a walk in the village

just returned from a nice long walk in the village with the other 2 women here, hetti and hadda(?) swiss and german, and it was fun...EVERYONE we passed on the street smiled and said hello, asked where we are going and where we had come from! totally amazing....and this is not a touristy village, we were the only foreigners and so many knew english and invited us in or asked if they can help us...old, young, men, women, shopkeepers, garbage collectors, kids playing, drunkards drinking, brickmakers, carpenters, salespeople, and always a smile...
and i kept trying to figure out "why"? why do they take the time and interest and intention....why?,,,,and i asked heddi from germany and she said it is because they have an open heart...and i said, "yeah, maybe, but maybe they are just being polite, and i thought; why not just believe they have an open heart?!! and then i remembered caspar telling me this afternoon (as we AGAIN discussed my one meal a day that they prepare for me....and which i requested a few drops of oil for the salad, and he saw a soup bowl of oil next to the plate they were preparing for me hours in advance!! and wondered why i need a soup bowl full of oil!...and in the end, they still cannot figure out what i need on my plate...its cute...they so much want to please me...) anyways,.. i told him that by mistake i went to a funeral yesterday which i thought was going to be a ceremony of gamelon chime playing,,,and he said " oh, they must have been very happy because if there is a foreigner at a funeral it is very high status!" and suddenly i understood why they all thanked me after the funeral when all 30 of them jumped into 3 pick up trucks and drove off...i asked him why it raises the status??!! and he said it is as if a star from hollywood would suddenly show up at some occasion by us, we too would be honored and happy and feel lucky! and suddenly i realized as we walked through the streets of this little village, that it was as if elvis presley, or bill clinton were suddenly walking down the streets of yodfat, and whoever saw them would also want to yell out "hello" just in order to get their attention and get a reply back, no? so...however you want to take it, take it,,,it still requires an open heart in any case!
and the last saga today, was discovering how the water in the rice paddies fills up and empties out at whim....they just take mud and dam up an opening, or open up a dammed place...and that is how the water that comes from lakes in the mountains, waters all these fields, so simply and quietly and successfully without a single pipe...
and also found out that the man plowing with the tractor also gets rented out for a big $1 an hour...so if you have a rice field and need some plowing done...and before there was this modern day arrangement of him pushing the tractor, there used to be a bull that pulled it....ahh progress...