An afternoon in Detroit (I of II): Way there.

Me, my mom, and my godmother went in to Detroit one afternoon to go catch this art exhibit on forgeries.

We got off the freeway a little bit too early, and we drove around trying to find a cross street to get us to the museum.

"This is like a war zone," my mom kept saying, since most houses were boarded up or with windows knocked out or were just empty frame standing, for block after block after block, and that was just where there was houses; most of the streets had a lot of empty lots.

She reminisced, too, when we were going down one street, what a high-class neighborhood it used to be in her youth...

(Overall, I really thought that the residential streets were worse than similar parts of Chicago or Gary, though the downtown was much better than Gary.)

Anyhow, a little after that, we hit a pothole, and within a minute the tire on my godmother's car deflated, but luckily we were near to a gas station and pulled up to it without having to drive too far on the rim...

All the customers were (black), and there was this old (black) lady on drugs who kept coming over to us, and groups of young (black) (male) teenagers coming in and out of the gas station to get sodas and junk food and stuff.

We got the trunk open and I was starting to unscrew the emerency tire in the trunk (it was bolted down way tight; we had to dig out included tools to get it off), but after a few minutes this (hispanic) guy and a (white) guy came up and asked if we needed help...

It turned out that they had a company dropping off dumpsters in front of repossessed houses (others filled up the dumpsters), and they were stopped at the gas station and saw us.

As the (hispanic) guy changed our tire, we were all talking, and he was saying that when they dropped off the dumpsters, people would always come out and shout and them and telling them to take it back, and that they had the wrong address, etc., but they would just be calm and say that they had the right address, and leave the dumpster.

He said sometimes after others took out all the people's crap (a lot of times people didn't do it themselves), at night the people would move it all back in the house, so they'd have to go back and do everything all over again - except this time the people clearing out the house would make sure to knock out the windows or something so the place was uninhabitable.