Filed under: Daily life
I arrived in Johannesburg three weeks ago, and I’m just getting around to blogging. In the future, I’ll try to update this blog often, usually with short posts–plus links, photos, audio and video. Short notes are often easier than trying to write long email updates, and I think it’ll be more fun to read, too.
Feel free to leave (relatively appropriate) comments on the blog here, or send me emails of any appropriateness. Phone calls and postcards are great, too. I’ll keep my contact info updated through the “Contact Info” page–see the link at the left.
One other thing: my friend Christian and I will be trying to carry on a sporadic sort of “video conversation” with each other, and the videos will appear in the little box on the left. We’ll see how well we do with keeping up w/ that.
Anyway…
I made it to Johannesburg in one piece, after about 30 hours of plane travel, 6 hours of time changing, and less sleep. I had a fun time people-watching at the Doha airport in the “gosh I wish I could use that in Scrabble”-named country of Qatar on the Persian Gulf. In case you were curious, Qatar is slightly smaller than Connecticut and has the highest per capita income of any country in the world, mostly due to huge oil and natural gas reserves. A couple of demographic surprises, care of the CIA: Indian, Pakistani, Iranian and other minorities together outnumber ethnic Arabs, and only about 3/4 of the population is Muslim. Qatar also has big problems with human trafficking, though I couldn’t pick any of that out at the airport.
Testing French fragrances in Doha Int'l
I’m working on a little video of the airport, by the way, which I’ll post soon. It was a interesting place to hang out, and it had an enormous diversity of people. Western travelers in safari get-ups, Middle Eastern men in white robes and keffiyeh, women in black burqas, a Chinese tour group in matching maroon polos, spiffy salespeople in starched suits and many other people in different styles of dress–most people staring off blankly, probably with six-hour layovers like me. There’s a prayer room, and there’s a darkened sleeping room with lounge chairs. It would have been comfy, but I was preoccupied.
The staff of Qatar Airways, which accounts for at least 80% of the flights at Doha, come from as many parts of the world as the travelers in the airport. They were dressed like they’d stepped out of the 1950s, and their service was equally old-fashioned. All the great little extras were there–constant rounds of drinks, free booze, pretty good food, booties for your feet, towelettes for your face and a mini-toothbrush and tiny toothpaste tube.
Overall the flights were great, and one of my seat neighbors was pretty cool, too. He grew up in Chicago but now lives in rural Mississippi. I don’t remember his name (what’s new?). He was headed to Afghanistan for work–as a defense contractor working on military helicopters, I think. He’d been there before, and he did the same job in Iraq for several years as well, but he said this was to be his last trip. Being away from his family in dangerous places was tough, and he seemed disillusioned with his job. He offered only one insight into what he thought of the future of those two troubled countries. The US bases he’d worked at in Iraq were permanent, he said. “They’re planning to be there for a long, long time.”
While the flights were enjoyable, arriving into Joburg was not. In fact, it was quite a stressful experience, and the stress was both unexpected and completely self-induced. Americans can get automatic three-month tourist visas upon entering South Africa, just like in Europe, but somehow I’d worked myself into thinking that they’d ask me lots of questions first: Was I really a tourist? Why didn’t I know when I was leaving? What was I doing? A “fellowship,” eh? That doesn’t sound like tourism, they’d say. I had prepared a little speech I would give them, and I’d read and reread the small print on my customs declaration until my eyes went fuzzy.
My most memorable recent experiences crossing borders have been at US Immigration, and I think they’ve prepared me to be apprehensive. Somehow I always seem to have the misfortune of being placed with people who are inexplicably angry about something–as if they’d really like to let off some frustration by socking me one across the counter. Or maybe getting ex-bullies to stamp passports is our new way to keep the Homeland secure; I hope not.
A couple of years ago, I remember coming back to the US from a choir trip, and one of the international students talked about being harassed by some mean-spirited Immigration official. Where are you going to college? Oh, that’s quite an expensive college; how do you manage to pay for that? (Welcome to America!)
Sunset out my bedroom window.
Anyhow, enough cynicism and digression. They often go together, I think.
Thankfully, South African officials, who are probably even more underpaid, were considerate and even congenial. My close perusal of the documentation had informed me that I should expect to pay steep tariffs for bringing in a laptop and other expensive stuff. But the customs guy looked at the form, looked at me, half-winked and gave me a thumbs-up. Right on, man.
I met my house-mate/landlord just outside. Her name is Lynda, and she’s been a really great first host here. Somewhat to my surprise at the time, we were hardly in the car before we’d jumped into a discussion of politics and race relations in South Africa — and she has been equally friendly and hospitable ever since. I’ve been over to dinner at her parents’ house at least three times now, and she threw me a fun (and yummy) birthday party with her family and friends on the 5th. She even set me up to rent one of her cars at a good rate, helped me get a cell phone and drew me lots of maps. I thought that sharing a house or flat with someone would be the best way to quickly meet people and integrate, but I didn’t expect that people would be quite so friendly.
It feels a little like Iowa in that way.
The weather, however, does not. South Africa is currently emerging from winter, but it feels little different than summer did in Oregon a month ago. I think SA is at a similar latitude to somewhere in Mexico, so that would explain it. Johannesburg is just over a mile-high, though–on a desert/savanna landscape called the “high veld”–so apparently it can get dry, windy and below freezing earlier in the winter.
Dot, dot, dot
I’ll fill in more details about the past several weeks in another post, but suffice it to say that I’m doing well. I’ve settled in, adjusted to driving on the wrong side of the road, found some cool shops and gone to work at a local newspaper for several days of the past week.
Okay, more later. Take care.
