The locals here in the sand are so enamored by both inventions that they drive cars AND surf the internet at the same time, often while eating a doughnut and slurping on a Pepsi (Coca Cola is falsely believed to be a Jewish corporation) going some way to explain why the Arabian peninsular has one of the highest numbers of vehicle fatalities/accidents in the world, occurring on decent, well-built, arrow-straight, tarmac roads.
Another aspect of surfing the web is to start off looking at one site, clicking on a link to a different site, getting distracted by an interesting looking link to another site, continuing in the same manner to endless other sites until you are a long way distant from the original starting point, and so it was in this manner that I found out that Cambodia (where the citizens were recently eating one another) is now an unlikely magnet for weirdos and pissheads. Apparently they are poor weirdos and pissheads, mostly western, who can't afford Thailand, nor, perhaps, standard meals containing meat from a farm. The author writes about an Ozzie he met in Phnom Penh who has been begging on the streets for over a year and sleeps at that establishment known to dossers everywhere - Hotel Park Bench. It doesn't appear on booking.com.
This story jogged my memory to a couple of recent emails from guys who may be in the same figurative Cambodian boat. Arriving within a few weeks of each other, the first message came from a man who I haven't seen or heard from for at least 6 years. The last time we met was when he attended a conference in Prague and asked me to give him a tour of the city at the weekend, so I took him directly to the grungy, decadent, Marxist district of Zizkov where we spent an enjoyable time getting wasted. The next memory was waking up on a train at about 8am, way past my stop, heading due east to Brno, the second Czech city, and after I'd scrambled to get off at the next station I found myself on the sun-kissed terrace of a cafe where the injection of caffeine drew out my final recollection of the night gone by, which had involved a strip club and the consumption of a joint in the company of the barman and one of the artistes dressed only in a bikini and high heels. Happy daze!
However, I digress, and getting back to the urgently desperate email from this guy (employed in a certain capacity by the UK government) who was now asking ... no, scratch 'asking' and insert 'demanding' ... 300 Euros for some disastrous financial scrape he'd got himself into. Maybe he'd never escaped Zizkov? Lengthy bar bill at The Big Bazooka Club?
That was odd enough, but it was followed a week or so later by a similarly urgent and desperate email from another guy I had met via the first guy, now also in dire financial straits, in his case in Madrid. What annoyed me about both entreaties was the absence of any 'Hi, how are you/what are you up to' inquiry. The messages were simply blunt demands for cash, with precise details of how to transfer that cash, via banks and currency dealers, directly into their grubby, sweating hands. The second guy even ended his plea with 'Thanks in advance'.
Yeah, good luck lads. Why not try your luck in Cambodia? And by the way, my health is fine.
Yesterday, as I walked across to the supermarket and pondered this online approach to begging, I came across a woman in black sitting outside the shop with a bag proffered for spare change - the traditional method of begging. This may sound strange in a nation dripping with oil but it is a common sight and one of few career paths that women can go down in the sand. Out on the road, in the days before I quit driving, I've been waved down by people in fancy vehicles whose reason for stopping me was to ask for money! Sell your car, I told them.
Once, in Bahrain, I was using an ATM and a shifty, robed character came and stood way too close behind me. So, with cash in one fist and the other ready to punch him, I turned round to receive some long-winded bullshit hard luck story that I had to interrupt with a no-nonsense piece of advice for him to fuck off, which amusingly set him off on an extremely rude tirade against me, my country (he assumed I was American), religion and infidels in general. A fundamentalist beggar, no less. I walked away with a raised middle digit.
I remember Canadian beggars as grey-bearded, older white men (former geography teachers, perhaps) with pathetically beseeching smiles of desperation; in the USA, the direct, intimidating, deliberately in-your-face approach is favoured; in Asia it is usually kids tugging persistently at sleeves and trousers; while some don't even bother with conversation, they just steal it from you, e.g. in Canton, China I could only admire the artful work of the person who so skillfully picked my pocket on a bus that I didn't discover the loss for about 10 minutes.
So it seems that online begging is a modern innovation of a very old scheme. I wonder if Bill Gates had that in mind when he dropped out of university to sit in his garage and tinker with gadgets and bits of wire which he made into Microsoft before giving us this piece of advice, "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 Miles Per Gallon."