Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 152

provide affordable housing, none of which is truly affordable, while the purchased variances line their pockets. There’s the same frenetic energy, mopeds everywhere, people slaughtering animals in the street or selling dialysis machines from rickshaws, or cooking food on an open pit on the sidewalk. The ‘new’ stuff, it’s like India too, where someone randomly builds an all chrome Prada store and it’s next to an open air slaughterhouse. But, the unbroken bones of the city still are a mix of feudal architecture and French colonialism, with bits of Americana tacked on, like a Rembrandt that some ‘climate activists’ doused with a paint bucket. And then a guy is selling fruit off a moped, and he’s got a little bullhorn that’s playing a tape loop or something over and over in Vietnamese, and with the distortion and the traffic, I’m expecting him to start yelling ‘Fuck you GI! Fuck you GI!’ like in ‘Apocalypse Now.’

I got to District 1, and went for a walk. The heat was absolutely overwhelming. It was supposedly 90, but fuck the scientific instruments, it felt like over 100. Almost nothing had air conditioning. This was not Las Vegas or even Singapore. This was more like the ‘liberated’ district of Portland, Oregon or Mogadishu, Somalia. The Hotel Manhattan was a narrow building in a row of narrow buildings at a night market. The entire block was filled with occupied tents, abandoned Walmart pushcarts,