A week or so after I returned to campus, I was really surprised to find that the local police had forcefully removed all of the food stands that lined our street. Many of the vendors had been working there for years and I bought lunch at the stands all the time because there are so few restaurants in the town. Later, after talking to some of the other teachers, I learned that the new president of the university had come to visit our campus and decided that the food stands made the street look “messy and disorganized” so he decided to have the police remove them. I was really concerned at first because I thought that all of the vendors would be out of jobs, but the teachers told me that the carts would probably start reappearing again somewhere over the next few weeks. Sure enough, the vendors have literally all just moved 100 meters down the street, now out of direct view of the police. Meanwhile, workers have spent the past two weeks building these brick things that I’ve heard will soon be flower beds.
