Quote Originally Posted by annie
Sounds like a dangerous jungle out there, Beta! So glad you escaped undamaged! Makes me appreciate my little town all the more........

annie
And yet, at the same time, there's a strong element of neighborliness in that lady standing by you and advising you not to spend more time there than need be. Also the guy across the road offering to help. Yeah, it could be he was offering to "help", but it could also be he was actually offering to HELP.

I was just in Durban, ZA, for a conference. We were constantly getting warned NOT to walk ANYWHERE, at the very least not ALONE and NEVER after dark! And yep, sho 'nuf, 10 conference attendees (out of 3000 or so) got mugged in the course of the week. But then too, one of my grad students (who at 2m tall doesn't feel threatened by much) did walk around the iffy neighborhood where his cheap hotel lay, and complete strangers came up to him, asked if he was from the conference that had had those muggings they'd read about in the paper, and apologized on behalf of their whole city. So there are good folks out there too. And most of the "bad" folks are not so much bad as desparate. So maybe there's hope for the world if we could just do right by one another. Like, maybe it would help if the city would send in street cleaning equipment, if only as a symbolic gesture that folks there deserve clean streets too.