Looking back on 2013

Most of 2013 was here in South Africa, and I have been getting to know its people, languages, climate, and landscape.  I don't know why but it feels really comfortable and easy now as I feel transformed into a real member of the community.  I wouldn't have believed I would learn isiXhosa and be braaiing all the time.  Even though sometimes I was sad and bored (especially earlier this year) and sometimes insanely busy and super excited, I have resulted in a better person.  I am creating more art, cooking more, exercising, and being adventurous.  My Jersey attitude is coming out more cause I have now the room to express myself.  While, sometimes this can cause problems, mostly it is amusing and no fights have occurred. 
Now that I am reflecting on the end of the year, I remember what is most important to me love, creative energy, and sharing myself to the world.  Whether that means having a drink at the Rat meeting new friends or spending the day at the beach discovering new things about nature, I am happy to have been able to share my life with other people and enjoy nature. Will and I have been watching an enormous amount of nature shows lately, and I am now more aware of the details of my surroundings fascinated with the plants, insects, and animals. 

My vacation with my Mom was great earlier this year and I am looking forward to her and Ed coming to visit.  We are planning to spend more time in Kenton to watch the sunsets and enjoy life. Will's parents are coming in Jan too, so there will be a lot of touring going on.  It would be great to be able to share this experience with others and hopefully 2014 will allow for more people to visit. 

 

2013 has also been awesome to explore my responsibilities and expectations as a wife.  Will and I have been growing together in the most beautiful way. Finding deeper connections through communicating and supporting each other has been wonderful.  We are lucky to be so in love. 

Also, 2013 has been a year of a lot of successes.  I finally got a job with the company I worked for previously.  I still get to travel and contribute in a big way to the projects of my past job.  Wish me luck in 2014 for more success.  Will has been over the top successful teaching, researching, working on his book, journal articles, posters, attending conferences, teaching in Nigeria and whatever else he does.  He has been able to get up in the morning continuing to work even in the summer, which takes a lot of determination.  This year has had us playing alot of ultimate frisbee together.  It was definitely Will's thing in the past, but I always liked throwing a Frisbee, and now I consider it a goal to get better.  Will's help and our ultimate friends have made all the difference in our happiness for 2013.  Our Grahamstown ultimate friends are so much fun.  Even with some people moving away, I am looking forward to continuing next year. 

My only resolution for next year is to take more pictures and write more blogs! 

Will and I wish everyone a Happy New Year!  Hope your 2013 was just as enjoyable as ours.

The jacarandas are coming?

Apparently, according to local informants, there is a time sometime around this time of year when I can expect G'town to explode with bright purple flowers from the jacarandas.
Either it's passed and it was lamer than they implied, or it's about to get here.  But this is a photo I snapped today of Somerset st, in front of campus. The Jacarandas are the highly contrastive.

Nieu Bethesda

No that's not a typo.  That's where we went last weekend!  For my few Grahamstonian friends who read these posts, the best analogy is apparently this:
Grahamstown:Bathurst::Graaff-Reinet:Nieu Bthesda.


Which to most people who have never been to the Eastern Cape means very little.  But think of it this way: it's a place you never heard of. A tiny place.  There's about six different tourism websites because that's apparently the main source of income.  All of them dutifully note that there's no gas petrol or bank facilities there, so you must fill your wallet and tank before coming.

Descriptions are lame.  Let me rather show you a picture of downtown:

There is literally no place in the town where you cannot look in any direction and see not town.

Nigeria!

So right now my co-author is sitting across the table from me, and we are having a blace.  What the heck is a blace?  Answer #1: some random thing I just made up.  Answer #2: when one and one's co-author (henceforth "two") write posts for the same blog concurrently.  The first one to finish wins, but I haven't decided what yet.  I'll pick that when I win.

Anyway, MY post is about Nigeria.  Or, as I enjoy calling it, 9ja.  Because that's how the cool, hip kids spell it.  And while I'm not really cool, or a kid, I do have two hips, so....yeah.  And now, dear reader, tremble in fear, for you are about to receive an illustrated telling of assorted anecdotes from my increasingly-less-recent sojourn to Nigeria, land of languages, diversity, intrigue, and also credit fraud.
It's pretty – lush, and verdant, and a unique mix of first-world novelty, third-world apparent-ruin, and a sublime cultural charm found nowhere else on this Earth that I have been. 

Love of the braai

In the USA, NY-NJ-PA-MA in one week.  I celebrated being in here by seeing friends and family.  Mostly, I have been drinking and eating non stop thanks to great food and beer.  My cousins made my 4th of July a blast literally with the ridiculously grand display of fireworks.  Too bad I slept through most of it.

Now I in Boston to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday, Will's birthday and Sylvia and Scott's wedding.   Another busy week.  My mom is also tagging along in MA, just to be in the same state as me.  She hasn't moved to Africa (yet), but she couldn't stay in NJ while I was here.

The weather here in MA is....

What I never finished this one?  The weather was hot.  I loved every single minute of the trip to USA.   I love our family and friends.  Miss you all.

This was us about a year ago.  We are still just the same people with more stories to tell.  We are growing each day closer and more in love.  Our anniversary brandy is being drunk right now!  

Will and I are enjoying our evening, post braai.  The braai this evening was on wood instead of charcoal, which means we are becoming TRUE South Africans.  An honorable mention goes to me for the awesome rescue of the potatoes. 

Why braai in Africa? Perhaps because it is just another day of the year, perhaps because it is suddenly warm or because it is just so much fun.  I don't know what calls one to braai so much but the feeling is contagious.

Speaking of contagious Will came back from Nigeria with a cold, and I caught it.  It was not that bad, but I was able to kick it with antibiotics and paracetamol (acetaminophen).   After which we rescheduled our trip to Nieu Bethesda.  It actually happened this past weekend.  A new blog story to follow.

Tonight is an ordinary night in our lives.  It is just now being captured in a blog, something I haven't done in a long time.  I need to catch up on the things that are important in life.  So, if I have been absent for a while, I apologize.  Today I found out my work permit will be finalized (finalised) in about 14 days!  This has been a LONG time coming.

Our backyard has been steadily improving since we moved in to our house.  The garden was not a huge success although we harvested a few carrots.  Our tomato plants survived but without any yield. I am not sure what is going to happen with the spring season, whether we will tempt the garden again or not.  Now now *right now* we have planted spekboom, rosemary, and pelargonium. I am hopeful that my pelargonium lives.  This particular one is lemon rose scented leaves and blossoms purple flowers.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulacaria_afra - Spekboom - elephant bacon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelargonium

It is great to have the opportunity to learn the indigenous plants and indigenous languages (isiXhosa) and indigenous customes such as the braai.  We will have so many stories to tell in the future, so expect to hear "when I was in South Africa" a lot!

Here are the gratuitous food porn pictures you were waiting for:  

 Will has perfected the method of cooking steaks and boerewors on wood.  Our tiny braai cooking surface has served us well.  We even had a recent braai with Nigerian suay.  I love to entertain our culinary enthusiastic friends. Will and I plan to have many more parties in the future.

On gigantic bromeliads (and being 3 months behind in storytelling)

Man, this blogging thing is much harder than I ever anticipated.  Not that I'm giving up, mind you.  Nor that I expected to do it completely regularly and attentively, because that's just not a thing I do really.  But I did expect such merry excitement over every last little thing of our new (well, by now, really not-so-new) homeland that I would just gush ad nauseam.  Which I do, of course.  Just....not so much online.

Case in point: Big Pineapple. 

'Big Pineapple?!' I hear you cry 'What on earth do those words mean?'
They mean this thing:

At which point you should be thinking 'oh yeah, now the name makes sense.'

The road home

Greetings from majestic O.R. Thambo airport in Johannesburg.  This is to say I am finally back in SA.  This place must be starting to feel like home, because even just being around in the airport is feeling like a familiar comforting thing.  That I've only done like twice before ever.  Anyway, here's a picture for no reason:

Thambo is an airport.  Of the normal sort, mostly.  I am currently squatting between the entrances to the two bathrooms (mens and ladies), outside of Soaring Eagle Spur, so that I can use their wifi without getting irate glares from the waitress for sitting there for 2 hours and ordering nothing more than Rooibos.
My flight is not for like 4 more hours, and I have only about 8 student papers to grade, so get ready for some remarks about my Lagos -> Joburg experience.  Why?  Not because it is interesting.  Well, maybe certain aspects of it are, especially a few bits of the Lagos side...

In transit part 2: the 9ja connexion

So, no posts in a while.  I guess that figures - once I have steady and fast internet connectivity, you can count on it to distract me so thoroughly that I lose track of the world and thus fail to do useful and worthwhile things, as they get crowded out by flash games and such.

And so in other news, I'm in Nigeria.  Ibadan, Lead City university.  Everyone says it's pronounced like 'leed', but I'm not convinced that it's justified.  Maybe Ibadan is one of the world's largest lead producers.  I mean, probably it's not so, but still.

But I digress.  Really, what happened is I was sitting and having a beer whilst writing those 2 paragraphs, and then other people came in and I got distracted.

In transit

Amsterdam has free internet in the airport!  Apart from that, it feels strange.  Everyone speaks funny-sounding Afrikaans, and none of the Africans are amused by my attempts to speak Xhosa.

I am looking forward to good beer.  And fast internet.  Sweet.

Tourists in Ght: pics from the observatory museum

It is deep in the midst of exam time.  This, unlike in the US, is a really huge deal.  As near as I can tell, every course has a written exam that must be written in one (or more) 3-hour sessions during which you sit in a frigid, un-heated, gymnasium-sized hall with at least 5 score other people, while invigilating invigilators patrol around staring at you accusingly and prohibiting you from going to the bathroom.
It sucks.  For everyone.  Partly because – as far as I know – exams are very good ways of inducing task effects, meaning they're really great ways to test things other than how much students have learned, and thus really shoddy ways of actually assessing them.  But also, it makes a ton of paperwork for everyone – something South Africa seems to lead the world in.
So I'm headed off to the US today.  This is exciting, I hope.  But I'm either really great at packing, or really terrible at it, because it always gets done at the last minute.  So, my shuttle to the airport is at 3, and I haven't yet started.  Nor can I start, for in the process of the exam grading marking, 3 (hopefully not more) exams got shuffled into the wrong pile, and thus never got given to me to mark.  So I need to hang around until my colleague who discovered them in her pile brings them to me to mark so that I can, I suppose, give them back to her, because they're worth 70% of the students' course grade so it's horribly horrible if any of them gets lost.
But as a result of Sally running late, this means I have half an hour or so to kill.  So, a blog!

This is not the Africa you're looking for

So, the other week I went to the dentist, and read 5 minutes of a national geographic article about gigantic trees - in particular redwoods.  Which got me thinking about gigantic redwood trees, and so I went to wikipedia and read about them (as is my habit), and daydream about trees so gigantic you could build an automotive tunnel out of them.

Now here's where this gets relevant to something other than redwood trees: What should I happen to see, but this intriguing bit: "Other areas of successful cultivation outside of the native range include Great Britain, Italy, Portugal,^[15] the Queen Charlotte Islands, middle elevations of Hawaii, Hogsback in South Africa..." [the page]
Hogsback?!  What?!  I just went there!  

Kenton-on-the-sea, posh life

 While driving around South Africa's coast, we ended up in Kenton-on-the-sea.  It is a small beach community of larger homes, that are all obviously new.   It would have been beautiful to see when things were still undeveloped.   There are three places to access the beach in Kenton, and since it is small my mom and I stopped at each one.  The last place we went to was the Oyster Box, which from my memory of its internet site thought it was a restaurant, but it was not.  It is actually a guest house you can rent.  My crazy mom and I went right up to the door and knocked anyway.  The man let us in and toured the place, but he was a guest so it became a little awkward when he introduced us to his wife.  Upon seeing this place it was clear to me and my mom we had to come back.

They don't know who Sir Mix-A-Lot is.

An inescapable fact of life in South Africa is that they used to do Apartheid here.  It's inescapable in that pretty much everywhere you look, there are traces, vestiges, that it left.  Some of these are straightforward, and are to be expected.  Others are much more subtle...

Hello from a long time!

Long time no see!  My co-author has been doing all the postings recently (like for at least the past month, probably embarassingly longer than that).  There are several reasons for this.  One is that at the mid-semester point, we switch modules in all the undergrad courses - which means my (mercifully light) teaching schedule got turned upside down 5 weeks ago.  Another is that I got tired of bragging about how pretty it is here.  We have a ton more pictures from Hogsback that are gorgeous, but what's the point?  ...and so they haven't made it off the camera yet.  But they will.  Someday.  I'll also eventually finish the last post I started writing, sooner or later.

Big and close up Africa

Traveling back from Stellenbosch, we stopped at the Tsitsikamma Big Tree.  It is huge and ~ 1,004 years old.  Walking through the woods with ferns, humidity, and a canopy topped dense forest, we were definitely in a different part of SA.  Along the road we would always see brown signs for rest stops.  The sign tells you where is the next big tree with little picnic table.  But this is not that kind of tree, it was amazingly the bigger and there were a few trees near that were growing similar in size.  There was a long and windy slightly wet walkway to the tree, but we were so excited we practically ran there.  Lucky for us we didn't find any baboons along the way.  Will assures me he can take one or five baboons if he needs to, doubtful if you ask me.
 [Edit: I maintain that I could defeat at least one, handily. –WB]

Mountainous cats

Opps, things have been getting a bit crazy.  Its busy here between my mom visiting, new Rhodes schedule, isiXhosa class, and me wasting time watching the voice download very, very slowly.  Though, I won't let you guys miss the opportunity to see more pictures of our Stellenbosch trip.
After getting boozed up with brandy and wine, we took the next day to go hiking. 

Mountains and Clouds (x1,000)

 This post is going to be picture dense, so many pictures to show.  I mean, shit, this one above is the road to the cottage we stayed at.  It is in between two other wineries. 

Honeymoon # 1

Roughly after 38 weeks of marriage (22,809,600 seconds) lol, loving every minute, Will and I went on our honeymoon. We waited for our honeymoon to be in South Africa so instead of Napa Valley we went to Stellenbosch.

First stop in Kareedouw - pit stop to get some coffee.  It was a great place just beyond the mountains, something like driving to Isola Fossara, Italy. 

We stopped at a great cafe that was decorated with fifties ads.  But it wasn't too kitsch, and the place was floor to ceiling with wood, which makes sense given all the pine trees along the garden route.  Even our Vetkoek (below) was served on a wooden board.

Mountain views, lavazza coffee, coke floats, and this guy!  I was already having an awesome time at stop #1. Our actual destination for the night was a backpacker stop in Wildernis (Wilderness).  This is like the middle of the coast of South Africa, part of the Western Cape, not the Eastern Cape where we live.  It has magnificent beaches that go on and on for days, and a great little town.  I had a great time at the backpackers, view from the parking lot (below).  Everywhere you turn is another gorgeous picture.

Wilderness has a winding river (Serpentine) for paddle boats, hiking trials, beaches, lagoon, really steep mountains that you drive past.  Thrilling views from the car were a continuous theme.  I will never forget how beautiful and diverse all the scenery is in South Africa.  If we were more beach people we could have stayed at Wilderness, but we had to get to our final destination Stellenbosch.  On our way back home, we stopped at two other beaches (Knysna, and Jefferys Bay).  Its only the beginning of our beach trips.  We plan to actual get in the water sometime soon too.

 Knysna (Nice-nah) continues in the opening to the ocean. Its actually a warm-water estuary with an island in the center with a few shops, restaurants, and residents.  Like Martha's Vineyard. This is the view from our hotel room.

Jefferys Bay is a surfing town. We are going to go back because it is really close to us.  This was a final pit stop on the way back home to Grahamstown. 

The new car

So, we bought a new car a week-ish ago, and some people back home have been clamoring for pictures.  Well, here's a few, from the week-ish-long spin we just got back from taking it on, to Stellenbosch and back.

Our shining new steed is a 2006 Audi A3 sportback tipfishfin someothermodifiers #.0.
It looks pretty swanky:

Spacious, limo-like backseat.  Because here, when you learn to drive, you learn to use a manual transmission.  But we Americans are fools in this respect, so we bit the bullet and bought an automatic.  Which means it's a car that of course comes with other bells and whistles galore.

Also, it has the snazziest, pop-out-of-the-dash-iest, cupholder I've ever seen.

...And 12-speed windshield windscreen wipers.

No, really.  12 speeds.  Like a bicycle.  Plus, compartments in compartments!

Why?  Not entirely sure, but okay.  Cool, if not useful.

Fun to drive? You bet!  Top speed? FAST!  I think I got up to about 160 km/hour while overtaking some trucks on the N2 highway, but clearly it can go more than that...

Handles dirt well, but still fits in nicely in an upscale vineyard setting:

It's pretty good at hiking, too:

And excellent for framing lovely scenery:

And after all that it brought us safely home in style.

Details of the actual trip to come.  We have about 900 pictures, and maybe Al will post some in the next day or two, and then I'll do some more.  Lots of pretty mountains and coastlines, so if that's your thing, then...good?

~Will out.