Friday, May 11, 2012

Diversity on my doorstep (literally)

The middle of the street outside our flat has been sinking for several years.  (The western half of San Francisco was sand dunes up until the 1920s; underneath it's still just sand.)  SF public works shows up periodically, dumps another load of asphalt over it, which also proceeeds to sink.  This week, we must have finally made the construction schedule.  There's a crew and a flotilla of large equipment, performing construction archeology on layers of asphalt, concrete, brick, then sand.

Lunch time comes and they hit the Safeway across the street, so there's the all-Hispanic work crew down there sitting at the edge of the hole in the street.  Lunch consists of cokes, spicy chicken wings, and sushi, while conversing in Spanish.  They casually throw the chicken bones in the hole - it's going to be covered with concrete in an hour anyway.  The Chinese ancestry mailman walks up the street, asks "what you guys do to street?"  They answer back, he walks on.  Immigrants from former Soviet states walk down the street to the Muni stop.

Is this a great country or what?

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