in two weeks i'll be on the road headed to mocambique by way of st. lucia and swaziland. have tent, will travel. i'm quite nervous about dealing with the so-called "law enforcement" in mocambique. i've been told that at the border posts they will help themselves to any liquor i try to bring in. also, i've been told to bring an extra license. this is worrisome in that i don't have a license other than the one that i got at AAA where all the personal info is written in ball point pen. it's really a miracle that it got me through my first traffic infraction.temperatures are expected to climb into the 40's (celcius). multiply that by 1.8 and add 32 and poof you've got good times. on the positive side, i expect the beer in mocambique to taste especially nice at these temperatures.
for those of you with a.d.d., here's the latest in bullet format:
- i've cut my hair. my attempt to see how long i could grow it ended in "too long". (see picture)- i've seriously resumed my training for the comrades. ran for 90 minutes today through some SERIOUS hills.
- i play scrabble at lunch against the secretary in roads, ramona. i've never been so beaten in my life. and i can't blame my losses entirely on the fact that my american spellings aren't in their dictionaries over here (plow=plough, curb=kerb, etc.)
- the bcp field hockey team finished the season in last place (see picture)
- in the midlands, i just missed getting hailed on by golf-ball-sized hail.
- speaking of 'golf-ball-sized', one of those giant beatles with a horn flew into my flat. i've graduated to the next level in dealing with large insects. i wonder what could possibly come next...
one weird factoid i learned whilst booking all my accommodations is that it costs more for me to call swaziland and mocombique than it does to call the united states.
speaking of borderline interesting subjects, sandile, one of my young black coworkers down in city planning gave notice to take a higher paying job in a municipality up north a bit. the new job, i'm sure, will be paying him an assload of dough to basically scratch his ass until he retires. assuming he enjoys/tolerates firsthand experience with a sickeningly corrupt government (this coming from an american), he'll do fine. the point of this story is two-fold. sandile and i parted on bittersweet terms.
y'see last weekend was the 'end of the year holiday party'. the theme was rock and roll. the company hired a dance teacher to get us all to go through some swing dance moves. being dateless (the ONLY dateless person in the whole company), i got paired up with sandile. generously i volunteered to be the woman (he's taller) but my god if this guy couldn't get the 1-2-3-2-2-3-rock step thing down. so i dumped him and grabbed ramona (her date has back problems?). poor sandile stood there staring (heart-broken) knives at me whilst she and i jumped and jived.
the next week sandile came up to structures and somehow the conversation came up if i've ever called anyone a "nigger" before. i told him that, oddly enough, i'd used the n-word to get virgilio's friends attention when he was fall-over-get-thrown-out-of-club drunk after the office party. it had the desired effect on his drunk ass too.sandile then says, "call me one"
what?! no thanks.
"c'mon" he says.
the thing about the n-word in south africa is that it doesn't have the venom that it has in the united states. south africa has its equivalent word. starts with a "k" but i don't know how to spell it... so i won't try.
apparently the n-word is such a non-word here that people in south africa grew up eating a candy called (get this) "nigger balls". they sound like gobstoppers from america except they (and i'm not making this up) start black and "change colors as you suck on them." here's an old folk song by an afrikaans musician that mentions nigger balls. i BEG you to download the 30 second sample. it'll also give you the best taste of what an afrikaans accent sounds like.
i've also become accustomed to the accents here that if i hear an american accent (usually on the morning news) my ears perk up.
promptly changing gears, joelene and i broke up for good a few weeks ago and it's left me with plenty of spare time on my hands. my creative juices are now flowing and the fruits of my labour are either on youtube or are forthcoming. the bad news is that it has been brought to my attention (by scott anderson the maker of fantavision no less) that there is someone else out there in the world who is still creating works with fantavision. an older version of fantavision no less. and he's far more skilled with it than i. check this shit out. http://youtube.com/watch?v=9PAkjzZQvOY
there's no way i can top that. should i fall on my sword?
I first heard that song about Eskimo Pie and Nigger Balls being sung by a SA folk singer in imposed exile. He was earning his keep by playing the circuit of UK folk clubs way back in thew 1970s, and on this occasion, I saw him at Cambridge Folk Club (home of the famous Cambridge Folk Festival.) I wish I could remember his name! He was very good.
ReplyDeleteI recall him telling us the story of his explusion from SA. He had written a few satirical songs about the Apartheid regime but was inb no way an "activist", so he didn't expect anything untoward. Howveer, after a previous tour of UK folk clubs, he was greeted at Immigration in (Jo'burg?) airport by officials who said,
"You can't come in."
"Why?" he asked.
They replied, "We don't have to give you that information."
And that was that. He was sent back to the UK with nothing apart from his suitcase of dirty clothes and a guitar. Oh yeah - and a few £s of his poor earnings from singing in the folk clubs! (If you earned more than £200 a week singing in folk clubs during those days, you were doing extremely well ... but not by the wider UK standards.)
Jeremy Taylor
ReplyDeleteYep, Jeremy Taylor, and the song was called "Ag Pleeze Daddy". To be honest he doesn't really sing it in an Afrikaans accent so much as a pastiche of the accent primary school kids use.
ReplyDeleteThe song is really about kids pestering their dad to let them do all the things they love - take them on holiday, to the drive-in movies, eat sweets and treats and so on; it's a hugely popular song with a certain genetation of South Africans - me for example, I'm 50 years old and remember it as a hit when I was about eight years old. Good memories. And I remember "nigger balls" too; yes they changed colour as you sucked them, and also it's true that the N-word had no real negative connotations to South Africans; we had far worse insult words than that (to our shame).
Nigger Balls
ReplyDeleteFound this page while trying to figure out the nomenclature behind the word nickerballs, (as South Africans pronounced and spelled it). Obviously, we where kind of oblivious to the word nigger, and still is, although America is marketing it as their most famous export. Music, movies.... you name it. the word Nigger is shoved into our faces. I know the Dutch word for an albaster(sorry, cant remember the english word now) is a knikker. A glass ball roughly the same size as a nickerball. So, it is not impossible to believe that the word evolved from knikker bal and not nigger ball.
ReplyDelete