Third World Problems

As a spoiled first world person most of my life, I would complain to myself mostly about annoying things that might happen to me. 

But now I am in Africa and these problems I have are now real!  ;) Third world problems are way worse and make me grateful for all I had in the past.

Mail comes to your house in the first world, here you have to get a PO box or use a courier.  Mail that I tried to get from NJ to South Africa has taken 3 weeks to come.  Some mail may never arrive.  Our insurance cards are still somewhere in the system, hopefully not lost.   I don't think I ever thought I would miss the US postal service, but I do. 

Couriers: you pay them to deliver and pick up but there is no insurance the item will not be lost, stolen, or damaged. 

Unwelcome house guests - spiders a plenty, flies, mosquitoes, roaches, gecko.  Food chain tells you geckos eat spiders and roaches, and spiders eat flies and mosquitoes.  So this isn't so bad.  What eats geckos?  

Water comes to your house via the tap.  It may be safe from bacteria on a good day, but not free of lead, mercury, or other metals.  Awesome!   You can buy ozone treated water at PnP (grocery store) or at a separate water store called Oasis.  Luckily in third world water refilling is cheap, 5 rand a jug.  Conversion 8.8 Rand to 1 dollar
Other cheap items: 3 dollar sandals that broke two weeks after purchase, third world problems.

A surprising observation about walking in South Africa is bare feet is normal.  I have seen males and females, young (3 yrs) and old, black, white, rich, poor, on the street, in the grocery store, (even in Will's class) people bare foot.  I am used to the rule "no shoes, no shirt, no service".   In South Africa that doesn't apply.  My first world feet are getting used to this third world, broken glass covered sidewalks, but you won't see me barefoot just yet.  Only if all my sandals break.

As I read this, it sounds really negative, but I am doing just fine.  There are many highlights to my experiences in South Africa.  These are just some extra tidbits.

quiz night

Our team KFC, tonight "Klipdrift for Coke" (changes every time), is what I live for during the week.  Quizbowl with a bunch of random adults is the highlight of my week.  I actually study current events and try my best to memorize names like "Park Geun-hye" because inevitably it will come up.

The best night of the week is Tuesday night.  I drink black label castle beer and eat dinner at a private school dining area across from the cricket field with Will, Mark, and Sally.  Smart linguists and all around awesome people.

Here is Will post quiz night. 

The eagle has landed

This is our new ADSL modem.

...Which is to imply that we now have DSL at home.  Which, in turn, means you can expect to see updates more frequently and/or regularly, since we don't have to go out to get to the internet, as if we were living in some kind of third-world country.

Also, it feels a little weird to have DSL.  I am now accessing the internet in the same way I did in 1997...

Local flora & fauna (pt. 3 of 2)

So, it's been a while since I wrote a post, but Al has been taking up the slack.  This post is part 3 of a two-part thing.  By that I mean I want to not have everything I post on here be a mishmash of odd zoological and botanical generalizations based on the limited slice of the ecosystem I encounter in my daily commute and on weekends.

But there are so many of those that I cannot contain them.

Case in point: the other day I saw a bird clap.  Clap.  With its wings.  As if they were hands.  In flight.  It was at the bottom of its wingbeat, the tips of the feathers slapped together twice.  And I instantly recognized the sound as a thing I hear almost daily on my morning walk to school, and never thought twice about.  Because birds don't clap.  Except that they do.

Based on some 15 minutes on google, this is either a completely undocumented behaviour, or a mundane thing that pigeons do.  What I saw clapping was significantly larger than any pigeon, though.  If I can get a picture, or justify this improper questionable use of the phonetics lab equipment, it will go up here.  Or be published in Folia Ornithologae.

Here are some other fauna-related highlights from our trip to Port Alfred weekend before this one.

1) Snails. Quick ones.  The first three pictures were taken in a span of like 4 seconds.  These snails are lightning-fast.  And also really intensely colorful.  

2) Weavers.  These are bright yellow little birds that make really cool nests.  And they make them inside the mall, in droves.  Every tree in the mall at Port Alfred looks like this:

Also, everyone needs to go to Port Alfred, because look:

That's not even the beach.  That's a random parking lot at the mall.  Puts Menlo Park to shame...

Some of those were taken from the pier.  Sally saw one and figured that out, and informed me that we had done a tremendously stupid thing, because apparently huge waves frequently come out of nowhere and push people off.  Onto these:

Ouch.  Sure is pretty, though...

Next post, no more flora and fauna, unless there is a sudden bigfoot epidemic or it starts raining spiders or something notable like that. 

Plans for this week:
-get internet installed at home (tomorrow, finally)
-buy a car?  (Having never done this, I have literally no sense of how long it takes to achieve.)
-I'm giving a talk tomorrow, my first one as a Rhodes person.  Should be fun.  If you like Obolo nasal harmony, that is.  Otherwise, hit or miss.
-Al is applying for an Indian visa. 

Everything is still tremendously exciting!  More news soon.

Just another day at the beach

Port Alfred

Mark and Will

Parking Lot

Other side of pier

 I think eventually I will miss snow.  But for right now, I mean just now, I am enjoying the native land and water of the south coast of Africa along the Indian Ocean.

The green rolling hills, natural spring and valley of farm land on the way to the beach were alright, but once we pulled into the parking lot (see above).  It really hit me, Shit, this is beautiful, like jaw dropping gorgeous.  There is the pier then the sand dunes, and beach that goes on for miles, with NO houses, hotels, or anything on the beach.  Then you look to the right and there are some people on the beach (10 people abt) and more houses in the distance.   Straight ahead you see ocean, I mean what could I see?   Antarctica?

This beach was so nice, clean and fun to walk on.  There was a little seaweed and barely any foam residue.  Only thing on the beach was a couple of snails with seashells.  Will hopefully will post the picture.


 

What's lekker about Ght?

Lekker: sweet, awesome, cool, rad, tasty, etc.
Breakfast of choice: lekka wors from Wimpy

Grahamstown (Ght - according to Will, not G-town) is been pretty chill so far.  The college lifestyle here has officially begun with drunken parties and lots more young people milling around.   You just have to watch out none of the broken glass from smashed beer bottles gets in your sandals.  Plus, the occasional aluminum car door piercing bass heard outside our house at odd hours of the night. 

Other discoveries from town:
Best internet connection is at a cafe called Revelations.  Although it is strange how many people there don't eat or drink but Skype or email for hours.  It is a collection of foreigners ( US, UK, Canada, Spaiñ, Canadia, etc.)

There is a free outdoor swimming pool on campus.  [Free to us, anyway -WB].  Will and I went swimming sorta.  He swam probably three times more than I did.  The water was clean and cool.  Wonderful to take advantage of before more students arrived.

Ultimate (frisbee) can be found tuesday and thursday at the Great Field.  Will and I played a short game before quiz night.  We will be going back soon.

Lightening storms are frequent and intense at night after a cold front comes up from Antarctica.  One power outage so far. The storms are a bit scary but usually short.

As long as there is power, I have been cooking on our two hot plates.  I think the crepes are my favorite so far.  I wish we had better pots and an oven, but maybe next month it will happen.
We are also enjoying the food here in Grahamstown.  Mangoes are delicious here.  [The photo fails to convey precisely how amazingly and overwhelmingly delícioso they are -WB]

We also discovered a cute roof deck place for drinks and pizza. 

The smile is cuter than it appears in photo, taken at triumphant dinner after Will's first day of teaching.  [I offered to take dictation for Alyson.  She is saying mushy things about the smile on my face in this picture being really cute.  I think it is a ploy to get me to give her laptop back, which I will not do. -WB]

 Will and I are happy to be in Grahamstown.  We are enjoying the atmosphere and learning more about the area each day.  [Damn straight. -WB]

Flora & Fauna (pt 2)

Many moons since the last post.  Probably not, in reality, but it feels like it - much has happened.  I had my first day of teaching, Alyson's gone off to Johannesburg to swindle ze Germans negotiate a formal job offer for the job they're creating for her, and the beginning of semester whirlwind is starting to blow through town.  More on all of those things later, surely, as they continue to develop.

For now, mundane observations about the natural world in our roughly 3-square-kilometer sphere of existence.  By which I mean the route I've taken to and from the office, where I am busily working away when not at home.

1) Update from last time: my Jacarandar is in need of recalibration.  These are bougainvilleas:

This is a Jacaranda:

But from not-so-up-close, they look like this:

...at least at this time of year.  Apparently all the drama happened 2 weeks ago, when they all bloomed at once and they go from green and boring to dangerously purple.  I guess we'll have to stay here another 11 months and wait to see it.  Rats.

2) African pigeons appear to operate in the same manner as their North American counterparts:

Further observations will be needed to confirm for sure.

3) Did you know that I am endlessly fascinated by ibises?  Well now you do.  They are like enormous pigeons with weirdly stretched-out faces.  And are far larger than any of the birds I used to see on a regular basis in NJ (={pigeons, starlings, cooked chickens}).

4) The leaves are bigger here too.  On like pretty much everything.

I want to say this is like a banana plant because it looks familiar, but I think that is me being ignorant and plant-racist rather than knowledgeable.

5) Here are some pictures I took of our back yard manor estate. 

 These are figs.  I'd ask how we know when they're ripe, but Alyson tells me they're full of worms anyway, so there go our grand fig-marmalading dreams...

 Our apple tree also generates worms quite productively.  Also it looks kind of weirdly silver.

 ...but what looks even weirder is this pointy space-kudzu thing that appears to be strangling it.

 This too is a thing that I have no idea what it is.  Garth the mead guy (meader?), without seeing it, guessed that it was a .... 'bugberry', I think?  Anyway, he said it was extremely poisonous, and that's when I lost interest in it.  Thank goodness I stopped Alyson from popping one into her mouth the first day we saw it.

Finally, here is an interloper who apparently frequents our garden: 

I assume he does some useful things like killing gigantic hairy spiders (yet to be confirmed), so I'm not going to stop his trespassing.  But, since I am allergic to cats, I have forbidden Alyson from naming and/or befriending this creature.

I was hoping he'd remove our death-snail from the window, but then it turned out he was not even remotely interested in it anyway.



6) And then there's whatever the hell this is.

I think it might be a cycad?  Someone told me they're like living fossils, and highly endangered.  Wikipedia seems to confirm that they might be, and indicates that they, too, are highly poisonous.  Really, I was hoping it might be an oil palm, because palm oil is (a) delicious, and (b) turns out to be hard (impossible?) to find here.  Good thing I didn't have time for that crazy scheme either.




And now, it's off to the grad student welcome party for me.  Stay tuned!  Next time, maybe a tour of the linguistics department...


Update: I forgot to include this bizarre car-alarm-esque bird call we heard on our first morning here.