that child dream I became a scientist. I still miss the link. But it was a fortunate event for me, since I am so bad in playing instruments (no patience to learn).
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2 comments:
Actually, this exists in the US too, but its not to avoid being arrested. Just because dogs give love and are companions I think. It happens a lot among younger people.
I think that here they do it more to not get problems with policemen that for company. It doesn't honestly look that they have dogs for a need of companionships since these people always hang out in a group....But dunno.
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