April 12, 2007 - Stomach, stamps, and a small town newspaper...

This morning was not so good. After I woke Alissa up at 7:30a (Tangent: I’m the only one with an alarm clock here so at the time stated I make my way across the hall to knock on doors) I had to tell her to relay the message that I wouldn’t be joining them. The night before, I was very sick. I’d eaten Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner and had some green tea later in the evening and I think for some reason, the combo of the two didn’t sit so well in my stomach. So after a late night of praying to a porcelain god, I wasn’t really in any shape to be going anywhere early in the day.

I awoke later to the sounds of the maid trying to get into my room to clean. Oh yeah, that’s another perk we have here. Since we’re in “visiting scholars” housing, apparently that’s something that they receive. It was a surprise to us that they come in on a daily basis. We knew that we’d receive fresh linens each week, but not the full clean package. They even made the beds and washed the dishes of some folks! After I let her know that I didn’t need any service that day, I went back to sleep to try and calm my stomach.

At about 11 a.m., I finally felt well enough to get up and go off to work. I took the round about way to the university as I wanted to stop in the Hatfield shopping district at the post-office for some stamps, seeing as how the building closes at 4:30p and we’re never out of the office before then.

I’ve refreshed my 7 x’s tables in my head so now I’m able to roughly calculate the costs of things here in South Africa. It’s so inexpensive for many things! In trying to plan extra travel or tickets for things, people keep warning us of the cost and once I translate it into dollars, it’s always much less that I was estimating. It’s going to be hard to go back to the US where your one entrée will cost more than an entire meal (including dessert and a tip) here does.

I’d brought a sampling of the postcards I’d finished with and affixed postage to mail them off. After dropping them in the red box, I wonder just how long it’ll take them to arrive at their destinations. When I’m abroad I try to send postcards early enough so that they arrive back home before I do, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

I mosey (that’s the speed I walk – it’s always been the speed I walk) over to the university and join up with everyone else. Luckily my internet decides to work right away and I’m off and away trying to find libraries or something similar for many tiny islands in the South Pacific like Niue (which is now an entry on my list of places to go before I die). Many of these islands have great websites for tourism but don’t have a lot of information about the extras like their government or education items.

During our time in the office, we open the windows wide and let the fresh air in. It’s nice to be able to have windows without screens – there’s no worry of bugs on a regular basis here – so there’s nothing inhibiting the view. The odd thing today was that although we could see white marshmallow-like clouds and a clear blue sky from our vantage point, we heard the pitter-patter of rain drops on the rooftop above us (we’re on the 6th and highest floor of the building).

Mid-afternoon we were still awaiting possible travel excursion information. During our visit with Cathy, she gave us the name of a local student, Marius, who puts together package deals for visitors to South Africa. We had e-mailed him with our times and dates and a rough idea of what we wanted to see and were awaiting confirmation on the material. Eagerly so, because we are trying to go to Capetown tomorrow, Friday. A bit later, we finally heard from Marius but apparently he had mistaken our message. He’d sent us a 6-day guided safari tour of Kruger National Park with no pricing information! Knowing that that wasn’t going to work for us, we popped over to see Cathy again about other possibilities. She worked her travel agent magic to let us know the cost of traveling/staying in Capetown for the weekend. Unfortunately the entire thing, not including meals or entrance fees to do things there, was more than any of us could afford ($500+), so that put the kabash on Capetown. I was thoroughly disappointed as the big things I wanted to do were all there: Robbin Island, driving along the coast, wading w/African penguins, visiting a South African vineyard, etc. With that trip out of the running, I wasn’t sure what else we could go and see.

The mention of Durban came up. Flights to and from there totaled $85 and the housing was reasonable as well. We knew there was a marine park called uShaka Park where Alissa could do here cage-shark-diving but that was about all. I take that back, I’d also heard that it was a more touristy theme park-type city versus the culture/history travel that I prefer so I was a bit leery of planning an entire weekend there without knowing anything about it. Cathy and her brother (another travel agent) let us know of other great options, like the possibility of driving there and back to see the countryside, there’s a historical value just north of Durban along the coast where the Zulu nation is based – lots of culture to see there. As we weren’t sure of everything, we girls needed to pow-wow to figure out what our final decision might be.

Heading back to the office, so that we might look up some information about Durban via the internet, I was able to locate a lot of extra things there. There’s a vineyard close by, some cultural museums, a crocodile farm, rickshaws, and the hotel we may stay in has a sea view if we wanted. I also found a castle that we could tour! (I have a thing for castles) Feeling better about Durban’s prospects we decided that we would go there next weekend and try and do a few things around Pretoria this weekend. I loved this plan because having more time this weekend for finishing projects or at least getting them almost finished is something I was afraid I wouldn’t have.

With that settled, I checked my e-mail and other news sources one last time before I left. There I learned, according to my parents, that the article my hometown newspaper wrote about my trip here made front page news (tells you a little bit about how small our community is) with a picture I’m not too fond of from when I graduated college. Makes me wonder why I had to shoot 20+ pics of myself with my digital camera to find one that I liked to e-mail my parents so that they could forward it to the newspaper. But what’s a girl gonna do…