Sunday, September 11, 2005
Can’t expect to be bright and bon vivant
So let me give you another glimpse into my bottomless well of paranoia. Picture this: I’m preparing to leave Pretoria to catch a bus for Bloemfontein, and worrying because it’s a 7 AM depature, and that means I have to navigate Pretoria’s city center all alone, carrying lots of baggage, at six o’clock Sunday morning. How much of a target is that: large, heavily laden obvious tourist wandering through one of the worse parts of town when the sun has still not yet risen on a non-work day. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself the night before. Stoking the fires of that fear is an e-mail I received from one of my contacts in Cape Town, telling me that the last therapsid-interested visitor was mugged twice: once while walking around Cape Town on a Sunday morning. Her advice, “One simply does not walk around Cape Town on a Sunday morning.” Pretoria, while as mentioned laid-back, is not too dissimilar from Cape Town in terms of police reports, and I was still of course reeling from my exposure to Crimetown, U.S.A. (a.k.a. Johannesburg; n.b.: not actually in the U.S.A.) Finally, I had been driven from the bus station to the museum initially, so I wasn’t entirely sure how to get back at first. I looked into taxis, but could find no numbers for taxi companies. Finally, I was able to wrangle a decent Pretoria map online (you’d be amazed how difficult it is to find a street map for the capital of the frickin’ country.) As it turned out, the station was only two blocks north of where I was staying. At which point I said, “Forget the taxi, I’m hoofing it”, which brings us back to the beginning of this post: me, worrying because of a two block walk. I will detail my preparations for this epic trek (I sincerely hope that criminals in the Bloemfontein area aren’t reading this, otherwise they will know all my tricks). In terms of bags, carrying around the laptop case was right out. I had to stow it into my big suitcase somehow. How I was going to do this, I wasn’t entirely sure, because the thing was filled to overflowing already with clothes and papers. The eventual result of several hours of effort I consider the greatest packing job that I have ever done. I’m quite proud of it, even if I did need to stuff my skivvies in my backpack in the end. Like the luggage version of a Bedouin wedding feast (or turducken, if you will), I packed my digital camera case in my laptop bag, and my laptop bag in my suitcase. This left me with only two items to carry: said suitcase, and my backpack. Of course, both were freakishly heavy, which would cut down on my walking speed, but I considered it a fair trade for hiding the precious lappy. Then, there was the matter of the items being carried on my person. Namely, nothing, save for my wallet, which had been emptied of everything (said things mostly placed in an inner pocket of the backpack) other than a few South African bills (in the event of a robbery, I certainly didn’t want to have nothing on hand with which to appease an attacker, lest they grow ever bolder and demand the contents of one of my bags.) Incidentally, the monetary value of those bills worked out to be three bucks American, now that I think about it. I did need my credit card and an ID on my person to pick up my bus ticket, these I placed in a pocket on the inner lining of my pants (I make sure to only carry one of my three IDs [driver’s license, student ID, passport] on me at any time). Now I was ready for anything. There was a brief freak-out when I could not open the gate to get out, but I found a night security guard and he let me out. Onwards! The walk took five, six minutes tops and naturally, passed entirely without incident.
The eight-hour bus ride from Pretoria to Bloemfontein was quite nice, as for the first time, I actually got a look at the African countryside rather than the urban rot of the inner city. Leaving Pretoria, I saw both the Voortrekker Monument (commemorating the Boer settlers who founded the city) and the extremely impressive Unisa (University of South Africa) building (Notice I said “impressive”, not “attractive”: the building is absolutely enormous, takes up an entire mountainside, and looks for all the world like a crashed starship.) We passed some alkaline lakes that weren’t blue, rather, they were bright pink. You see, every inch of the water was covered with flamingos. I was pressed against the window, occasionally looking back to the other passengers with frantic head-bobs and gesticulations as if to say, “Omigod! You guys seeing this?!?” They continued watching Maid in Manhattan on the overhead television, apparently not needing to view so ordinary a bird as the flamingo (I’m from Florida, the flamingo is our lotto symbol, for goodness’ sake, and I still think flamingos are awesome. No one should be so jaded as to not think a flock of hundreds [maybe thousands] of them is worth looking at.) The countryside was quite pretty, although (speaking of being jaded), it did seem somewhat familiar after a while. Borges once wrote, “No two mountain peaks are alike, but anywhere on earth the plains are one and the same.” I’m inclined to agree. Sure, the carper in me can point out all the little differences between the plains I just saw and those that I have seen so many times in central Florida and Illinois: the dirt in the U.S. is brown and black, while here it is the ubiquitous African red; while the plains of the aforementioned states are flat as can be, the skyline here is topped with little koppies and occasional cliffs; here, the plains are dotted every few meters by large, globular balls of hardened earth (termite mounds; back when I took a mycology class, I learned that there is a very delicious species of mushroom that grows only on termite mounds; I thought that they must be very rare and difficult to find, growing on such a scattered habitat. Now I realize that they must be far more common still than the mushrooms growing on cow pies in the U.S.); in the U.S., trees by the side of the road will have circular bird’s nests up in the canopy of the leaves, here, the pendulous nests of industrious weaverbirds dangle from every branch tip; and finally, the herds of cattle seen along the side of the road are mostly of that dewlapped, humped aspect that identifies them as being of Bos indicus stock rather than of ruddy, hairy European ancestry. Yet these are, as I said, minor differences. The general impression is very much the same, and I think, were it not for my obsessive attention to natural historical detail (e.g. me, thinking to myself, “Oh my gosh! Look at those xerophytes! We must have entered the Karoo sclerophyllous floral zone!”) that I may well have found the bus ride boring. Furthermore, as the bus was sparsely occupied, I did not find myself longing to murder each and every passenger as I have on similarly-long bus rides through Ohio and Florida, crammed between enormous Americans and their screaming children.
Folks in Pretoria and Jo’Burg spoke of Bloemfontein (the judicial capital of the country) as being a rather sleepy, backwater burg of minimal interest. I have, thus far, found it rather nicer than those previous two cities, however. Despite Pretoria’s beautiful Sir Herbert Baker-designed government buildings and Johannesburg’s brash skyscrapers, the dominant feel in both places was of extremely run-down, seedy urbania. Neither of them had a real “downtown” in the sense of a U.S. city: the hip spots and storefronted avenues are all in the less formidable suburbs. Bloemfontein is indeed a smallish city, but the buildings are either new or well-kempt enough to pass, and I have yet to see a store entitled “The Handgun Experience: Arms and Ammunition” (saw that in Pretoria, just south of Strijdom Square along my bus route). It’s sort of in the middle of nowhere (in the landlocked heart of the Free State), and it’s the first place where I’ve encountered people who simply do not speak English (only Afrikaans), but I can deal with that. Oh, one more thing (I know I talk about Afrikaans words a lot, often with seeming mockery, but I do find the language seriously cool): I was at a restaurant recently that had the menu in both English and Afrikaans, and I noted that the translation of “Two fried eggs with bacon served on toast” was “Twee gebakte eiers en spek, bedien op roosterbrood.” My first thought on seeing that was, “They call eggs roosterbrood? That’s awesome! Odd, yet entirely appropriate!” A second later, I looked again at the order of the offerings, remembered the rules of hypervowelization, and realized that “roosterbrood” was “roasted bread”, i.e. toast. This was a great disappointment to me, but I consider “roosterbrood” to be such a great word that I’m using it to refer to eggs from now on.
So let me give you another glimpse into my bottomless well of paranoia. Picture this: I’m preparing to leave Pretoria to catch a bus for Bloemfontein, and worrying because it’s a 7 AM depature, and that means I have to navigate Pretoria’s city center all alone, carrying lots of baggage, at six o’clock Sunday morning. How much of a target is that: large, heavily laden obvious tourist wandering through one of the worse parts of town when the sun has still not yet risen on a non-work day. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself the night before. Stoking the fires of that fear is an e-mail I received from one of my contacts in Cape Town, telling me that the last therapsid-interested visitor was mugged twice: once while walking around Cape Town on a Sunday morning. Her advice, “One simply does not walk around Cape Town on a Sunday morning.” Pretoria, while as mentioned laid-back, is not too dissimilar from Cape Town in terms of police reports, and I was still of course reeling from my exposure to Crimetown, U.S.A. (a.k.a. Johannesburg; n.b.: not actually in the U.S.A.) Finally, I had been driven from the bus station to the museum initially, so I wasn’t entirely sure how to get back at first. I looked into taxis, but could find no numbers for taxi companies. Finally, I was able to wrangle a decent Pretoria map online (you’d be amazed how difficult it is to find a street map for the capital of the frickin’ country.) As it turned out, the station was only two blocks north of where I was staying. At which point I said, “Forget the taxi, I’m hoofing it”, which brings us back to the beginning of this post: me, worrying because of a two block walk. I will detail my preparations for this epic trek (I sincerely hope that criminals in the Bloemfontein area aren’t reading this, otherwise they will know all my tricks). In terms of bags, carrying around the laptop case was right out. I had to stow it into my big suitcase somehow. How I was going to do this, I wasn’t entirely sure, because the thing was filled to overflowing already with clothes and papers. The eventual result of several hours of effort I consider the greatest packing job that I have ever done. I’m quite proud of it, even if I did need to stuff my skivvies in my backpack in the end. Like the luggage version of a Bedouin wedding feast (or turducken, if you will), I packed my digital camera case in my laptop bag, and my laptop bag in my suitcase. This left me with only two items to carry: said suitcase, and my backpack. Of course, both were freakishly heavy, which would cut down on my walking speed, but I considered it a fair trade for hiding the precious lappy. Then, there was the matter of the items being carried on my person. Namely, nothing, save for my wallet, which had been emptied of everything (said things mostly placed in an inner pocket of the backpack) other than a few South African bills (in the event of a robbery, I certainly didn’t want to have nothing on hand with which to appease an attacker, lest they grow ever bolder and demand the contents of one of my bags.) Incidentally, the monetary value of those bills worked out to be three bucks American, now that I think about it. I did need my credit card and an ID on my person to pick up my bus ticket, these I placed in a pocket on the inner lining of my pants (I make sure to only carry one of my three IDs [driver’s license, student ID, passport] on me at any time). Now I was ready for anything. There was a brief freak-out when I could not open the gate to get out, but I found a night security guard and he let me out. Onwards! The walk took five, six minutes tops and naturally, passed entirely without incident.
The eight-hour bus ride from Pretoria to Bloemfontein was quite nice, as for the first time, I actually got a look at the African countryside rather than the urban rot of the inner city. Leaving Pretoria, I saw both the Voortrekker Monument (commemorating the Boer settlers who founded the city) and the extremely impressive Unisa (University of South Africa) building (Notice I said “impressive”, not “attractive”: the building is absolutely enormous, takes up an entire mountainside, and looks for all the world like a crashed starship.) We passed some alkaline lakes that weren’t blue, rather, they were bright pink. You see, every inch of the water was covered with flamingos. I was pressed against the window, occasionally looking back to the other passengers with frantic head-bobs and gesticulations as if to say, “Omigod! You guys seeing this?!?” They continued watching Maid in Manhattan on the overhead television, apparently not needing to view so ordinary a bird as the flamingo (I’m from Florida, the flamingo is our lotto symbol, for goodness’ sake, and I still think flamingos are awesome. No one should be so jaded as to not think a flock of hundreds [maybe thousands] of them is worth looking at.) The countryside was quite pretty, although (speaking of being jaded), it did seem somewhat familiar after a while. Borges once wrote, “No two mountain peaks are alike, but anywhere on earth the plains are one and the same.” I’m inclined to agree. Sure, the carper in me can point out all the little differences between the plains I just saw and those that I have seen so many times in central Florida and Illinois: the dirt in the U.S. is brown and black, while here it is the ubiquitous African red; while the plains of the aforementioned states are flat as can be, the skyline here is topped with little koppies and occasional cliffs; here, the plains are dotted every few meters by large, globular balls of hardened earth (termite mounds; back when I took a mycology class, I learned that there is a very delicious species of mushroom that grows only on termite mounds; I thought that they must be very rare and difficult to find, growing on such a scattered habitat. Now I realize that they must be far more common still than the mushrooms growing on cow pies in the U.S.); in the U.S., trees by the side of the road will have circular bird’s nests up in the canopy of the leaves, here, the pendulous nests of industrious weaverbirds dangle from every branch tip; and finally, the herds of cattle seen along the side of the road are mostly of that dewlapped, humped aspect that identifies them as being of Bos indicus stock rather than of ruddy, hairy European ancestry. Yet these are, as I said, minor differences. The general impression is very much the same, and I think, were it not for my obsessive attention to natural historical detail (e.g. me, thinking to myself, “Oh my gosh! Look at those xerophytes! We must have entered the Karoo sclerophyllous floral zone!”) that I may well have found the bus ride boring. Furthermore, as the bus was sparsely occupied, I did not find myself longing to murder each and every passenger as I have on similarly-long bus rides through Ohio and Florida, crammed between enormous Americans and their screaming children.
Folks in Pretoria and Jo’Burg spoke of Bloemfontein (the judicial capital of the country) as being a rather sleepy, backwater burg of minimal interest. I have, thus far, found it rather nicer than those previous two cities, however. Despite Pretoria’s beautiful Sir Herbert Baker-designed government buildings and Johannesburg’s brash skyscrapers, the dominant feel in both places was of extremely run-down, seedy urbania. Neither of them had a real “downtown” in the sense of a U.S. city: the hip spots and storefronted avenues are all in the less formidable suburbs. Bloemfontein is indeed a smallish city, but the buildings are either new or well-kempt enough to pass, and I have yet to see a store entitled “The Handgun Experience: Arms and Ammunition” (saw that in Pretoria, just south of Strijdom Square along my bus route). It’s sort of in the middle of nowhere (in the landlocked heart of the Free State), and it’s the first place where I’ve encountered people who simply do not speak English (only Afrikaans), but I can deal with that. Oh, one more thing (I know I talk about Afrikaans words a lot, often with seeming mockery, but I do find the language seriously cool): I was at a restaurant recently that had the menu in both English and Afrikaans, and I noted that the translation of “Two fried eggs with bacon served on toast” was “Twee gebakte eiers en spek, bedien op roosterbrood.” My first thought on seeing that was, “They call eggs roosterbrood? That’s awesome! Odd, yet entirely appropriate!” A second later, I looked again at the order of the offerings, remembered the rules of hypervowelization, and realized that “roosterbrood” was “roasted bread”, i.e. toast. This was a great disappointment to me, but I consider “roosterbrood” to be such a great word that I’m using it to refer to eggs from now on.
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