Poul Anderson excels at busy street scenes but nowadays I must always check whether I have posted about them before. In this instance, see:
Ikranankan Street Scene
As Sean says in the combox, there are many such scenes in Anderson's works - and several others are summarized on this blog, if they can be found. As SM Stirling implies, also in the combox, such scenes are based on Terrestrial real life and his anecdote inspired me to google for an image of Mombasa Old Harbor.
As I said in Exotica And Mirrors, we value fiction because it reflects reality and imaginative fiction because its exotic settings differ from familiar reality. We can have it both ways in fiction.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I fully expect very similar scenes to occur on planets colonized by human beings. But we both agree on that, at least!
Ad astra! Sean
That’s nostalgic — we used to go to Mombasa every Christmas. We drove down from Nairobi, usually, and stayed at beach cottages or the Nyali Beach Hotel, which was very pleasant. We also went in to Mombasa most days.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be! But it is a big deal on this blog.
The rug in my living room is one my mother bought from an Omani dhow captain in an 18th-century warehouse in the Old Harbor district — he was squatting on top of a heap of them (all Shirazi), smoking a water-pipe, and in full fig — robe, pointed-toe slippers, silver-jilted dagger through his sash. It wasn’t costume, either: those were just his clothes, and we were the only Muzungu around.
This must have been in ‘63. He thought the blond lady would be an easy mark, but my mother learned bargaining in a hard school in Lima as a girl, and she always regarded it as a blood sport.
She laughed and turned around without another word and started to walk out. He let us get nearly to the door, then came running after us with a 33% cut, and it went on from there. She got it for about a quarter of what he first asked.
She told my father afterwards that she hadn’t had that much fun in years.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That's the fun side of shopping, being able to bargain hard for something you might buy!
Ad astra! Sean
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