When I arrived at the hotel, some staff remembered me from the two-week stay last year. I was welcomed "home". The same at the library where I'm teaching: warm welcome, catching up on what's happened in the intervening year, slipping back into relationships.
I explored some new areas of the city, especially the Tabo An market. This is smaller than the Carbon market, and seems to specialize in dried fish (it is very near Pasil, the main fresh fish market). Heaps of dried fish, virtually every vendor selling the same things. One would wonder how they all survive, but for the obvious fact that they do! One stand sold a dried fish about 10" long, still colored a brilliant indigo blue. You must wonder what it looks like alive, under the water, swimming: it's enough to make one want to take up scuba diving, just to satisfy that curiosity.
There was much at the market and, indeed, throughout the city, that can confuse and concern. One sees what appear to be heavy bedsteads tucked into corners of the market or simply placed on the sidewals. During the day, the bedsteads are covered with items for sale or with tools and materials of trade. I've even seen a little forge on a bedstead on a sidewalk, with the smith pounding away. (And, in a market, have seen charcoal burners producing the charcoal for the little forges and for street vendors' fires to cook food.) At night, things of the day are stowed beneath the bedstead and screens put up around it, or curtains rolled down from a frame or the underside of the house against which the bedstead is pushed, and there you have it: a place to sleep. Lives are lived in a space not as bit as an American double bed.
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