Mercurial

My crazy friend Cris, nice PhD student that he is, calls me at 10pm last Monday to go out and take pictures with his new and shiny 6.2 megapixels digital camera.
And off we go, in his car, and the only place we come up is Salem College, a very traditional college for women. Only. When you visiting one in the dorms, and you are going out, they have to yell "man in the hall" so all the other naked cavorting lesbian kissing students can avoid the ogling eyes of the marauding male.
But I digress.
Off we go to Salem College, to take pictures of buildings, I suppose, and I can see that we are already suspicious characters, two males, taking pictures inside an all-women college, at 11pm. Please.
It is not until Cris actually started taking a visual interest in the contents of the Office of Admissions that I got nervous, so we go downtown.
And, if you are downtown in Winston-Salem, what is the more interesting vista to photograph, specially at night? The Wachovia Building, affectionately called "the penis building".
So, there we are, couple males, one obviously foreigner, taking pictures of a financial institution in the middle of the night. And when I got tired of that, Cris decided that he might as well point his camera to the other buildings, such as the Courthouse, and things like that.

Finally, a nice car came by, and we both agreed that, even though we might have the right to take pictures of buildings, it was a pretty stupid thing to be doing. Not in this country, at least: Russia, Singapore, Korea even might be better places. I know for a fact that if you film buildings in downtown Havana, Cuba, they do not arrest you.

Ah, the land of the terrorized, home of the imprisoned.