At one side of campus in an exit onto ‘Backdoor Street’. Apparently every college has a road like this; it’s basically a place where loads of street sellers congregate and you can eat really cheaply and buy most things. It’s incredibly useful and fairly vital for the students.
Unfortunately the college tried to stop students getting out of college during school hours by putting up a gate. So the shopkeepers had a big strike and tore down the gate. So the college put up a bigger gate. Then they decided to lock it. We can’t quite work out the schedule of when it’s open and when it’s not so often have to use the happy shortcut, which gets more and more dangerous as it’s gradually overused. A wall was put up to stop people getting through one way, and a fence was put up in another place, but the students are very resourceful.
So here’s our current route:
Over the torn-down fence and across the clay track with the sea of rubbish from a boys’ dorm flowing down the side...
Over a wall...
Through some gardens...
Down a precarious clay hill (see the students queue to experience the thrill of getting back up)…
Round the back of someone’s house…
And here we are on Backdoor Street, or, as Jav and Chrissy have affectionately named it, Filth Street.
We love the Filth, we really do. There’s printing lady who often lets us foreigners jump the queue, ‘Punk’ a new restaurant owner who has promised us an English menu and fried-food lady who always has a smile for us. Then there’s plenty of cheap restaurants where we have to write out our order so often just pick the characters that look most appealing, fruit stalls, amazing pizza-esque fried bread stand, shops that sell everything from phones to nail polish to inappropriate lamps, and, right at the bottom on the main road, the supermarket and the fake KFC with the dodgy electricity. What more could anyone want?
At least when the gate is open we fully appreciate it. Nothing like clambering up clay banks surrounded by rubbish, in the dark, trying to hold a torch in one hand and a pile of photocopying in the other, wearing flipflops and narrowly evading death to make you appreciate the joys of an open gate.
