During the week

Again, the working week isn't the point of the blog so I'm not going to say too much about work (and there isn't much outside work as we often work til 8pm or beyond).

Suffice to say that the colleague that I came in to replace returned to Australia. As a result I tried (with some success) to bring in the leaving time (to 6:30 pm), at least for Thursday and Friday.

Eating was mostly at the hotel, with occasional trips to restaurants outside. One of these was at the racecourse, an Italian restaurant that was very nice. The next evening we went to a local wine bar. From the look on the faces of the guys I went with, not drinking was probably the smart move.

We got confirmation on Wednesday that we would be moving hotels on the Saturday. I realised that if I was going to walk in to work one morning with my camera then that would need to be on Thursday or Friday. I spent the Thursday taxi trip confirming that I knew the route and looking to see if there were particular things I wanted to capture, and then walked in on the Friday.

It's not a long walk, but the contrast from the top class hotel is immediate. Directly across the road is the slum, and walking along the road you see the shacks that have been set up there (built is far too strong a word for them). It's worth noting that they do have numbers painted on may of them, and several have satellite dishes on them. It's also notable that several have very nice cars parked in front of them. I'm not saying that the residents own the cars, but the contrast is again quite striking.

Another thing that you notice is the number of small shrines that there are around the place on the streets. Some of these are small and seemingly home made, but most are 5 - 7 feet tall, made of stone and well tended.

There's also lots of shops and stalls, most of which are closed at 8am when I was walking around. Flower stalls are very popular, with many places selling garlands. It's also not unusual to see people getting shaves on the pavement.

Lots of the stalls are basically lockups, with shutters when closed. The shutters have often got advertising on them, and the mobile phone companies seem to have the market pretty much sewn up.

Even where there are proper buildings, they often look derelict, with little glass if any in the windows and rubble and rubbish on the ground around them. Sometimes the apparently derelict buildings will have paintings on them with their own garlands. Modern buildings are often directly next to, or across the road from, the derelict ones.

There's a patch of land that, for the sake of argument, we'll call a park. Here's where people go for a walk and, even at 8 a.m., there's a cricket match going on.