You know Goldfinger - now meet Goldballs and Ghandi

Note: This post does not have pictures of the man we nicknamed Goldballs, nor is there a detailed anatomical description. Somehow it doesn't seem needed. If you cannot continue reading without seeing a tasteful nudie pic, just go to the Living Statue page on Wikipedia.

This post may be a bit of a letdown because of rather sparse information on the context of our encounter with Goldballs.

All we are going to say is that it was an event where a non trivial number of people came together to hang out, enjoy time away from the normal routines of life, only to then go back to said routines.

This stringent limitation is hard on anybody, but especially difficult for someone who falls into the category "What is in one's heart is on one's lips". That's a suboptimal translation of the German proverb Wovon das Herz voll ist, davon geht der Mund über. The German says that your heart is full, making your lips overflow, a much more vivid and meaningful wording.

Since we hinted at living statues, let's mention Ghandi first. A Ghandi living statue was standing in the blazing sun on the side of one of the thoroughfares of the venue, all clad in white, all body parts not covered by the white garments painted in the exactly matching tone of white - an accomplishment in itself, if have ever tried matching up shades of white.

His dais was again the perfectly matching shade. A wicker basket for donations was in front of the dais, and yes, same shade.

Marveling at the whites, we almost forgot he represented Ghandi, one of the humans we have turned into icons, letting slip their foibles and quirks during that transformation.

So, we dropped some Euro change and continued. A few yards away, a little girl tapped us on the shoulder and held out a miniscule white scroll with an even tinier red bow.
We has seen a couple of young girls at the statue but they looked like they were just part of the audience.

Instead, it turned out, Ghandi employed child labor.

The good kind, obviously, when kids do something for fun, and it does not fulfill the weary adult definition of work.

We still need to open and read the scroll.

Then we noticed Goldballs, an old man wearing nothing but a small backpack, a hat, and shoes plus an ample amount of gold paint covering every inch of his slightly stooped, leather skinned self.

He was not standing still like Ghandi but simply wandering in the milling crowd, stopping there and then to check out something, ignoring the others and not being scrutinized by many.

Since he was headed towards us, the absence of cloth was very clear, hence the nickname Goldballs.

We noticed Goldballs a few more times shortly afterwards but stopped noticing him. We would not have been able to tell if he was still there or had left.

Now, some of you may say, what about the children, you just said there were kids.

Yes, there were, and they could not have cared less.

Plus, there is one distinct advantage that works towards protecting children if an old male is buck ass naked and wears body paint (hint: the nickname, additional hint: the paint rubs off easily).