Chasing pavements

You'd be surprised the things you can get excited about. Take pavements, for instance. I'd never been a big expert on pavements before, myself. Don't get me wrong - I like them. New pavements can look clean and pleasant. Interesting patterns can be made laying bricks and slabs. And of course I played games skipping over the cracks as a child (I even had somewhat sweaty teenage dreams of Jeff Buckley doing so too). But I'd never taken much of a personal interest in the matter of concrete and pavements, y'know. Never even thought about it from a County Council, Health-and-Safety point of view. Never really had a need to. Until I moved to Kosovo.

They're not big on pavements around here. They're not big on pavements anywhere outside the the sanitized environment of the Western world, if we're to be honest - most poor countries have much more important things to worry about: unemployment rates, stagnant economies, getting international recognition of your country, ethnic conflict, funneling back-handers, misusing donor funding, that sort of thing. And usually I don't have much of a problem with this. I don't complain about the water being turned off at night or lack of public services or the fact that there are potholes everywhere because I know that this is a poor country and putting up with it was part of the decision to live and work here.

What I'll complain about though, loudly and enduringly, is paving a road with smooth, beautiful new asphalt and then digging it up again six weeks later. Or digging things up when there are no funds and no foreseeable opportunity to re-pave it again. Or even when funds are available - digging up a whole street in one day, then leaving it a mess for months on end, rather than working on it slowly on a section-by-section basis. I think all three of these scenarios have taken place simultaneously on my street, which has more or less been in a state of constant chaos since I moved into my apartment in May. It was a spectacular mess when I first arrived, but it was asphalted beautifully not long afterwards. Then they started tearing out chunks of it (usually right in the middle of the road where it disrupted both lanes of traffic), supposedly to lay manholes. Once laid, the large squares of dirt surrounding the manholes were not filled in, leaving the street looking something like a chess board, alternating black and brown squares, albeit not quite in such neat patterns. Not long afterwards I came back after a weekend away to find that the new asphalt, laid only six weeks before, had been scraped away from the entire street, leaving only a hard bedrock behind. They've been working on this ever since, ensuring a harmonious judder of clamouring drills, engines, generators, diggers and shovels outside my window at early hours of the morning all summer. Very early hours. And 'all summer' includes weekends. Plus providing the source of the heavy dust that films over every surface in my bedroom, whether I leave the window open or not.

Then the pavements. It was mostly mud outside my front door when I first arrived, wet from the spring rain, so my landlord had laid a few bricks to use as stepping stones so we could get in and out of the building. A month later they dug a vast trench the width of pavement, too wide even to take a running jump over. Some shipping pallets (the kind they use in warehouses to lift vast cubes of stacked boxes) provided a drawbridge into the building for a few weeks at that point. They did come along and fill that in lately, but the street was still a mess of rocks and gravel at that point.

So imagine my surprise when I came home from work one evening last week to find... astoundingly... a clean, wide sweep of perfectly paved pathway outside my house. No notice, no warning, no sign that morning when I'd gone to work that anyone would come and work there today. And now, suddenly, unexpectedly, pavement! REAL pavement! My landlord was standing outside the front door, clearly as astounded as I was to see this unprecedented development, and urgently sweeping it, brushing it, and watering it down (naturally), as if to make sure that it was real and wouldn't get up and walk away from us.

He doesn't speak a word of English, but speaks Serbian, of which I speak almost nothing. Still, the two of us stood there, looking at the literally solid ground beneath our feet - 'literally' solid for the first time - beaming broadly and saying Dobro! Vrlo dobro! Super dobro! Which was the one and only piece of Serbian vocabulary in my possession which I could use to express my pleasure - Good! Very good! Super good!

And went inside, laughing at myself and blushing at quite how pathetic my excitement about the whole thing was. The street itself's not paved yet, the dust is still clouding up my room and making my balcony practically unusable, and the raised-manhole obstacle course is still in effect in the middle of the road. True too, no sooner did they lay the pavements than people started parking their cars on them so that people have to walk on the street regardless. And how long before they dig the pavement back up again? Who knows. But its a start. And makes me feel less like I'm literally chasing pavements on my walk to and from work every day, which is always an improvement.

View from my balcony of our street with its brand spanking new pavement.

PAVEMENTS!

(Note: for added authenticity, see the manhole obstacle course in the centre, and the stretch downhill where the road, typically, has been watered down)