April 13, 2007 - Roam if you want to...

Friday is my malaria day. Okay, so it’s not my contracting malaria day but is the designated day that I keep up with my dosage. Lucky for me I’ve got this stuff called mefloquin (spelling is probably wrong), so I only have to take a pill a week. Some of us have these daily pills that don’t sit so well. Fortunately, none of us has even remotely been near any place where we could have picked up the disease.

More research ensued today. Over the span of the week we’ve found almost all of the missing countries contact information, except some of the Saint _____ islands, but those shouldn’t take to long. We’ve slowed down a little considering once we’ve located all of these, we will have run out of work until our next assignment. Retha, who is currently on vacation, is our go-to-gal for information on the project, and will be returning on Monday.

We did cut out early from work today as we needed to meet up with Cathy in the travel office to solidify travel plans for next weekend. Cathy and her brother Peter run the travel office there and because we’ve discovered that they both are on the loquacious side we e-mailed them what activities we wanted to partake of whilst in Durban. Our intinerary will then be drawn up. So far I know that we’ll be taking the early flight (and I do mean early – it’s at 5:45a!!!) from Jo-berg to Durban on next Friday morning and have all of Friday and Saturday to explore Durban and the surrounding area, then we’re renting a “mini-bus” and driving back to Pretoria, so that we can take in the countryside. It’s going to be about a 7-8 hour drive but we’ll be traveling through the Drakensburg Mountains, which I’m looking forward to. We’ve been in the city since we arrived so I’m excited about getting the chance to explore more of this place.

Discovered that the street sign that’s an S with the red circle and slash over it means “No Stopping”, so I was right to begin with. There are other things that I’ve yet to discover though. Such as, there’s this bird on campus (I’ve not seen but only heard it) that when it sounds off makes a noise that’s a cross between a monkey’s “ooo, ooo, ooo” and a pigeon cooing. Until I find the real name of the thing I’ve dubbed it the Monkey-bird. Not original, I know, but at least I’ll know what I’m talking about. There are also a couple of trees here that I need the actual names of. One has branches and leaves like a regular ground fern and the other looks like it has a curly aloe plant at the end of each branch. Again, my cleverness knows no bounds when I dub them Fern-tree and Aloe-tree. (Please note heavy sarcasm here).

This weekend though is not without its activities. The Hatfield Square market is supposedly taking place all weekend so we have that to do, as well as on Sunday we’re going to venture out to the Lion Park ½ hour outside of Pretoria to see some of the wildlife. Cathy has graciously offered to take us to see the Mpumalanga (a really fun word to say) region of South Africa which has some of the most breathtaking scenery to found anywhere on the planet. Apparently there’s one point called God’s Window where you emerge from a trail and the view in front of you stretches on forever, appearing literally as if you were watching from God’s window. Rebecca H. decided to take her up on the offer, and as much as the rest of us wanted to, we had too many paper’s and projects to work on, especially if we were to be gone all of the following weekend. So with much regret, we opted to not go but made Rebecca H. promise to take lots of pictures.