South African Lingo

There are entire books of South African slang, but here are some words which I've heard since coming back which are new to me, or I liked.

A zebra is a mixed-race child, so you can have a zebra.

If you see a sign saying troeteldier kos in a supermarket, it's the pet food isle. And a papbroek is an Afrikaans saying for someone who is spineless.

Veld Fire Season

The cool, dry winters in Jo'burg lead to regular veld (or grass) fires. They're not really dangerous, but produce a lot of smoke. Today there was a big veld fire on the ridge above Giloolys Farm (the Harvey Nature Reserve), close to where I'm living. I saw it from the freeway, went home to get my camera and went back to take these photographs. The Erukhuleni Fire Brigade arrived at some stage and waged war on it with a garden-hose mounted on a big red bakkie.

Kayking to a Giant Bhuddhist Temple

Okay, the headline is better-sounding than its accurate.

Its like this: on the weekend I went on a kayaking trip on the Wilge River near the town of Bronkhorstspruit, about 2 hour's drive from Jozi, with the Dabulamanzi Kayak Club. I rode a Wild Water kayak (pictured left) for the first time. The location was beautiful, and on the first day I did an eskimo roll, and then made it all the way down the series of rapids only coming out when I intended to.

Then that evening I drank a couple of beers and had a glass of wine and the next day: good bye kayak skills, hello cold water.

Beautiful campsite and a long grassy meadow with the background sound of running water for doing hours of sunny reading provided one of those still sessions I need after months in big bad joburg.

Funny side story: I took a dry bag down with me, and forgot to put my cell phone in it ... fished it sopping out of my pocket on the other end after having been swimming for minutes in the water, dried it out in the sun, put it back together and .... Sim-Card fried, but the phone worked first time. Its an ancient Nokia 6230i with a couple of lives its already shedded. Impressive!

And the buddhist temple? It is called the Nan Hua Temple, and it is a vast but beautifully-built construction in Bronkhorstspruit which I visited on my way back home. It felt as authentic as anything I've seen in China or Nepal, although a little more out of place. It was built by the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order as their main temple in Africa, and its new - it was only completed in 2005. The sight of black men in traditional Buddhist monks' robes was a refreshing one.

Work Kills Blogging!

My longish absence from blogging can be directly attributed to my having started work. Since the beginning of April I have been helping out at Qualica, a company run by a group of friends of mine, people that I met when I last worked in South Africa for Internet Solutions. Qualica is involved in a variety of different projects; amongst other things they developed and support the IT systems behind the 1Time Airline, support data exchange under tough conditions in remote parts of Africa for Bayport Financial Services and provide networking solutions for South Africa's Old Mutual. The common link between all of these is Linux operating system; Qualica is a Linux specialist house.

Working again with people I know as friends and respect as professionals is an amazing experience. But I am not only working with them, I am in the same building as in the days at Internet Solutions, and working with some of the same systems, so sometimes the air at work feels like it's thick with ghosts from a past which was a personal golden age; and the fact that I have travelled so far and done so much since then and still come back to the same environment makes me restless. And that feeling is not a new one; its something I've had to deal with a lot in coming back to South Africa.

The fact that my stay here is temporary makes it easier to deal with. But I also think that you can't show how much you have changed until you go back into an old environment.

Buying Me Some Sound

While living in the Netherlands I bought myself a really good amp and CD-player (the X-Ray and X-150 from Musical Fidelity), but I was playing them through borrowed speakers. During the entire two and a half years in New York, the components lay in storage and I was listening to music through headphones or tinny IPod speakers. Gak!

Today I put the May Day holiday to good use and added high fidelity audio back into my life. I went through a series of sound rooms with my friend Kezia and eventually bought a pair of B&W CM5 speakers. It cost me a considerable part of my first salary check, but it was worth every cent. Listening to the fabulous PJ Harvey as I blog...