I was quite excited a couple of weeks ago when an area had become a "street art" park of sorts. I don't think that this was an official thing because there were no signs put up but all of a sudden there were real artists in there performing their craft on this unused plot of land. I thought it was nice because of the fact that the quality of the street art improved now that the painters no longer had to worry about being arrested, and the amount of senseless and ugly tagging of random buildings had started to go down. Not all street artists are talented but a couple of times when I walked through this place there were groups of people talking and learning techniques from others. It was nice to see and I personally believe this would be an excellent way for the government to cut down on vandalism without actually putting anyone in jail.

It was all too good to be true though because since the land doesn't appear to be monitored by anyone, people started to dump trash in the open space and slowly but surely, this escalated to the point where the grounds that you could previously walk around in are now filled with all manner of garbage and is once again, unusable.

Who knows how this began but given the fact that there is a piece of furniture there I would imagine that one of the nearby hotels was responsible for getting the dumping trends started. The next photo kind of backs up this notion.

Whenever you see a discarded toilet somewhere and there are thousands of rooms with toilets around this area in the way of hotels and condos, there is only really one place you can point the finger.

Unfortunately, this only lead to more and more people dumping their garbage here and since this land was never really monitored by anyone as far as I can tell, there is a very good chance that this system of using this land as a dump will likely continue.

Most of this is clearly construction debris and there are plenty of potential guilty parties in the immediate area since it is a relative hotbed for construction activity.

This is really tragic because the area was becoming somewhat of a local attraction to the point where someone set up a little stand with some plastic chairs at night where people could order drinks and watch the artists do their craft. Ever since the garbage started piling up, the owner of this little cafe - if you can even call it that - hasn't been back.

So now the only answer to all of this is going to be that the person who owns the land is likely going to seal the area off when it started out as something that was actually good for everyone; the artists, the community, as well as people who might otherwise just spray areas that they are not allowed to.

We can't have nice things here because no matter what people do it seems as though there is always going to be some bad apples that are going to screw it up. Personally, I would like to organize an effort to clear this land and make it an official spray park but I am a foreigner and when we raise our voices to officials we are either ignored or punished for being a squeaky wheel.

It was nice while it lasted... which was only about a month.