We were there – Public Market

Please have patience, I’m going to re-post this and try to embed a video.

Back in the 1960’s I remember reading a series of history based fiction books. The Series was called, “We were there at- – ” and then the place, incident or whatever was inserted. My Uncle and Aunt had quite a large number that I enjoyed reading while visiting them.

For our post today, I thought I would share a little bit of the flavor of the market area of the town of Sindangan where Inday goes to do the marketing and other things needed for the children’s home.

I have a short, 40+ second video that I am not able to insert at the moment, so I will post a couple photos. Please click to open. If this works as desired, I will try more later.

This was taken on a Wednesday mid-morning as I was on a bus waiting to go to another town. In the background, you will see the public market. It burned to the ground earlier this year.

A few things I found interesting as I was people and traffic watching was, how few private vehicles there were, how few traffic mishaps I saw, and how the seemingly random mixing of buses, vans, trucks, pedal cabs locally called bicycles, motorcycles, and motorcycles with a sidecar attached locally called tricycles flowed together. I swear that they must have some grease that they put on the sides and corners of the vehicles as they came so close I was sure that they had hit but nothing happened.

In a video I took, I particularly get amused at the motorcycle coming into view from the right around the 20 second point. He is speeding along and almost drives into the side of a vehicle but manages to swerve at the last moment.

In the background on the far left side of the intersection is a small shelter that is the police station for that area. There were usually 2 policemen sitting there but doing little. The one day that I was waiting for someone right there, I noticed that one of them had one of the oldest M-16s that I had seen in years. The 3 finger flash hider was resting on the floor so much that the fingers were bent towards each other.

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