quiet

this photo was taken on our last day in kinshasa 30 august 2007.
we shot in makala, a neighborhood in Kinshasa where SNEL, the state electricity provider, was turning on the juice.
i was quite a novelty there. every resident under the age of 12 thought that i should be shooting them. people tried to get my attention by calling me "EMIINEM". it was a very intense experience. much different than the other places we had been.

when we were done, we hopped back in the truck and went to the airport. within 4 hours we were in the loving embrace of Air France. Unlimited beverages, Spider man 3 and a special insecticide treatment. Another 14 hours later, we were back in NY. Customs didn't even bat an eyelash at my DRC tourist visa or the 31 hours of video tape in my bag. The bags arrived and soon enough we were in a taxi with a new interactive LCD screen for passenger use. the weather in NY was almost exactly the same as Kinshasa. Overcast, humid and hot. But when we got off North Conduit Blvd. and turned onto Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, it felt very different.

Quiet.
Nobody on the streets. Roads that didn't make the axles buckle. Stoplights. Other drivers passed, their windows rolled up. Isolated.

I'm enjoying the return. Out for croissants at 7:00 am on saturday morning. A filmmaker was projecting his doc on North African hip-hop on the side of a building in Ft. Greene last night. I swam in the Atlantic Ocean yesterday and rode waves. Its nice to be home, on Labor Day weekend, in the sunshine, with friends.

But the Five Boroughs, a place I once thoght of as loud, wonderful and out of control, now feels a little tame. I am looking forward to getting back to Kinshasa.