the head trip to work

so my cousin amie ptak is back in the usa after a trip to build schools and teach english in tansania. she wrote extensively about her experiences in the deeper, more secluded we'll say, africa.

her experience was definitely more third-worldy whereas mine is maybe other-worldly. it's true i'm living in the beverly hills of africa and you might even go so far as to say i'm living in the los angeles of south africa. durban might be the san francisco and i've heard joburg described as the new york.

bear in mind that being the 'new york' of south africa doesn't mean lots of quaint jazz clubs, pretzel and hot dog stands on every corner and man dressed as a gorilla waiting to hug you on top of a building. and being the 'los angeles' of south africa doesn't mean taquirias, red carpets and 'pietermaritzburg' being prominently displayed in white letters on the surrounding hills. it just means sprawl. and sprawl means traffic. and traffic means pollution.

one misconception i may have fueled in my earlier blogs is that i live in an upscale, almost american, city. while true in some regards, i've elaborated at length and via pictures i've taken on my adjusting to the subtle differences and finding remnants of home (read: beer and cheese farms). it's easy to take pictures of the touristy and safe areas of pmb but the sketchier scenes don't often present the opportunity to pull out a camera.

amie's trip to tanzania was painted with a different brush than i've been painting this trip with. she talks about handing out shoes to children that have never seen a white person before. i've been been writing about joining a croquet club. so at the risk of offending any south african readers i'm going to try to paint with the same brush amie used to describe her trip.

ahem.

on the trip in to work from woodlands, joelene's side of town, we drive through a neighborhood consisting of two and three bedroom, one story houses. typical south african construction: brick with tile roof. usually one or two decent sized windows and a plaster finish with a recent paint job. the windows invariably have burglar bars over them and the property is lined with a fence usually fitted with some form of burglar prevention ranging from sharp spikes on top to the extreme of razor wire coils.

once i take a right and stop running parallel to the city of pbm, i roll down a hill overlooking the whole city. on a map and even from with the city itself, to me, it never looks a thing like it does from outside. scattered throughout are several multi-storey buildings but they don't create a sense of denseness. moreso a sense of legitimacy as the province's capitol. from afar the town center of pmb looks like it could take quite awhile to drive through seeing as no freeway runs through it but provided a steady flow to the traffic, one can pass through on commercial road, the busiest road through the center of town, or even speed along on one of the side streets.

but before i make it into the first road in the city center of pmb, i pass by a pocket of industrial factories. one road over is a more serious industrial area which, if you drive by with the windows down, will smell like the pet food it's turning out. while this industrial area may have once been technically outside of town, pietermaritzburg has grown out to meet it. pmb's poorest have taken advantage of the adjacent factories' impact on land value as well as a small river that passes by and created a squatter camp. of course the surrounding square miles of pmb contain dozens of such camps, this one is pushed up to within a few dozen meters of east street, the street that constitutes pmb central's eastern perimeter.

the houses are made of stolen corrugated metal panel and wood planks. some are identical to those you would find hundreds of kilometers away, far from a city like pietermaritzburg. a home built entirely from mud and stone with horizontal branches at six inch spacing running the perimeter to hold the walls together. laundry hangs from clotheslines endlessly and residents turn into pedestrians the moment they set foot outside their front doors.

sharing the road with me, and making frequent unannounced stops, is south africa's post-apartheid version of mass transit: the koombi. i've spoken about this already but this time i'll try to spare everyone the jaded perspective. imagine taking the aggressive driving tactics of new york taxi drivers, degregulating it, multiplying it by ten and then putting it behind the wheel of a squareback van. then mix in a little mexican lowrider look and you've got the koombi. the most extreme of which are bass-thumping, minivans with full-body paintjobs depicting american models in bikinis. the middle ground is a white van with some urbanized, quasi-ghetto expression painted in a pink or blue font with some silver glitter around the edges. unfortunately, most of these expression stick to my brain like an egg to teflon. think jonah...

"TOKYO DRIFT"
"IN MEMORY OF "
and my personal favorite:
"ONCE TASTED NEVER WASTED"

some even sport religious quotes, not necessarily biblical, but something an evangelical might spout on a television show. bear in mind that since routes aren't assigned by any governing metro body, territoriality does exist. conflicts between drivers are resolved with automatic weapons.

oops, looks like the jaded perspective crept in there at the end.

speaking of jaded though, i became unjaded this last weekend during a trip to the beach with joelene and her niece and nephew. as some of you may have heard from me, the beaches in durban stretch wide and far but swimming is only allowed in little 20 meter sections ever half kilometer or so where lifeguards sit and watch. the reason: riptides and strong currents. i thought it was just because 90% of the people in this country can't swim but it turns out the riptides are pretty serious.

i took the nephew pretty far out (on my back) and pretty quick found it difficult to paddle in. we were swept outside the 20 meter wide swath and we must have looked ridiculous enough to warrant a rescue with me walking along the bottom when i could and joelene's little nephew's head the only thing above the water after each wave. we were back in waist deep water by the time the life guard got to us but i learned my lesson: don't swim with children on your back.

there are PLENTY of stories that came out of that trip to the beach with joelene. the basic jist is that we looked like the proud parents of two children whose skin color didn't match that of their parents. she and i had a great time looking watching the kids throw themselves around in the shallow water and every now and then we even found time to steal ourselves a kiss. but by the end of the day, after we'd dropped the kids off back at her brother's place, we were too tired to even take off our clothes. "we ARE getting old" joelene remarked at one point.

so next chance i get to write, i'll relate the weird and funny stories about the beach trip.

in related news, at a company costume contest joelene won a weekend at a nice hotel in durban. so that'll be later this month. just the two of us. stories from that weekend might not be suitable for this family blog.

ahem.

As I'm Writing This I'm Eating a Chicken Liver Pizza

...and i'm drinking an award-winner port... and listening to they might be giants... and improving my video editing knowledge through youtube. it's a koosh life.

speaking of getting my ass kicked by little old ladies, i set off this morning to find the one croquet club in maritzburg. i started by searching the web but, surprise surprise, croquet clubs don't advertise online. or anywhere. if you need them, you must find them yourself. in this sense, croquet clubs are like the a-team.

i decided to start the search at the bowls club (lawn bowling club) that i run/drive past on my way to work every morning. when i pulled in around 10:30 or so, the pitches ("rinks") were empty so i inquired with the first person i saw. the man was a tall 70 to 80 year-old named dobby who said bowling wouldn't start until later so i might as well come inside the clubhouse to watch the tri-nations rugby match about to start (s.a. springboks versus the new zealand all blacks). this building is basically the veterans memorial hall for pmb. inside was a nazi flag... captured perhaps? don't ask, don't tell.

after the rugby match ended, dobby took me outside to one of the pitches to roll a few. i wasn't dressed in the required white pants, shirt, hat and flat-bottomed shoes but they make exceptions when it's your first time. a little about the sport of bowls and how it's different from what some of us americans are used to, bocci ball:

bowls is played on grass,
bowls has no side boards,
the balls you roll aren't spherical and one side is heavier than the other. this means every ball rolled curves between one and three meters and, if thrown skillfully can come in almost sideways at the end (see posted video) on the picasa page.
the one thing that's not different is that i suck at bowls just as much as i suck at bocci ball.

after a few rounds, dobby took his leave and gave me directions to where he believed the croquet club was. behind another bowling club. pmb has five bowling clubs so whoever says that there's nothing for young people to do in this town is quite clearly overlooking bowls.

for any of you that have looked at the zoomed in satellite imagery of pmb, you've surely noticed a huge patch of green (or brown depending on the time of year the pictures were taken). this is a large area of parks, bowling greens, memorial gardens and even pmb's stadium where maritzburg united plays its home games. for some reason i've never ventured through this beautiful area. maybe it's because there's a cemetery right near the entrance.

this second bowling club is located in this pocket of green and instead of a meeting hall with a nazi flag, they had a meeting hall full of young women getting ready to celebrate a friend's baby shower. this club was self-described as having fewer "coffin dodgers" than the first one.

as senior citizens began to arrive in their traditional white pants, shirt, hat etc carrying a bag with their bowls and other equipment, i ordered a red pepper soup with basil and waited for the tournament to begin. and i waited.

eventually i started to feel self-conscious about being the only spectator so i went for a walk and stumbled upon the croquet club about to start a warm up game. even though i wasn't wearing the traditional white colors, they were insistent that i be the fourth player in the game they were about to start. the rules they were playing by were, not surprisingly, drastically different from those taught to me years ago by my dad (rules that i'm sure were tweaked significantly to pique the interest of a kid who could barely swing the mallet). the games were all doubles so i always had a teammate to let down with my inability to shoot a straight shot when it counted. part of the problem is that the mallets are some serious pieces of wood. much heavier than i'm used to and i realized i'm the type that adjusts my swing whilst i'm swinging. not easy to do with a 15 pound mallet.

so in addition to being well under half the median age, i was also the only person there to hit the ball "hockey style". it's a style that i was delicately suggested to consider changing over time. SCREW THAT!

one thing i should report is that doubles croquet involves a lot of malicious tactics. blasting opposing balls out of bounds constitutes close to a third of all the shots. constituting about half of the shots are little-old-grey-haired ladies. so you have little old ladies cursing each other with british accents. it's ADORABLE. also, the skill level there is amazing. the wicket openings are maybe 1.1 times the size of the ball you're using so even a straight on shot is tough, yet these ladies are rolling shots through from over 10 meters out. i missed a shot from about half a meter out. fifteen seconds later my ball was blasted out of bounds.

after i was exhausted from playing croquet, i watched a little bowls tournament in the centrum silver age category. the skill level is ridiculous. i shot a little video and it's up on the picasa webpage.

the bowls rinks are situated by not just the restaurant but the semi-adjoined bar. as i was leaving i saw a table-full of blokes producing pickled vegetables in super-hot chili-pepper oil. my accent landed me a place at the table and a glass of hansa pils. the next two hours were spent defending the sport of american football, my decision to come here (they were all celebrating their forthcoming emigration) and anything else they could come up with to complain about. lively to say the least. the bar was packed with blokes my age but none of them consider playing any of the croquet or bowls... shame.

i ended up leaving with a bellyful of beer and a jar of those chili oil vegetables. i had been sticking my fingers in there for the whole two hours and it made for a unique sensation when i went to take out my contacts later.

leaving the realm of what you may consider interesting subject matter, the following is a catch up of my life, my family in africa and my hobbies. for some reason not in that order.

firstly, when i'm not playing croquet, my copious amounts of spare time are being spent learning video editing skills for editing the cartoon i squeezed out in my first few months here. some of you know that i tracked down scott anderson, the creator of fantavision (the animation program from the early 80s that i use to animate) and told him about "into the night: the third coming" on youtube (with an inexplicable 2000 views and a four star rating). so hopefully the next project, "because they can..." will make him even more proud (and not get flagged on youtube for being sexually explicit). mom, dad... you're gonna be SO proud.

my cousin amie is still alive and well teaching english and cleaning up a little speck of africa for a village in tanzania. she's surviving snakes, the thornfeld and no television. compare and contrast her experience with mine. i'm drinking port and eating kfc (sometimes at the same time...). i also have a second cousin who, i believe, is on her way or will be on her way to sudan soon. here i was thinking i was a bad ass for moving to south africa and then i get shown up... BY MY OWN FAMILY!

shame...

i believe i'll have at least two more cousins in africa in early 2008 (david and robyn). they'll actually be in SOUTH AFRICA.

awesome...

nextly, the bad tie war at BCP engineers is over. bad-tie-war-refugees are returning to find their bad-tie-homes destroyed by strayed bad-tie-laser-guided bad-tie-missiles.

and speaking of work. work is still great. i'm under the gun on a few major projects. i've been working on a bridge portal (a beam with two legs that supports a road deck 6 meters off the ground). working in meters i never really had a sense of scale of this beast until thought about it and realized i could stand upright inside the beam. it's a big ass structure.

another project i'm working on had a guy come in and do the surveying with a set of laser thingamajigs. the result is a cad image that you can "fly" through. here's an image from it. its a road traveling over some train tracks. the traffic signs, road and abutments are shown solid gray. the hard-to-see grey lines are contour lines. neat.

lastly, i'll be coming back to the states for a whopping week in mid august to officiate the wedding of uber close friends kristi and nate. unlike last time, i won't be taking one week layovers everywhere that i go. if you live in d.c. or london and want to say 'hi', i recommend running out onto the tarmac. i'll be in a (over the counter) drug-induced sleep several seats in from the window over the wing.

from your updates it sounds like california is still standing. news from america doesn't really make it into the rotation here on sabc news so everything i know is what i've heard from all of you. i hear everyone now talks like pirates.

really? i'll have to see it with me own eye to b'lieve it!

Hang 10 like a Horse

my weekend: where to start?

FRIDAY: there was so much going on in durban this weekend that I decided to spend the whole weekend there. problem is i don't really know anyone in durban. to my great benefit, virgilio gave me the name and number of an old university friend, elisio (also from mozambique), that lives in the town. so i was set. i pulled out the map, found the cross-street and then forgot to bring the map. 10 points.

i then learned an interesting tid-bit about south africa: gas stations ("garages" here) don't sell road maps. but they do sell mutton pies.

on the way in to durban on friday night i decided to meet up with my only pen-pal currently in south africa. a berkely ph.d student doing something-or-other research in johannesburg. she was staying the night with a family in one of durban's outlying towns, hillcrest. the map would've been handy to find my way there and back.

in hillcrest i passed a chinese restaurant. if i hadn't been in a hurry to meet elisio and if jenny hadn't already eaten i thought it would make for good copy to eat chinese food in south africa with a jew from america. or at least it would for a good start to a joke. "so two jews walk into a chinese restaurant in south africa..."

jenny got my name from our mothers being friends. turns out jenny had my dad as a chemistry teacher and we apparently went to preschool together.

when we got to elisio's he was making dinner. i could tell cuz there was a fish head in the frying pan. after dinner we grabbed a drink and dessert at a little outdoor cafe / restaurant that jenny said reminded her a little of berkely. so that was nice. it was nice getting to talk with another american sharing the same or similar experiences. we laughed at how we both are saying things like, "just now", "is it?", and our favorite "shame...". it's now a knee-jerk reaction we realized. if we hear something tragic, really independent of how tragic, one says, "shame".

the remains of three missing children were found buried under their neighbors house: "shame"

i left my gloves at work: "shame"

but depending on how tragic it is, you change how you say it. you use the word itself to express your feelings. slower, louder, more emphasis on the "sh". i'm curious if i could use the word as an exclamation for something good.

jonah, your map of kwazulu-natal is ready to be picked up: pumping fists, "shame!"

SATURDAY:

i managed to get myself a ticket to the july show, south africa's biggest horse race. helicopters were landing in a daisy chain to drop off some of durban's more successful and financially flippant residents.

the show is also a HUGE fashion event. i'm fuzzy on the details but i believe there were fashion shows going on somewhere. what i'm not fuzzy on is that everybody that goes to the july show, dresses to the nines... almost like it's a car show or something. open backs were standard, low cut fronts down to the navel were far from uncommon, and skirts were shorter than the jockeys. as i may have said already, many turf grasses are indigenous here so south africa, if it wants a parking lot, just plants grass and doesn't even need to worry about installing a sprinkler system. in other words, we parked on a golf course. the track that the horses run on is also grass. oh, the point of the story was that all the women were dressed up crazy which invariably means, high heels. on soft grass... it hurt to watch women walk from their cars to the entrances. but on the plus side, they were aerating the soil better than the ibis birds with the long arcing beks.

another thing about the fashion. the theme was "silk safari". india meets africa? so there were some interesting takes on that. silk garters with camouflage skirts (eat your heart out guys). some people treated it almost like halloween, making incredibly eccentric outfits from scratch. something you have to see to truly understand.

another thing that americans might have trouble understanding or believing is the lack of a fear of terrorism or robbing the concessions of revenue from overpriced food and drinks. there were literally NO restrictions on what you're allowed to bring in. ice coolers weren't searched, shrimp platters were brought in en masse and i even saw a few gas camping stoves wheeled in through the main entrance along with the gas tanks.

inside was free booze and food and an armada of cute girls waiting on everyone hand and foot. my ticket entitled me to a v.i.p. tent with our own person to take our bets and some flat screen televisions showing the races and the stats, etc. it also showed the south africa v. australia tri-nations game.

i'm not a betting man but what are the odds of making 10 bets throughout the day on horses to just to place in the top 3 and not winning once? i used homer simpson logic of betting on horses with names i liked: "groove armada", "jay peg", "cozumel", "statue of liberty"... all losers.

so the event went all day and everyone in our tent was making chit-chat all day long. i should point out that the tent was for employees of a big investment firm (so when i talked to people about "horses" and "bets" i referred to them instead as "futures" and "investments"). you could also people-watch and see the interoffice affairs that people were better at hiding around the office but not good at hiding whilst drunk in a circus tent. fun!

there were 13 races over the whole day with number 7 being the most important of all of them. at this point i decided to make my way to the track to watch the ponies tear past me live and in person. what an amazing atmosphere.

now when i say there were 13 races, i should clarify. horses only run in 12 of them. the "13th race", as it's officially called, involves only drunk male patrons of the july show racing the last 100 meters buck naked. i was TOO SHY to consider participating.





get it? that was a joke.

so there i was asking complete strangers "how do i sign up for the 13th race?". most people said "you don't sign up" but it wasn't until a woman explained to me that it's really something you have to jump over the railing to participate in, that i realized it wasn't restricted to size... ahem... numbers of participants and you just crash the course with your naked ass at the 100m marker.

the woman turned out to be a real sweetheart and offered to hold my clothes (and underpants) for me. so as the horses bolted by during the 12th race, i stood surrounded by indian south africans, all with cell phone cameras at ready, my shoes untied, tie off, shirt off and pants unbottoned. "go, now!" she kept saying. i insisted that i wasn't budging until i saw the guy on the other side of the track, who was wearing only boxers, make his move. it's a good thing too because a lagging horse would've run me over. moments later they opened up the gates to allow people to cross (see my picasaweb album) and that's when the place erupted.

the next day i would realize that i gashed my left leg in two places jumping the concrete gate.

i ran out there with my underpants on but they were pulled down by a stranger within two seconds of my arrival. the pre-race involved a lot of nude guys running around high-fiving and saluting the crowd. after a few moments of calisthenics i was limbered up and ready to make my country proud (next year i'm going to have a number painted on). we lined up and one guy stood in front with an air horn but before i knew it, people were running this way and that. i'll say this, the grass was really nice to run on but all my jogging to work in the morning wasn't enough to let me sprint 100 meters at full-throttle. i was so impressed that i passed most of the other drunk-asses (started in about 20th but got up to 5th) until i realized my legs were already giving up on me. i guess that's why horses have a backup pair. i tried whipping myself to get a a good last 20 meters but it only made me feel dirty.

not to pun, but it was a photo finish as flash bulbs were going like crazy.

and for some reason the first race wasn't considered official enough so i had to trot back to the start line and line up for a second race. this time i was in the back and... uh... it's a different race from the back side. people were getting bumped by their friends and crashing and taking down clusters of runners around them. i even had to jump over one 'oke who had his feet slapped out from under him by his friend behind him. i got a second boost of adrenaline trying not to end up naked and on a stretcher in front of thousands of south africans.

SUNDAY:

sunday was the last day of the durban beach festival. a week of sporting events and other crazy stuff taking place all along the south beach of durban. events include lives shows, a surf contest, the african fifa world cup qualifier (brazil 2007), a volleyball tournament, etc.

so elisio drove down there early and grabbed some breakfast on the top floor of a place on the beach where we watched kids doing their best to shred on durban's over head-high break. then we started walking towards the beach that had the beach soccer tournament. when we got there, a huge queue had already formed and it wasn't moving. through a series of impatient follies we were always too far back in the wrong line to get in...

a white security guard that had kinda misdirected earlier nonchalantly waved me over to let us cut to the front of the queue but his coworker wasn't interested in giving a line of 300 africans reason to riot. but to be fair there were riot police there on horses that ended up doing nothing.

while the lines to get in were huge, i brilliantly noticed there was no line to get out. slipping the security guard at the exit a c-note (too much? we'll never know) got elisio and i in (and some third guy oddly enough). it was hilarious because the woman who was in charge was super-scared of getting caught. i was pretty sure that if anyone in the queue outside who saw us outside then saw us inside, it would translate to a beat-down for me. luckily i blended in real nice into the crowd (see picture below). we found space in the front row somehow. primo seats.

the final match was nigeria versus senegal. three 20 minute periods. the fact that you can throw it in to the goalie is just one of the subtle variations on the theme. also, the sport is a riot to watch because there's so much juggling and flicking the ball involved. my eyes are getting sand in them just thinking about it. in case you're wondering, nigeria came back from a 0-3 deficit to win 6-5. the tying goal at 5-5 was a diving header into the far side of the goal. the picture above is nigerian fans celebrating. see my picasaweb page to see pictures of the game and, more importantly, the cheerleaders.

a little sociological information if you want. one quarter of the stadium was dedicated to v.i.p.s and media. in the v.i.p. area there were quite a few whites and even a few indian south africans. out of the plus or minus one hundred guests it was predominantly white in that quarter. the other three quarters, which held what i estimate to be around 3000 people, had one white guy.

after the game ended, elisio and i walked to the surf contest in just enough time to catch the awards ceremony so we kept walking and watched the amateur kids riding the waves just 100 meters from where the contest had been. nearby, sabc1 (the s.a. public television channel) was doing a live bit on stuff still happening at the beach fest and i saw about 10 blokes holding a blanket with something or someone in it. i told elisio to stop and watch. a few moments later the contents of the blanket were revealed as a 50-pound african child was launched into the air (not to mention out of frame of the camera). my female intuition told me that the child had never met his launching compatriots before. this is what a candy bar and "hey kid, you wanna be on tv?" can buy you in south africa. he seriously ran away from them afterwards and grabbed onto a handrail to keep from doing it again.

so cute!

mrs. singh inaction

my cousin amie just arrived in africa to teach english to children (and teachers) in tanzania. don't ask me what they're gonna use the english for in tanzania. she wrote home to describe her experience in africa after reading it, i was reminded of a very very important thing that everyone should be reminded of: AFRICA IS BIG.

get ready for a jag. here it comes. i have a map of the u.s. up in my office that my parents sent (from AAA. known as AA here. ever notice that "alcoholics anonymous" is just one letter from the "automobile association of america"?). after work bridget and ramona were looking at it with me and ramona remarked that the united states is big. yes it is. it's bigger than south africa by a significant factor but it's a lot smaller than the entire continent of africa. i know i'm stating the obvious but let's look at what might not be so obvious.

unlike the united states one doesn't hop in the car and take a road trip to north africa. south africa has an "interstate" road system but it hasn't been around for as long as the united states'. my road trip with gavin where we covered something like 7 or 8 states in 10 days (ski trip included) highlighted the fact that the u.s. road system is one of american cold-war philosophy; be able to get anywhere in a hurry in the event of commie invasion. two lane and four lane roads will get you anywhere you want and if you have a navigator with a map, you can cut corners saving scores of miles on a trip.

on the other hand, south africa's national road system is still growing but is well behind demand. perhaps partially because of a lack of anticipation of the majority of the population ever owning vehicles. many people can point to the national roads (two to three lanes each direction) and point to a winding one lane each direction road and talk about getting stuck behind a long-haul trucker going 60kph and being unable to pass the whole trip. so it's improving (that's what i'm doing for a living here) but this is just south africa and bear in mind that south africa is the most developed country in the whole southern half and one the most, if not the most, including the top of the continent. so what you get here, isn't the standard. federal tax revenue from california can potentially fund projects in montana. do you think south africa is throwing money at problems in sudan?

so back to the thesis of this retarded jag... south africa is not only a hell of a lot bigger than the country of the united states, but it's not an interconnected network of roads, governments and economies. amie wrote in her email about the travel time that it required to get to her destination. small planes, small roads, unreliable vehicles... you name an ingredient that would cause slow travel and you'll find it when you try to visit an "off-the-beaten-path" destination in africa. anyone that's taken a road trip in a road-hugging, tight-suspension honda s2000 knows that the u.s. caters to off-the-beaten-path travelers with well paved roads. leave the sports cars at home if you want to see south africa.

next on the list of not-so-obvious things about africa is that, due to its size, africa has as much diversity in its landscapes as the united states. i'm finally taking the time to write about this subject because it's become glaringly obvious and, to be honest, a little frustrating. i honestly do wish that it were easier to go adventurin'. i haven't walked through any jungle where i thought i might see tarzan swing by yet.

the source of this concern is that i'm beginning to look at the country through the eyes of any of you who might come visit in 2010 for the world cup. the prefix "south" in "south africa" does belong. it truly is a modifier to its noun africa. some parts are so different from mainstream perceptions of africa that they even resemble parts of the united states. the differences are subtle to vacationers but become clear the longer you stay here.

point in case being this last weekend. snow fell only 30 to 60 minutes from here. just days later (and days before) it was shorts weather. warm winds and blue skies. it fell at the beginning of the week and i was determined to blow the minds of all the americans reading this blog by posting a picture of me making a snow angel (in july) a week after walking on the beachfront in durban. the picture to the left (if you click on it) shows a teensie bit of snow in the mountains. three months ago maritzburg was in a heat wave and only one month ago i was running the air con to keep cool in my office.

the snow fell all over eastern south africa at elevations reached just outside town. by saturday (our days are very short right now) much of the snow had melted but i was hell-bent to get to the snow. but there was a problem. joelene and i broke up thursday and she had been serving as my brains for the past two months (if you're more interested in the drama of my dating life than the drama of south africa versus the united states, i'll go into a little more detail of the breakup in about one paragraph). so i was without a navigator. the result was me just pointing my car at the snow and driving. i hit dirt roads that would result in dead ends and never managed to get there. i wrapped up the day by grabbing a cheddar sausage and roll at a little family-run restaurant called "gunther's" in the midlands. i was again the only patron and again alone so gunther and his wife and i talked. he moved here from germany to get away from his military education and worked in transportation for awhile but eventually just settled in the midlands and bought an amazing piece of property and turned it into a restaurant.

i apologized for eating slowly and keeping them from closing up shop but i guess they live there so no biggie eh? gunther said he was taught to analyze potential employees based on how they eat. i asked what a slow eater such as myself meant and he said it meant i was "full of sorrow". here i was thinking i chewed and talked too much. it made me sad to realize how sad i ate.

maybe i should smoke some marijuana to lose my sorrow cuz i eat faster when i'm high.

so for those of you following my dating life in africa, here's the whole enchilada. i should start at the beginning because that's where the end started. our first couple of dates were great but, if you remember, a text-message mix up led to both of us thinking the other person wasn't interested. as you may know, i shrugged and reluctantly moved on and started gaylene. when joelene contacted me i told her that i had moved on and regretted doing so but wasn't the type of guy to just break up with gaylene the day after 'getting serious' with her because someone else came into the picture. so ten days later, i broke up with gaylene because joelene might have been back in the picture. crazy part was that naturally joelene had accumulated a list of admirers and, just like i had, had contacted them about getting serious. get ready for a little culture shock or whatever... while i had been having awkward and unsatisfying sex with my next in line, joelene had been proposed to by hers. man #2 had offered up a marriage of convenience that she didn't have to decide on until her birthday at the end of june. that was two months off at the time. add to the ticking of that clock a biological clock ticking like the one in the croc's stomach in neverland, joelene was seriously ready to settle down.

for selfish reasons, i wanted joelene all to myself. like i said, i knew she could serve as my tour guide and brains. that and if you've seen pictures of her you'll know another reason i wanted to spend time with her. when joelene and i got "serious", by which i mean keeping a toothbrush at her place, this put a strain on phone calls from man #2 (not to mention her other admirers) who was calling to say "hi" and check in. after less than a week she came clean and broke off the engagement. the bloke took it well. i expected profanity but the guy was upstanding.

again, i was with joelene for selfish reasons. i knew she was what i was looking for while i was in south africa but joelene wanted something i couldn't give her which was a serious serious commitment and if i were to give it to her i was under the gun to match this other guy's offer. i was never the type to rush into a commitment and after get burned by shannon in the marriage, i'm really making sure i move slowly and cautiously. in the beginning joelene wondered aloud quite often why we were together if we weren't going to stay together. i asked her to give me three months of not taking it day by day but just letting down her hair and enjoying the moment. a relationship with an expiration date is always lucky to make it that long and naturally last week we fell one month shy of our three month re-evaluation period.

what doomed us was pretty simple. joelene expected me to be perfect and when i wasn't it caused serious problems. to be fair to her, joelene lived up to her own standards of perfection. the only problem she had was that she really let every little mistake i made get to her. the break up came after a great night with one misunderstanding that was allowed to ruin the whole thing. it came two days before her birthday... remember that's when man #2 was to come visit (he never changed his plans) to hear her response. for all i know, she said said "yes" and they're getting married sometime in the next six months or less. i felt bad for keeping her to myself while we were together and potentially keeping her from true happiness but now i feel even worse. not because i think she's making a mistake but because the whole thing is holding up a mirror to myself. i failed to make a snow angel and today rhona (a coworker that i introduced to her and is now bosom buddies with her) showed me pictures of mrs. singh playing in the snow...

another kick in the gut came when grant told me that tickets to the big horse race in durban this weekend that i've been looking forward to since i got here is sold out. joelene bought two tickets but odds are i'm not getting one anymore. oh well. the feeling of loneliness is just magnified by losing the closest thing i had to a friend so far. i pity the next person to come along that i'll have to latch onto to see the sights.

on a related subject, tomorrow is virgilio's last day at bcp's maritzburg office before he ships off to richard's bay, about 2 to 3 hours up the coast from here. he'll be closer to his home country of mozambiqe.

ten points if you read all this. we'll chalk this entry up to catharsis rather than trying to serve as informative.

Thee Strikes and You're Out (of Luck)

those of you in the know may already know south africa is going through a public sector strike. public workers differ here in some ways from back in the states. they're also the same in many ways. here in south africa, some hospitals operate under the government as do schools. so a strike not only sends children home requiring their parents to stay home with them but it cripples hospitals. and not to disparage africa's public sector but i'm not going out on a limb when i say that the public sector wasn't doing so hot to start with. the post office queues are like watching the grass grow. car registration already had a backup of months with cars sitting on lots, sold but unable to be given to their owners.

in slow stages, more and more of the public workers are striking demanding a 12% pay increase to account for inflation. the government only wants to pay out 6%. at one point the offer went up to 7%. no dice.

one thing i haven't spoken about enough is that protests are not uncommon in this country. lots of frustration leads to lots of protesting and the protests are on the news frequently. while in the states, protests involve angrily waving pickets, angrily walking in circles, and angrily shouting through loudspeakers, protests here have dancing. it's called "toi-toi-ing" and it has moves and songs that go along with it. so it's kind of a different feel.

but that's only when things are going well. when things go worse, it goes way worse.

the resentment that has formed between public workers that strike and those who don't has resulted in an almost irish-factory-worker-esque "don't cross the picket line" mentality. some striking teachers and workers are going to work and beating up those that are working. one hospital had its drains blocked and then faucets left on to flood the place. tragically counterproductive.

last week the koombi drives (not in the public sector) striked in sympathy. this left kitchens unstaffed all over kwazulu-natal. 90% of restaurants have stayed closed or closed early.

next week things may get worse. police haven't joined the strike but they've threatened to join in eventually if the 12% isn't met soon. so far, the military has stepped in to try to help out in hospitals where nurses are providing only a skeleton crew. but the military (i've heard) wants an 18% pay hike... so if the cops walk, who knows what will happen. i think nobody expects it to go that far. BUT. one thing i picked up on quickly here is that a lot of people believe that the government is sitting on piles of cash. with such a high tax-rate, they argue, where is all the money going? bear in mind, south africa doesn't have the borrowing power that the united states has. we don't print our own money here. the world cup has allowed south africa a lot of leeway but it only goes so far as people believe in their investment. a nation of striking workers demanding what their government can't give them... well you do the math.

the difference in people is exemplified by the scene as well. the public sector is largely black while the private sector... else. striking never occurred under the "old" government and it highlights shortcomings of the current government and even the direction of the country. others just don't understand why the government won't give it's people the raise necessitated by inflation.

one last thought. the inflation is caused by rising oil prices. rising oil prices which are being caused by a war in iraq headed by the united states. the cause and effect relationship isn't talked about as such here. or at least i haven't heard it yet.

Let's Beer It for Here!

joelene's been sick so i've had some time to myself. i figured i need to go out to the midlands to stock up on flavored coffees and so i did. the place that sells the flavored coffee is called 'the wine cellar' and it's tucked away pretty deep towards the end of the meander. i should take a picture of this place because it's so cozy. wine bottles EVERYWHERE many just going bad (or "going off" as they would say here).

the "i should take a picture" thing brings me to my first tangent. it took me two weeks but i've managed to place an order for a new cell phone. one with a camera. a 3.2 megapixel camera to be exact so the days of me forgetting my camera shall soon be over. getting my hands on a good camera was quite an ordeal. unlike in the states where you walk into a store and walk out with a phone 30 minutes later, here, no matter who you are, you need to provide a copy of your lease agreement or proof of residence as well as three months bank statements. no exceptions. now i can understand how people can walk in from some township, get a phone and disappear and never make their payments again but it is harder to get a phone than it is to buy a car. and here's a quote from a phone salesman: "a phone is easier to take out of the country". does everyone understand that one? good. vodocom wasn't satisfied that i had a letter hand-signed by one of my personal bankers at redlands saying, he hasn't been banking for three months but he's a on ok bloke. mtn didn't like that my work visa would expire before my 24 month contract would be up (in fact, they couldn't even figure out my work visa at first). so i've ordered the phone through my company. they'll deduct the bill from my paycheck. now i just sit and wait. expect to be inundated with pictures... until i'm robbed and lose the phone.


i bought a bottle of port and... 9 bottles of begian beer! after 3 months, i've finally found belgian beer. let's talk beer.

the beers that run the show here are 'heineken' (pilsner), 'caslte' (lager), 'hansa' (pilsner) and 'carling black label' (lager). now, similar to "mum deoderant" and "lux soap", carling black label is a product i'm familiar with thanks to my time with old time radio. it's not really popular in the states but the english love it so it sells here.

i'm not exactly sure how it all works but i think there's a little problem with south african breweries buying out other breweries and smothering the competition. i think hansa had leased the rights to brew heineken here but now heineken has pulled the contract saying that hansa is getting too big because of this deal. on a side note, namibia brews a 'windhoek' lager that isn't hard to find. but it's all megabrewed. so for the first many weeks here it was all lager and pilsner unless i bought something from the one local brewery (about a 30 minute drive from here) nottingham road brewery. they make a brown ale (whistling weasel) that is rich in flavor. tastes like home. few people believe that in the usa there is a huge selection of ales. nottingham road also makes a stout as does castle (milk stout). both are 7s out of 10 compared to guinness and mackeson being 10s and 11s. nottingham road only makes four beers typically. they had a pink beer i've heard last year and they commonly will come out with a fifth beer for a couple months... baited breath.

at the last company month-end drinks and dinner, kevin, who was in charge of beer couldn't find any heineken (due to that licensing problem) so he grabbed a bunch of tall 'bavaria' cans. the only wheat beer so far that i've found in this country modeled after the german style of brewing but made here in south africa. so that made me a little happier even though i've never been nuts for weisens.

but today i found three types of belgian beers at the wine cellar. duvel with it's requisite high alcohol level and two others; a golden and a brown. not cheap. they not only would cost less in the states but this duvel isn't the quality of belgian beer that you can get at trader joe's. sigh... this duvel doesn't have any yeast in the bottle so no master pour to show off to my friends. i've already taken the bottle to boozies the local liquor store across the street to say "get this beer here!". they must think the world of me there.

i also bought a bottle of south african port. here's the itemized receipt: 5 duvels. 4 other belgian beers, 750grams of gourmet coffee and a bottle of quality port. "see you next week" i said as i left.

this little mom and pops store has people walking out with multiple boxes of wine and booze. amazing. it's getting cold in south africa so this is one way to stay warm eh? it's now sunday evening and i've just cracked one of the duvels. very very good stuff. very creamy head on it, with the sweet very belgian flavor. not as good as the two beers that you can get at trader joes but i'm very happy still.

after leaving the wine cellar i stopped in at 'gunthers'. a small german eatery on a hillside overlooking some of the midlands rolling hills. the menu includes german sausages served on a roll with potatoes. i got a cheese sausage and spoke with the owner, gunther. he was in germany for world cup. we spoke about the night and day differences between germany and south africa. trains that run on time without interruption versus south africa's lack of a train system (or public transportation for that matter). gunther used to work in south africa's transport planning or something and he spoke to me extensively about suggestions he had for fixing the transportation problem in joburg and all of south africa. i had to explain that my job consists of design and not planning. it took me 1,5 hours to finish just the sausage and as i left a couple showed up and ordered 7 sausages between the two of them.

in other news, the public workers here are still striking demanding a 12% pay increase. whilst the upper-eschelon officials are giving themselves larger pay increases, they argue there's not enough money for the 12% raises. they did offer 6.5% but it was rejected. whilst there are plenty of similarities between the usa and s.a., the differences leap out at you during a worker strike. the strikers include teachers as well as the nurses at government run hospitals. deaths have been recorded due to lack of hospital workers and some people are losing sympathy for the strikers. also schools are closed and bridgit has brought her son to work the past couple of days. here's where south africa acts a little different from the usa (and more like ireland) with its strikes. here, teachers that are striking are going to work... to beat up teachers that aren't striking. the strike gets extra momentum when people are afraid to not strike.

also, i had a thought today: this country is renaming many of its streets to reflect its african pride / government. problem is the previous white government that named the streets previously had a serious lack of imagination. when someone gives you directions, the street names in howick can also be found in maritzburg and even durban (remember durban has 5 umgeni roads). so the result is directions that make you want to kill yourself. maps either don't have the street names people are giving you or worse the street signs don't match your map. also, it's not like the new government is renaming the ENTIRE street. in some case, just a few blocks get renamed. street names that change several times without you making a turn is not uncommon.

OR

today, in howick i took a right turn from "link road" onto a street called "hayfields road" (why name a street after a neighboring town?!). the street took a little loop and ended back up on itself. here's the crazy part: i did a u-turn and instead of finding myself on "hayfields road" again, i was on "tweedy road". address numbers started at 1 but before they even got to 4, the street took a little left turn and address numbers started at 1 again as the street name changed to "hyslop road". note that "hyslop road" also exists in maritzburg as does "link road".

so that's my story about roads. my new cell phone is gps enabled should i decide that i should shell out for the software. as i venture further out of pmb, i'll consider the option more feasible.

ok, tomorrow i'm gonna run to work for the second time tomorrow morning. hopefully a faster time this time... wish me luck and pray for my knees.

to wrap up, word got out in the office about my blog about my office. i never expected anyone in south africa to spend the time reading about my time in south africa... live and learn. maybe i now have some explaining to do? hopefully nobody found anything too scandalous or disagreeable in there.

as always, stay tuned for future drama!

I Bollywood If I Could (Sari About the Pillai on Words)

well thanks to joelene, i've come across another gem of south africa. the gem: indian theater. up until last weekend, my only serious exposure (not counting eating dinner at 'falafal house' in downtown s.c.) to bollywood or indian music videos was the episode of the simpsons where abu stays with the simpsons.

that all changed dramatically this last weekend. y'see, joelene's position as p.a. to the ceo of umgeni water gets her all kinds of perks. umgeni water has boxes at all the sports stadia in durban and she's always being given tickets to shows. this time she took them, we hopped in my car and off we went to durban.

at dinner beforehand, i learned what i already knew. i can't eat spicy food. everyone in this country must grow up nursing off of a chilli pepper or something because nothing fazes the indian population around here and the sauces are created accordingly. this chain, "mugg & bean", had four sauces and joelene just put the hottest one on her french fries (chips) like it was ketchup (tomato paste). i had one fry and couldn't eat for five minutes. it hurt to breath.

before the show, we waited in the foyer and i played one of my favorite games, "find a white person", while i sat with joelene and slowly sipped my second jack daniels on the rocks in 15 minutes. why the sudden interest in booze? the synopsis made me do it: something like, "when the star of the show quits a week before opening night, the director must find a replacement. but the replacement is inexperienced so the director insists he must attend a film and acting school first." the plot turned out to be totally irrelevant. the whole thing was a vehicle for everyone to lip-sync and dance along to famous bollywood songs. the dancing was AMAZING. hours and hours of it, all of the indian hand-thingy style. the costumes were constantly changing and that was the show's one hiccup. instead of having one or two people come out and dance while everyone else was changing, they'd have dialogue. i might be the only one complaining though seeing as i might've been the only one who didn't get the impersonations of all the famous bollywood actors. the film ended where the whole school sequence was just a dream he had after falling asleep the moment after having the conversation about going to attend "famous film school". i think. it was complicated.

one last thing to comment on was that the cast was mixed. it had several black women and men and even a white girl. regardless of skin color, almost all of them at one point had to lip-sync the words of some of the songs in hindi. but while they could all do the indian style moves, make no mistake, it was the indian girls (and guys) who could really really move their feet and hands. anyone that comes here has to experience one of these shows.