I went to the Old City this morning. I love Casco Viejo. It's an old,
pedestrian city with cobblestone streets, cathedrals, buskers, bums,
the works.
In Bermuda, the "city" is Hamilton, which is nothing like what most
people think of when they hear the word "city". The main area where
people are is called "Reid Street". I won't describe it, it's too
different from anything that most people have as a reference. If I
find some pics, I'll link them. But anyway, when I think of hanging
out in "Tahn" in Bermuda, I think of Reid Street. In Casco Viejo, I
realise that my favourite place is a street which, until today, I have
never been able to find on the first try. It's a curved, weird street,
because it's not parallel to abything and doesn't seem to join up
where it should. It seems a lot like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter...
If you don't tap your wand on the exact brick and say the right words,
it isn't actually there. THis street is full of clothes that I like,
Indian cotton, loose comfortable stuff, the shoe stores have nice
looking comfy shoes, everything is just chill. So today I went there,
looking for a notebook, but I got there at 1:30 when everything was
closing for lunch (those that actually open in the morning, as I'm
finding that Casco Viejo doesn't really do mornings - and "afternoon"
doesn't actually start until 4:30 or 5 p.m.). So I was walking around,
looking in the store windows behind their locked gates, and I kid you
not, for the first time I realised that every other store on this
street sold paraphernalia for smoking marijuana, growing marijuana, or
covering up the scent of smoking marijuana. I honestly didn't notice
before! One store was posing as an agricultural supply store, but the
books in the window were actually about growing your own weed, there
were fluorescent bulbs, fertilizer, the works. Why didn't I notice
this before? Every store window had bongs in it, there were also
candle and incense stores (which I really liked, part of why I liked
that street), and of course the clothing stores that I like. So I am
now realizing that just as in Bermuda my favourite street was Reid
Street, here in Casco Viejo my favourite street happens to be "Weed
Street". I know that I won't be visiting any of the garden supply
stores there, and the candles and incense that I may buy will not be
for covering up the smell of smoke from anything else, and if I do buy
any clothes there, I will make sure that there's no grass in the
pockets (remind me to tell you about THAT story one day!)
1 comment:
I was an exchange student in Turkey. I went there 4 months after my 16th birthday, so I was still pretty young. One of things we were supposed to have when we went, was a Rotary Blazer, because we were Rotary Exchange Students. Someone had suggested to me that I should get one when I got there from someone who was leaving, because people were usually selling them at the end of their year. So I arrived in Turkey, and we had an orientation weekend in Ankara. During the months leading up to my departure from Bermuda I had heard a lot of comments about the "Orient Express" and various references to movies regarding Turkish prisons (which I purposely did not watch). But I got the idea that they had pretty strict drug laws and you didn't want to be breaking them. No problem for me, who didn't even so much as drink.... So anyway, I found a jacket that fit, and it belonged to one of the American exchange students who was leaving. I bought it off her, she emptied the million pockets it had, and gave it to me. We were both happy.
That night, I was pinning some of my newly-aquired pins to my new blazer. Each exchange student had a jillion pin representing their country and we traded them (I had little Bermuda flag pins and a couple of Bermuda longtails). I was pinning a pin above the Rotary logo on the frong left pocket of the blazer, so I reached inside the pocket to seperate it from the jacket to put the pin on. There was a small plastic ziploc bag in there. I pulled it out so I cuold give it to the girl who owned it because she had left it behind. I took it out and saw that it contained some dried leaves. I smelled it, and (even though I was a Bermudian who had only been to one or 2 "sessions" I knew the smell right away) I almost died of fear. Here I was in Turkey, holding a bag of marijuana. It wasn't mine, but no one would ever believe me. The girl would deny any knowledge and I would be in a Turkish prison forever. I imagined myself being attacked by drug dogs while walking around in my Rotary jacket and being carted off to prison. The worst part was that the bag was open. So when I took it out of the pocket, some fell out in the pocket, some on the floor, some on my bed. It was hellish. I went the the bathroom and flushed the contents down the toilet. I filled the bag with water and sealed it without any air so it wouldn't float, and flusched that. I went back to the room and picked up every microscopic little shred of that weed from the floor and the bed, and then swept, and then flushed the dirt down the toilet. I then took paper towel from the bathroom and wet it and wiped the floor with it. I turned the pocket inside out in the bathroom and took every little shred of anything from the inside of it. I did this all with a rock of fear in my stomach, eyes on the brink of tears, trembling sweaty hands, and my brain not fully comprehending anything. When all traces of it were gone, I hung the bag next to the window all night to hopefully remove any trace of the smell. I was more scared than I had ever been in my life. The next morning, after breakfast, the girl who sold me the jacket asked if she could come with me to my room because she thought she left something in the jacket. I said yes and watched as she took the hanging jacket and went straight to the pocket where the stuff had been. Then she checked all the other pockets. She said to me "did you find anything in any of the pockets?" I looked her in the eye and lied and said "no". I had no idea what she would do if she found out what I had done with what was probably her last stash. And I didn't want to find out. I was racked with guilt about that whole incident for months and I still don't understand why I felt guilty.
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