Friday, May 29, 2009

Inner Harbour/ Little Italy

After riding the MTA bus from the first stop on the route (Cromwell Bridge Road, surprisingly very close to my house) to the last stop on the route (Charles and Pratt Streets, near the Inner Harbour), my mom, dad, and I arrived downtown. This was the first time that I've taken a public bus in Baltimore. I took one in DC and later wrote about the experience in my why I want to go to GW essay (and I guess it must have been interesting if I got in!)-- let's just essay that I didn't intend to take the bus, but an elderly woman insisted that I should after I asked her for directions and she explained I was very far from where I wanted to be.
In India I made a habit of taking the bus. For starters I had to ride a school bus (at RPCS we only ever ride a bus on field trips) and to be honest that was probably one of my favorite parts of the day. The Indian host school was very big so there were two bus shifts: we rode into school on the earlier bus with kids our age and took the later bus home with the younger kids. I had to switch buses when I moved to my second Indian host family, but I will always be an F bus kid. I met some of my closest friends on that afternoon bus. So you have to understand that these buses were VERY VERY VERY crowded with four or five people to each bench seat and many kids forced to stand. For this reason I was glad that the younger kids were excited by us Americans and would want us to sit with them. And this is how I met my friends: everyday I would head to the back of the bus to my guaranteed seat. Over the next four months I would meet their families, go over their houses, and (unknowingly) break their dietary restrictions-- they're Hindu and thus strict vegetarians (what Americans would consider Vegans) which btw apparently means marshmallows are off limits.

(If you couldn't tell, I'm the white kid in the back.) Those were the school buses, I also rode the public buses. In school we studied Hindi. But Regardless of the fact that there were complications with the teacher to say the least, the official language spoken in Andrea Pradesh (the state were Vizag is located) is Telagu which makes communicating with locals pretty damn hard. Now Telagu and Hindi are probally as far apart as Latin and Arabic: they have different alphabets and grammatical structuring. So of course, everything on the buses (i.e. the direction and stops) was in Telagu. Let's just say I got on the bus that looked like it was heading in the direction I wanted to go in and prayed the bus conductor spoke English. In all seriousness though towards the end of my stay I did start using the bus as part of my regular commute, thus spending 5cents instead of the approx. $1 fare charged by the auto-rickishaw drivers.


About the Inner Harbour...
The first thing I noticed was the smell. The water taxi driver later told us that the pesticides from farms were draining heavily into the water supply because of all the rain (the Harbour area was nearly flooded). He said this caused the dead fish too.


Besides the smell though, I found the area to be quite nice and much more colorful than I last remember it. Many of the dock cleats (or mooring bollards) had been painted as well as the benches (which by the way had no dividers).




There were also many bicycle racks shaped like bicycles.

I came into this day without any listed murals that I planned to see. My dad and I had driven past little Italy on our way to Fells Point the other day and saw many murals so we decided to go back and just walk around. Here's some of what we found:

This next mural was very intricate and appeared to almost be divided into two. On the first half, the town appeared busy on a normal Friday night. But on the second half, a funeral precession was occurring. The two halves are split by a piece of ivy. On the left you can see a bartender fixing drinks, while the church procession is beginning on the right.

Here the restaurant doors blend into the artwork:

I came across this old church. Not only did it had a beautiful mosaic, but also a cross outside on the side walk.


And of course, what would Little Italy be without a Bocce court?Note the painted benches (which do not have dividers).

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