Description: View from my Window

In the midst of all this fact-telling (which apparently you all find enjoyable to read but which I find inadequate at describing my reality over here), I thought I’d include something more descriptive, just so you’d know how I’d really like to be writing about everything I see here. So for those of you who think all of this is too long, now you’ll know that it really is a very summarized version of what I would in theory like to be sending you. :)
It is a glorious day: The sun is shining through a thin layer of haze, and a family works on their plot of land across the street. I don’t mean to spy on them – their land used to be a plant nursery and my eyes have grown accustomed to looking over at the pretty flowers. I am lucky to have this view, as most of the apartments in this area have another three-story house or apartment building’s windows a couple meters away. Fate (or Fulbright, I guess) gave me a room with this view, now of a family’s yard and soon to be vegetable garden, or possibly house. An old one-story brick building with a v-shaped roof squats directly adjacent to my window, and although now in the dry season it doesn’t look particularly pretty, the dried brown grasses sticking up from where the roof and wall meet remind me of the delicate morning glories and tiny white flowers that sprung up among the mossy green foliage and the mist of four months ago. Now through the brown stalks I see the family’s yard, a work-in-progress surrounded by fairly tall brick wall. Dirt and rocks sit in little piles randomly, so I can’t guess for what purpose they’re being moved around so diligently. Every once in a while the man brings around a large cardboard box, and out of this he gently pulls out half-grown chickens and places them in a hand-made wood-and-mesh enclosure, held down tight by loose bricks. The chickens aren’t quite old enough to cluck, so their peeping blends in with the general bustle of the neighborhood; hammering, crows cawing, the kids playing next door, the cheep-cheep of the handsome sparrow sitting on the electric wire, and the intermittent strange howlings of the zoo down the road. A woman and a teenage girl watch as two toddlers sit on their haunches to observe the chickens through the mesh – they look as though they’ll pull open the wire any moment so their bird friends can come out to play. Two new baby goats (kids, I should say) run freely around their compound and over the aforementioned piles. They’re having about as good a time as can be had, jumping onto everything, including their own mother goat who’s tied to a stumpy wooden post. I wonder vacantly as I watch the little goat perched upon the apparently un-phased mother goat, how such adorable animals grow up to be such ugly, neurotic, obnoxious creatures. The babies at one point advantageously used a poorly placed brick pile to hop all the way up onto the top of the wall, and though they probably wouldn’t be brave enough to jump all the way down onto the street on the other side, a young man pulls himself up onto and stands on the wall as easily as the goats had jumped, to spread his arms wide and slowly convince them back into the safety of their yard.