Almost every day at one point or another I go out in the evening to get some food from all of the street vendors that gather outside of the North Gate of campus, right next to the international dorms. Well today I just went there for dinner as usual, I order my skewers from the barbecue stall and wait for it to cook, all was right in the world. Then all of a sudden, there is a wild flurry of activity. Everyone is either biking or manually wheeling their food carts away, fires still burning and food still cooking, I think my order was still over the grill. I'm just standing there looking around in bewilderment. There are still containers of cooking oil and other cooking apparatus just left around the sidewalk and street during the scurry. Then I see a police car driving down the road then a truck pulls into where the vendors were set up just moments before. A cop gets out of the truck, looks around for a minute or two just standing there and leaves. Then all of the vendors rush back into positions like nothing ever happened, I go back to where I was and exchange smiles with the cook but had no way of asking what just happened and they just finish cooking my food.
The food was good but I still have no idea what happened. I'm assuming there is something against zoning laws or some other regulation that may disallow this type of business, but you see these vendors everywhere in the city so it seems more like a technicality that is only followed when the cops drive by. I did once see something similar happen when a police woman on foot yelled at some guy selling some sort of trinkets at the end of a pedestrian intersection and he scurried away as well. I suppose it is more of a hassle for police to actually arrest these people for something so benign than to just pass them by or give a verbal reprimand and send them on their way unless there is some blatantly offensive violation.
No comments:
Post a Comment