Arrival - Part 4 (venturing out)

I went out by myself after various cups of tea, naps and a brief look at some incomprehensible guide material with maps it took me forever to figure out. I shower, I dress. Take the scarf, for modesty and as a gesture of dressiness. I go downstairs and ask about the nearest supermarket (I have this vision of salty snacks like cashews or rice crackers, and maybe some milk for tea – the ‘creamer’ that comes with the tea stuff in the room is that powder, which if you read the packet – I have – is full of strange aluminium compounds, no doubt to give it a strong opaque while colour. I find this disturbing. It also doesn’t help cool the tea, or really change the flavour.) I get instructions to markets – fresh fruit and veg markets. I accept them graciously. I leave and start walking along a footpath crowded with motorbikes - scooters. Looks like a showroom spilling out on to the footpath. It looks like the footpath is for parking not walking. I navigate gutters and wetness, random poles and muddy run off from building sites. The water pooling in the small recesses is white and clear, marbled, has an occasional sheen. People are out, sitting on very small baby size stools, eating soup at a outdoor shop which is maybe 5 bowls of ingredients resting on a low table, and the shopkeeper sitting there on her stool ready to cook. There is something very intimate about bowls of raw meat sitting open on a street. There are open fronted clothes shops: ladies professional wear, long cotton pinafores that might be maternity wear, Chinese style tops, hanging one above each other making a display wall of colour perpendicular to the street. A few glass shop fronts. People look blankly at me. I try to walk as if I belong, walk slowly and carefully but with ease. I try to look at everything, but without staring gape jawed. No one likes to be stared at. I do catch an eye full of some amazing power lines above – there are maybe 30 wires black and slack, a gentle arc downwards as they travel from one node to another. They meet at a pole which is somehow sporting a mass of wires as they have been scribbled there in the air by a small child drawing. I stop and stare at those before walking on. Hassling – very little hassling. No one tries to sell me soup or clothes. Maybe on the whole walk a total of 4 men leaning or sitting on their stationary bikes say ‘can I help you? Where you going?’ and I shake my head and smile and say ‘walking’. One follows for a bit and says ‘can I help you?’. I’m not sure whether this is standard practice when tourists pass on foot, or whether I look lost and particularly in need of help. I opt for the former. I’m not lost, I couldn’t really be, I’ve been so cautious with my venturing – straight line right out of hotel, go straight, go straight some more. Follow the curves to the right. Turn left at the Samsung building, turn left again at the end of the row of suit shop. Straight straight straight. Hit a crooked intersection with a few too many angles to be able to calculate confidently – turn around, head back, follow my tracks, like an ant sniffing out the trail. Get back to the hotel and keep walking, left this time. I feel a surge of satisfaction at having been this far, resilience for going further. I know that this first exposure to somewhere new, especially on my own, is like an act of determination rather than a curiosity inspired fun wander. That will come later, when the familiarity has taken the edge off the noise, the wet burning smell of the air, the shock of old women sitting in dark, furniture-less narrow shop fronts waiting to sell things, the feeling of being so different, the self doubt about intruding on other people’s familiar space, the lack of words to even order food, the unfamiliarity with currency that makes you peer at the numbers that mean nothing as you try to remember which order of magnitude is appropriate for which type of purchase. It is like walking as a baby – deliberate, unfamiliar, prone to falling. It will get more coordinated as I do it more.

The mythical expat friendly supermarket does not appear, I go into a bakery and find it sells other things, I stand and look at sachets of milk until a young woman comes up and kindly touches one each of the two identical – but different coloured – sachets I’m holding. ‘That one has sugar – that one no sugar’ and smiles. I thank her and take the sugarless one. Take two. I browse at the rolls and danishes, each wraped in a printed bag, I pick one that looks like it is filled with custard or maybe bean paste. I am shown the calculator for the price. I pay. I leave.

Straight straight straight, then right. Straight straight, until the prospect of more whizzing flocks of bikes beeping and another length of sidewalk to navigate becomes overwhelming and I am ready to face my final task – of getting a coffee, of sitting somewhere and being, even temporarility, part of the landscape.