ESL Blogs

I have been here in the Baltimore MD (The USA) for last nine months. Now I am feeling like at home.  How and why?  Let’s see candidly:

I am now seeing people here also throw all sorts of garbage openly on the road like glasses of drinks, bottles of wines which are sometimes broken and scattered on the footpaths and grass. They do not bother to put them in the corner at a safe place if no garbage can is provided.  There is a colony yonder of my back yard, Some of the residents throw their garbage bags in my back yard though they can use the big garbage containers provided for this purpose.  But they do not bother to go there and throw their garbage in the container.  At the very moment when I am writing this, I am seeing this trash lying under the tree through my glass window. The garbage collector does not come here near this site.  So I have seen this trash piling up for last nine months. 

So, it has to be happened back there in Karachi (Pakistan) people also there does not care about how to keep the garbage safe in bags and containers.  In the apartment where I was living people do not bother to throw all trash and garbage out from their galleries which most of the times fall on the passer byes under their galleries.  Even the ladies do not care much and throw the baby napkins and their own (of course used ones) out of the galleries.  Once I was saved from them by inch on my shoulder.

Here (in MD) I have seen (been seeing) people spitting freely hither and thither. Even throwing bud of cigarettes. 

So, it has been back there in Karachi.  There one thing is for their distinction is that they spit the remaining of betel (Paan ke peek) which is blood red, in color and sometimes give a shock to the strangers who first time see them and sympathize to see the man spitting blood.  You will rarely find a fall there even in the apartment which is not colored red (giving an impression of abstract art).  Really if someone put them in the exhibition they will get a prize for that art.

The public buses here in MD are very advanced technically and of course very comfortable, but they mostly stink.  Why? Because the ladies traveling with the infant kids let them pee in the buses (may be compulsive, which of course can be done before leaving the house to travel, but it is not done).  I have seen this by myself so this is not any exaggeration. Once one of the pairs of seats was folded back with the notice “wet seat”.  The problem is this that these buses are not washed later on there has been a persistent ‘stink’ on the buses.

So as is has been there in Karachi.  People do not mind using the mini buses as their toilet when they are stopped at their stand.  Even the passenger who get sick because of the hot weather and all suffocation to vomit.  So these buses also stink with the exception that they stink because of the sweating of the people, which is not so here in the USA because the busses are fully conditioned (cool in summer and warm in the winter). 

I use to go out for walking daily.  Here I have been seeing a cat dead/rotting on the footpath for weeks and no body cares to remove or get it removed from the scene.  I have to keep my breath stopped while passing through (because there is no other way for me to walk through except road which is surely dangerous). 

So it is back there in my native city.  Most of the times animals (dogs and cats) get crushed by the passing cars and truck and no authority bother to remove them from there except nature, which naturally let it pass through the due process of rotting, stinking the air around.

So finding all the similarities with my native city, I am now feeling like at home here in the USA.