the first from Ireland

Starting from the beginning... I was delayed one day in Chicago because my plane had a bit of a fender bender with another plane - we hit a wing and damaged it badly enough that the shamrock part of the Aer Lingus logo was knocked off. So I spent a lovely night in a suite at the Mariott, complete with two TVs, three sinks, a bath and a shower, a work desk, two sofas, a huge bed... I had broken the Neenan code so I had no swimsuit, but I did have fun having lots of conversations with Irish people headed home for the holiday.



Other pictures at random:

The house, from a field - this is where the entrance probably was originally. Now it winds around from the side (the view from my bedroom, at the end of the post).

The view opposite to the one above - standing on the front steps, looking out into the pasture.

Josie (the very energetic middle child, 10 yrs) with the dogs. The brown one is Shnoogie, or Gay Boy, and the black lab (still grow I N G) is Ozzie (as in, Ozzie Osbourne).

Donkeys

Check out this huge beech tree stump! (Those are my feet)

The kitchen - one of my favorite rooms because it has tea and warmth.

Atty at the stove, pretending to threaten me. She sort of looks like she's crying. But she's laughing.

I've never seen this before: an aga. There are two burners, covered by those big metal things. The one on the left is HOT, that's where you cook things. The right one (covered by a towel in this picture) is more of a warming burner. There are five oven spaces. From top right clockwise they get progressively cooler. This thing is on constantly, burning (a huge amount of) gas. You open what you need when you need it and otherwise it looks like this.

Ozzie and Shnoogie peacefully snoozing in the kitchen.

I haven't moved to where I'm supposed to live yet, there was a ceiling issue, but this is the toilet in my area right now. I've also never seen a toilet like this. That big white thing at the top of the picture is where the water is. Funky, eh?

The view from my (current) window yesterday morning.

And in the afternoon, when the sun had come out. People keep telling me that the weather is uncharacteristically nice, so either the sun rarely shines in Irish winters, or the people I have met are terribly pessimistic. Perhaps a mixture of both.

Well that clarifies absolutely nothing about what my life is like. I have no routine, we have just been constantly visiting, once every day except yesterday, either hosting or attending somewhere. Since there is all this socializing, I am being offered far too much alcohol, and I must put up a fight if I want to remain sober. It was a bit much to start with champagne at 11:30 on Christmas morning. People keep pouring me wine when I'm not looking or filling me up before I have a chance to refuse or pouring me a new glass of champagne when I've finally gotten rid of one. One night I was drinking coke in between glasses of wine and I turned around and someone was filling me up with red wine. It's a weird mixture. I don't really recommend it.


The kids are fun, I haven't spent all that much time with them. They have a lot of electronic games that make me feel like a grandma because I don't understand them.


Everyone I have met is very friendly, mostly members of Atty and Arthur's families.


It's much warmer than Minnesota, so HA.


Tomorrow Atty and I are hopefully sort of constructing a schedule so that I am in some sort of pattern for how things will be.


I have read a lot - they gave me three books for Christmas and I finished two of them. The first one was The Commitments, by Roddy Doyle - funny and fast read, also a movie in the 80's, I belive. Second, Something to Hide, a biography of Sheila Wingfield, a semi-known poet of the last century who was also Atty's grandmother. The poem of hers I recognized was this one:

Odysseus Dying
I think Odysseus, as he dies, forgets
Which was Calypso, which Penelope,
Only remembering the wind that sets
Off Mimas, and how endlessly
His eyes were stung with brine;
Argos a puppy, leaping happily;
And his old Father digging round a vine.



Email me if you're bored. I love that stuff.

yikes!

feelin Karoovy

THE KAROO:
Weekend trip to the Karoo, a desert area to the northeast of us. Highlights:

Going up into the mountains to watch the sunset

Going to a “tequila” factory: they can’t call it tequila because that’s patented in Mexico, so it’s called agave, but it’s the same thing. It’s made from this plant.

After our tour, we did shots – some people went a little too far (um, eight shots), but most of us just had one of each kind. Which means three.

Dinner at a nice restaurant with the roommates. Awww

Went to see Bushman or San paintings somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty neat. These people have a bunch of fossils and stuff at their house as well.

The Owl house. So, sometime in the 1800s or so this woman’s husband dies and she has to move from Cape Town back to this little town and take care of her parents. She’s not thrilled about this. Her parents die and she starts changing her house, using colored glass to make light do interesting things inside. Slowly this becomes an obsession with expressing herself. She gets married again but divorces right away, she has workers come and help with her projects occasionally, but basically she is just this woman who doesn’t belong in the African interior in a small town and goes crazy and lives in her own little world to escape. That’s my theory. She committed suicide by drinking caustic soda when her arthritis and such was so bad that she couldn’t do her projects any more. This is probably the creepiest place I have been in my whole life. Anyway if you think it’s interesting you can always google “owl house south Africa” and you will probably get to some information.

3 cool things

1. John (my cousin) set up this thing in our group: date night. Each week we are ramdomly paired with someone not in our flat and we set up a date with that person (cross-sex, same sex, whatever) and try to get to know them better one on one. It's a really cool idea and fun to do. My dates so far:

Breakfast and good conversation with Giff, a friend who I work with at the OLC back at school. Laid back but nice, not something we wouldn't have done anyway.

Date number two: Teddy and I decided to do a walking tour of PE. So we took a kombi/taxi/minibus to "town" and got out, looking very out of place with our white skin and American accents. As we walked in the subway to get to the other side of a street, Teddy said "I wouldn't caught dead here in six hours" and I said "I think you would" - as in, if he was there in six hours, something would have happened to him. It wasn't the safest part of town, at least not for people like us, but at 1:00 it was fine; there were people everywhere. We got a map and directions and did our walking tour of the historic sites of PE, and it was fun - to see things I wouldn't normally have gone to see and to talk to him, since we don't know each other very well.

Maybe an hour and a half later, we finished the tour and got in another taxi. We were the first ones in, so we had to wait for the driver to fill it up with the rest of the passengers. The first two guys to get in were these rasta dudes. They sat in front of us and started asking what we are doing in Africa, if we like it, etc. I've never heard the rasta dialect spoken, only seen it written: "I n I" or just "I", no matter what, even where it's grammatically supposed to be "me". They had a lot to say, at least one of them did, telling us about how he is from Zambia but in Africa "we are migrants" (we as in him and the other guy). He is an artist, he paints or draws or something - "I could make a picture of your beautiful faces" and he also "makes music". The other guy didn't have as much to say for himself, but he did tell us that if anyone tries to tell us that South Africa isn't a good place, we should just tell them "you suuuuck". They were also talking about how Westernized SA is in comparison to the rest of Africa, which is something I have heard elsewhere as well. Cape Town could practically be in Europe, at least some parts of it.

My date for this week hasn't happened yet, but it is with Brian - we are each picking out our 3-4 favorite youtube videos and showing them to each other. My idea - I know, I know, I'm a genius.

What I chose, in case you’re bored:

Buttmachine (thanks Chanti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHlDfejCHkc

If you're into it (thanks to Pasutti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0

Sony Bravia (thanks to Papa)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw


2. I am one of four captains of a dodgeball team on our group. We had our first games of the regular season on Monday and Tuesday (we lost one and won one). It's great - every member of our group, except for the director and the "non-traditional" (read: over age 30) students joined the teams, which gave us four teams of seven. And the assistant director of our program is the referee. I am completely awful at dodgeball, but it's fun, and I can at least organize a team name, etc. I had first pick but I don't think I did that great of a job stacking my team. Oh well.




We are Team Eskom, which is the name of the power company here. Explanation: we have been having rolling blackouts - "loadshedding" for the past few days, and are scheduled to have them every day until we leave. So each day our power goes off for two and a half hours, a different time each day. There are nine zones in PE. SO, in honor of the blackouts, we are Team Eskom, we wear all black, and our cheer is "loadshedding". It's sweet. Plus some girl band sings a song about Eskom ("Eskom, Eskom, you light up my life") so I might have to get a hold of it to pump up my team.



I don't know if this is just the nature of study abroad, but I think date night and dodgeball are signs of how our group is coalescing or a word like that. We're becoming a group. And it's nice that we mostly like each other.



I have a lot of respect for the people I'm here with. Sometimes I think they drink too much or that they are disrespectful. But in classes when we talk about our experiences here, and the dichotomy of vacation life in Humewood and volunteering in New Brighton township, I am grateful that it isn't just me having ethical dilemmas, confusion about our role and if we can even do anything useful, what the point is of us being here, or at Pendla, and why we aren't able to be involved in the local culture - I feel like we are all struggling to understand our experience together: no one is taking it lightly, just here for the tan and the cheap alcohol, the surfing and the time at places like Coffee Bay. That stuff is great, but we are all very aware of our strange position. It's a relief not to be alone in that.


3. Ahh okay originally I had a different cool thing but then we had a practical for Marine Biology today! So we went to a rocky shore about 40 minutes away from school to do some sampling. We were collecting data for to help with this guy’s research for his PhD. We drove South Africa style - rode in the back of a "bakke" (pickup truck) all the way there.

So we were collecting something – this is really embarrassing but I know I’m not alone in not knowing the name of what we were actually looking for. But I do know they were something that lives in shells and we had to dig around and pry them off the rocks to measure them, and then we threw them back in the water. Not to be critical, but in our first sampling area, my cohorts were pretty wimpy about digging around among the creepy crawly and stickery or slimy, so I was the sampling champion, but at the second spot I got some backup. It was practically euphoric when you knew you found a big one and pulled it out and got to shout out the measurement to the scribe.

AND while we were there a sea otter just showed up and started swimming 5 meters away. It swam around for a while and then climbed up on some rocks to hang out and dry off. Its behavior was kind of catlike and kind of doglike. It was a catdog sea otter.

McEdlund, Madcore and Shoeless Jo have an adventure...

We just returned from fall break. YOWZA!

I drove a difficult stick shift with no power steering on the left side of the road for the past week. Christa and Jo don't drive manual, so it was all me, all the time. Driving in Africa can be utter insanity. In big towns, people just wander the streets, there don't seem to be any jaywalking laws or anything along those lines, so you have to watch for traffic and people everywhere. On the highway, there are animals all over the place. I had to stop for cows and geese and sheep, and there were a lot of goats around and occasionally some horses. Sometimes there were people with them, mostly not. On the roads, people pass all over, all the time, and protocol is to drive on the shoulder while they pass you.

I actually got pulled over - although it was more like waved over (my first time, in any country) for overtaking - I started my overtake in the legal zone but then it stopped being legal in the middle of my passing and the cops saw me. They didn't have a good way to ticket me since I am American and basically just asked for a bribe. "Just give me something - a cold drink, just a little something, we'll let it go. What do you say?" I only gave him R20 - about $2.50 and he let me go. The ticket would have been R2000, or $250.

We stayed in backpackers (hostels) R70-90 a night, so around $10. It was weird to drive through Africa, most places we didn't see ANY white people, and then suddenly, a backpackers, in the middle of nowhere, or right next to/in a village, and all the 20-something white people would be there with their tans, their dreads, their surfboards, their Chaco sandals, their books or journals, their big packs, usually holding a drink.

As far as activities:

Coffee Bay:

Surfing was cool - we had an hour lesson on a soft board, I got up about 8 times, so I felt pretty good about myself. Surfing was followed by toasties on the beach - toasties are something they make all the time here: A grilled sandwich of cheese, tomato, and onion.

Horseback riding: kind of scary because my saddle wasn't on tight and my stirrups were too long so I couldn't really keep my feet in them very well. Our guide asked if we wanted to go fast - his English wasn't that great - and we thought we would be trotting, but we took off at a fast canter. That happened twice, and the third time he didn't even ask, he just started galloping across this field. Yes, I have galloped a horse through the Transkei...

Dinner in a Xhosa village: we were taken to the headman's hut (about 10-15 of us) and our guide was also Xhosa, but from another village. He was quite a character - about 18 years old, he translated everything for us, and you could tell he was adding things on all the time. So it started where the headmaster served up some Xhosa beer - maize beer. He poured it into large yogurt containers and we passed them around until they were gone, then, to our dismay, he would fill them up again.

Our guide, Joseph, explained the process of making maize beer and then: "So, once the beer is ready, word gets around the village: 'Joseph has one of the best batches of beer ever made!' and then everyone in the village comes over, they all try the beer, and we drink and get drunk." He said that a lot: "We drink and get drunk." Every time he passed the yogurt container to me or Christa (we were sitting next to him) he would say, "Get in there." Another girl bought a drink from the ones Joseph brought from the backpackers, and he said "A Hunter's for - the Tessa one...Get in there, Tessa."

After we started drinking the beer, "the Mamas" came in and sang and danced for a long time. Joseph kept saying "SHAKE that body!" and he would occasionally get up and dance behind the Mamas, where the kids were sitting, and sometimes dancing.

After the dancing, we ate pumpkin and maize mixed together, then maize and sweet beans mixed together. Both were tasty, not particularly interesting. During dinner we asked questions through Joseph and the Mamas and the headmaster would answer. Then they asked where we were from and our names, so Joseph asked us and told them, one of us at a time. There were a lot of Americans, and every time he said one of us, he said we were from Bush or from "Mr. George", and of course we all kept protesting that we don't like Bush, but he always introduced us that way anyway. I was last, so I had time to prepare, and I said I study in PE, which made me sound a little better.

After dinner they had us get up and dance once with the Mamas, and that was embarrassing for us. Then we hiked back to our minibus and rode back to the backpackers.

The Drakensburg mountains:

Took a Land Rover up the Sani Pass into Lesotho with a crazy guide named Rudy - these tour guides are all a little odd. It was fun.

Lesotho was strange - a totally different culture from what we had been seeing in South Africa. They wear blankets and boots, and herd sheep or goats. We had some bread and maize beer in a woman's hut and our guide told us about their lifestyle.

Lesotho is a little country inside SA, they have their own government - a monarchy. Lesotho (Say Leh-soo-too) is the country, a Mesotho is one person, Besotho is many people, and Sesotho is the language.

A Masotho shepherd sat smiling at me and said "I love you" when Jo and I were eating our lunches, so I considered staying in Lesotho and becoming a shepherd's wife, but before he said that he asked me for money, and afterwards he said he was hungry, so I think he was a gold-digger. Plus I'm probably worth 30 cows in Lesotho, given my level of education, and I don't even think he had that many sheep. We gave him a juice box - it was all we had left from lunch, and we aren't supposed to encourage begging.

We did tip the young man who had created a guitar from some metal and plastic, and played it impressively (I have an 8 second video).

Then we went to the highest pub in Africa and had a drink, but it was cold, so we had hot chocolate after that.

The next day we did a 6 hour hike, it was beautiful, of course. We didn't see a soul the whole time, swam in some COLD water, and forded a river a few times. And we got a little lost apparently, because we came out on the road about 8 km from our backpackers (it was supposed to be 2.5 km away). We walked for a while, until it became clear we had a ways to go, and the road was under construction, and then a truck went by and I jokingly stuck my thumb out, but they saw and backed up, so we got in the back of this couple's pickup and got dropped off a few minutes later.

Then we washed up and had dinner at a nice coffee shop/deli called "The Lemon Tree" in Underberg, about 20 minutes away from where we stayed.

Buccaneers at Chintsa (say sin-sah):

Took out kayaks and went upriver for a few hours. Neither Jo nor I had ever kayaked before, but Christa had, so she took one alone, and Jo and I laughed a lot in ours and got really wet. Jo doesn't know how to steer, but she got in the back, I was trying to teach her how to steer, so we zigzagged up the river. I got hit in the back of the head with her paddle at least three times. There were jumping fish in this river, which we discovered when one jumped into my lap. That was exciting.

We got back and went down to the beach to swim and read all day - I finished a book for our literature class (it was more like a romance novel though - gross).

Both nights at Buccaneers, Jo and I drank cider and giggled for a few hours, which was fun. We had some good talks, and some that we probably shouldn't have had, but it was nice to reconnect one-on-one, away from the stress of the flat and school and all that.

And then the drive home: we had to pull off the road at one point to avoid head-on collision, because someone was overtaking and there was no room for them to get back into their lane. Then they pulled off too, so we went on again... and then I got pulled over, as described above, and we made it back to PE all in one piece.

If you read all that... wow. I'm honored. Don't tell anyone, though, they'll find out you have no social life, and as Joseph would say, "So, sorry for you!"

things I will miss

I think I will miss the things I didn't realize I was adjusting to:

being in the minority

walking around campus and seeing non-white people everywhere

hearing a variety of languages and accents - being at choir and hearing groups suddenly break into Afrikaans or Xhosa, then back to English

crowding into taxis with strangers

running next to the beach at sunrise every morning

moving slowly, having spare time to cook dinner most nights and lunch some days

hugging the kids at Pendla, even when they have lice or ringworm

listening to the teacher I work with make English mistakes: "When did he died?" "Stop noising!"

leaving a stack of dirty laundry and a R20 note when I leave for class, and coming back to find it neatly folded, sitting on my bed

being called "my love" by Zukie, our maid

sitting on the balcony with a guitar in the evening, serenading the street below with Josh Ritter songs

explaining anything with TIA: "this is Africa"

The Way Home

- Gabeba Baderoon

Find an intersection

Turn the map to match

the angle of the street.

This might mean

the book will be upside down.

Find the way home.