Tuesday, June 13, 2006

The arrival...

Sunday, June 11th

Its been 5 days since I arrived in the Republic, though it honestly feels a bit longer. I arrived early Tuesday morning, completely exhausted, eyes bloodshot and clothes wrinkled to the contours of uncomfortable airline seats that I feebly tried sleeping on. The night before leaving I amassed just about 3 hours sleep, no problem though, I’ve got a 17 hour flight to catch up! WRONG. I think I slept about 2 hours. I did, however, manage to make all my South African row mates feel rather uncomfortable (as well as myself when I noticed their fidgeting) by watching ‘Brokeback Mountain’ on the Senegal to South Africa leg. Goodstuff.
The past week was spent learning all the eye watering, brain numbing, super benign intricacies of South African Air Law. Much of it is ‘similar’ to US regulations, but much of it is amazingly complicated for such a silly subject. There is also the differences in semantics that makes it amusing sometimes, frustrating most others. For example I spent 30 minutes trying to decipher how or why someone would ‘secrete’ themselves on an airplane. I had ideas as to how they would, but we wont jump into those. In any case my hypothesis proved wrong. To secrete yourself in South Africa it seems you only have to secretly hide yourself aboard an aircraft. I was a bit disappointed, I was hoping for the abstract and raunchy.
The town we are in currently is called Midrand. Its halfway between Johanesburg and Pretoria, in an area resembling something like a mix of central New Mexico, Nebraska and maybe other random parts of the US west to Midwest. Its not unlike any suburb in the US, having monotonous strip malls, car dealerships, pizza joints and overpasses zig-zagging everywhere. The most exciting wildlife I’ve seen so far has been a small rodent that cautiously eyes me every morning when I go outside to see what type of smoke dominates the current day. I did, however, see a sign on the double razor wired fence of an obviously paranoid white land owner’s estate that read “Caution: Bullfrogs”. I’m very interested in South African bullfrogs now.
As I mentioned above, there is always some acrid layer of smoke lingering over the area at all times. It changes though. Sometimes it smells like barbecued grass, other times burning tires, other times garbage. There is always a field burning somewhere close with no one around and no one that evidently cares. Before we leave the house in the morning we bet what flavor of smoke will invade our nostrils, such excitement.
The 3 other guys I share the house with here are all great. There is Bryce, from Ohio, Ed, from Idaho and Chris, from Texas. We all get along well and keep ourselves entertained well enough for the time being. After we pass our South African validation exams this week we plan to visit a nearby national park where Bryce can ride a lion. I’ll be sure to take pictures.
So, there it is, almost a week here and not too much to report. The fact that I am on the southern tip of the African continent and thousands of miles from home hasn’t sunk in just yet…I’m not looking forward to the day that it does.

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