Driving through town this week has been rather pleasant. The journey is always interesting enough with so much going on and so much to look out for. It really can be quite entertaining. The hustle and bustle of people walking, pushing carts, selling anything from phone credit to bags of water to second hand clothes to air freshener. Carting around anything from containers filled with water to coal to large bags of flour to pigs. You name, they’ve got it, for the most part. The sellers are literally on the street- on some streets they actually cover the entire road. This means that when driving along you literally have to force people to pick up their goods off of the road and take a few steps back. We do feel slightly bad making them move their mobile shops, but then again, a road is a road.
The trips home this week have been more interesting. I keep coming across people I know – a carpenter I have known for years, nurses from the Aberdeen Centre, former patients’ moms. It’s great. The slow flow of traffic allows for a little bit of conversation but before you know it, the car moves on.
The best part of the trips this week has been the increased number of Christmas items available. Driving through town you can find numerous people walking around with Christmas trees - small, medium and large. Other people are draped with vast amounts of tinsel sparkling in the sun. Street sellers have an assortment of Christmas lights – colored, musical, etc. Special Christmas sweets are being sold at street side stalls. Christmas tunes are being played from shops throughout town. Even my driver now has “The First Noel” as his ring tone. Despite the 30 degree Celsius temperatures in Freetown, Christmas has come.
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