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!