Yep, thanks for the pictures, sp2 boy.
Saw all that kinda thing back in the sixties. Is it still the same? I never went back, but often wonder.
At the mine in Australia, an engineer came from India. Nice bloke, well educated. I used to ask him various technical questions.
One strange thing I remember was spurred by a visit from the jehovah's witnesses who'd come all the way from South Australia to preach to us lads in the bush.
When they'd gone, we had a chat in the bar about "creating life". The only guy who reckoned he could organise the " creating of life" was this Rajeev.
According to him, if a bottle of almost any water was taken, sealed, and kept for six months, scientists would find that there was some life form within it, when they opened up. The only exception, he said, was " Ganges water". That would still be the same as when it was put in the bottle! :egg:
I think he actually used the words "still as pure as when it was it was sealed in the bottle".
I'm not a scientist and have never tested his theory.
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Before I went to India and Australia, I worked in the pits in South Wales. One big thing about the men in the valleys was that they would pee almost anywhere. It seemed to be the done thing.
Maybe that's why I'm always a bit amused when i read threads about "grey water" etc. If folk saw what used to go into the Taff river, they'd be horrified, I guess.
Years later, we were doing a tunnel to improve the sewers of Cardiff. One of my jobs was to go in the ten foot diameter, live sewer outfall tunnel to sandbag it off , so that we could overpump it out to the Bay ( Cardiff Bay, where it all goes, eventually) and enable us to connect the new tunnel.
Suffice it to say that this wasn't the most pleasant of jobs, the worst two things being a tie between
a) the pump getting blocked by a dead chicken, and b) seeing a foetus float by!
Pretty horrible.
After that and India, I didn't think France was too bad: Paris is a dirty place with dog-muck and human wee quite common in the streets and subways.
There again, London isn't much better, though London has plenty of parks.
In Dublin, they started putting in temporary sentry boxes on weekend evenings and whisking them away in the morning with liberal spraying of nice smelling disinfectant all around the main touristy centres.
Out nearer to where I came from, an American tourist was a bit perplexed when he was unable to find the toilet in the pub. When he mentioned the problem to the landlord, he was shown the backdoor, which was thrown open to reveal a green and pleasant rural scene. "That's forty acres of the best land in the county", he was told.
" Pick your spot!".
sean rua.
