To sum up my two week trip to Madurai, I thought I’d just post an email I sent today to a Grinnell friend named Dean. I was in Madurai to surprise other friends studying abroad there with a program called SITA, and he had previously offered me some tips (thanks, Dean).
* * *
Sri Meenakshi Temple
Hey,
The trip was great! After sleeping off some of my train ride hang over, I used your directions (specifically, “across from ICIC Bank” was an essential bit of info) and got an auto ride over to the SITA center. “Hey,” I said to the two students sitting out in front of the building, “my name is Linn. Are Kelly and Blake here?” “Oh, you’re Linn,” they re-stated. “We’ve heard about you. Kelly said you haven’t been answering her emails.”
They led me back to the computer lab, and Kelly, Blake and (unexpectedly) Mike Kober and I had a little hug-fest. Fan-tastic! Kelly and Blake called me “sneaky,” and I was very happy with this.
"Avvai Shanmugi"
I’m on my way back to Chennai now, where I’ll start an intership with The Hindu tomorrow. During my great two weeks in Madurai, I visited Meenakshi Temple twice (the newly repainted gopurams were reopened on April 8), drank beer and read Hemingway at three different rooftop restaurants, cooked pseudo-Mexican food w/ Mike’s family, saw a goat have its head sawed off in sacrifice at Pandykoil, feared for my life climbing Yanai Malai, got better at riding on the backs of motor bikes and off the sides of buses, got solicided for donations to a Muslim madrasah and for investment in a coastal tourist resort, learned useful words like “poodum,” danced to “Cotton Eyed Joe” at a surprise birthday party (to an utterly astonished audience), and bought several great DVDs, including a Tamil remake of Mrs. Doubtfire (photo above). I give it one and half thumbs up, but two big thumbs up for the fight scene where Mrs. Doubtfire levels five crooks at the market.
All the best,
Linn
Filed under: Daily life
That’s the Ministry of Tourism’s most recent campaign, and I think it fits okay. “Incredible,” one says, stepping out of the airport. And then BAM!, mid-thought, an exclamation point. “I’m in !ndia.”
A man emerging from a watermelon. BAM! Bizarrely, this was the photo used to advertize an ice cream-juice drink in a restaurant I was in recently.
An auto-rickshaw. BAM! And is that a guy holding a twenty-foot PVC pipe out the side? BAM! A silk shop, and a burka shop. Restaurants in “veg” or “non-veg.” BAM BAM! A trapezoidal temple, and…a shrine to a plump Virgin Mary. Huh, BAM! People adjusting their saris and retucking their lungis, people pushing carts of split watermelons and spiky jackfruits, people fixing bicycles in the alley and splitting bamboo on the sidewalk, people pissing, people sleeping, people arguing, people, people, people. BAM bamity BAM!
I’ve been here nearly three weeks now, and the first exclamation points have worn off only a little. I keep thinking of Senegal, as that seems to be my basis for comparison for every foreign place, and much of the feeling here is the same. Right hand only for eating, taking off shoes at the door, political rallies with blasting music, little shops with a little of everything, religious icons on walls, dangling charms on back bumpers, disgusting bathrooms, friendly faces, spicy smells, packed buses in crazy traffic, mosquitoes that are problematic, constantly oppressive heat and just…the feeling of the street.
Chennai's best crumbling colonial hotel, called Broadlands. According to unreliable sources, it was the private guesthouse of a British governor (or Indian aristocrat?) for a hundred years, before it became a hotel in the '50s. In the '60s it was a hippie hang-out, reminisced one baby boomer guest I met, and a perpetual cloud of pot smoke hung above this quiet courtyard.
Until yesterday, I was staying in the Triplicane neighborhood of Chennai, a densely populated mixed-income area near the city center.
For some reason I noticed dress right away. Few women in Western dress, but most men. Sandals for everyone. I’m happy to see that men almost uniformly sport cotton pants and button-up shirts, so I should fit right in. Some men prefer their hair parted severely and slicked, and mustaches are the hot thing. I dig that, too.
I feel like I’m sweating in the shower. My scalp is like a squeezed sponge, and the droplets become ants as they roll off.
So there’ the dress and the heat, but it was the feeling of safety that really hit me. I can walk around worrying about remembering a few Tamil words, worrying about not getting run over, feeling culture-shocked at all the people, senses, stores, sure. But to not worry about being mugged? After seven months in South Africa, thank goodness most of all for that. What a great relief.
As I finish old posts re: South Africa, they’ll appear below, so keep an eye peeked for those. New videos at the left, too.
Filed under: Daily life
This’ll be a long one, and it’s been a long time in the writing. But I’ve added asterisk separators, like an old Bantam paperback, so hopefully it’s at least manageable. Too bad the page edges aren’t colored red or yellow and the last one isn’t an order form.
* * *
Edenvale, from across the freeway
Well, where was I? I had just arrived at Lynda’s, I think, when I wrote my last real update. We had had an exciting political conversation on the way from the airport, and I had slept like a bat. (Right through the next day.)
The long flight, the anticlimactic panic of passing customs and my interest in impressing my new acquaintance all prevented me from being very observant. But one can’t help but notice some immediate similarities with the US–the magazine racks packed with sports and Hollywood celebs, for instance, the parking garages packed with SUVs, the wide freeways, the cookie-cutter urban sprawl, the fried chicken places.
Mine was just one up from the big tan house in the middle
Lynda lives in an eastern Joburg suburb called Edenvale, two cloverleaf interchanges and three stoplights (or about 20 minutes) from the airport. It’s a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, with single-family homes on big lots, numbered streets, lots of trees, a park with swing sets, the works. Homeowners and car-drivers are mostly white, but almost everyone walking on the street–maids, gardeners, handymen, service-sector employees–is black. City-slicker Joburgers sneer at Edenvale like Chicagoans probably sneer at Gary; most white folks there are conservative and boring, they say.
There is some culture in Edenvale, though. There’s a semi-famous, rip-roaring hard-rock bar called The Doors and a nice library with skylights in a big postmodern concrete block. Across the street from The Doors is a yummy bakery called De Bakkery, with–as if its name didn’t get the point across–a towering Dutch windmill replica on the roof.
The Doors nightclub, famous enough for some guy on the train to mention tripping there in the '80s
And Edenvale, like many a white-middle-class suburb in the US, is becoming more cosmopolitan all the time. When I wanted some fish balls and sesame seeds, I went to one of the two Chinese grocery stores. When I wanted a short-wave radio, it was a Sudanese-Serbian guy who sold it to me, from the back of a shop so cluttered with piles of grubby electronics that customers squeeze single-file along one wall. His life story and 9/11 theories came free.
All these shops are located along Edenvale’s four-lane Main Street equivalent, between car dealerships, supermarkets, banks, and other staple businesses. Several Protestant churches are clustered a couple blocks away, of which a Dutch Reformed Church* is the only unusual one to American eyes. There are half-a-dozen small strip-malls within walking distance, and there’s a big glitzy mall up the hill, which is the real place to see and be seen. The only recognizable store in that mall is, bizarrely, Build-a-Bear. But change the signs on the department stores and cell phone shops, and the whole gargantuan complex could have been transplanted, bleached-blonde people and all, straight from SoCal.
One brand of biltong that is very lekker indeed
For cheap eats away from the mall, there’s delivery pizza, Chinese take-out, McDonald’s and KFC. The corner convenience store has six-packs and 40s in the coolers, potato chips and beef jerky (biltong) on the shelves, and cigarettes in an above-counter rack. The Shoprite supermarket has the exact floor-plan of Grinnell’s Hy-Vee and Milwaukie’s Albertson’s, and Lynda’s three-bedroom ranch-style house is as generically American as they come. The backyard grass is mowed and landscaped, and a plum tree and flowering bushes occupy the curvy perimeter soil. In the living room, for the 16 hours of the waking day, either 94.7 Highveld Stereo is playing Beyonce and Madonna, or e-TV is showing WWE wrestling and Judge Judy.
* * *
My, you're looking sharp today, Johannesburg
Before you suspect that I accidentally stepped off the plane in Texas (or Hoboken–thanks, Elizabeth) rather than Africa, I should say that if the food, language, customs or dress in South Africa didn’t startled me, other things did. The other things weren’t personal culture-shocks but rather big-picture “social justice” sorts of issues–race, class, gender, yada yada.
For the first couple months at least, they occupied my thoughts like an army in Baghdad. At restaurants, I’d count the number of black clients and white staff–and make a judgement, of course. When I’d see some rich guy give a waiter a 30-cent tip, I’d leave 30 percent. Disappointed in all the (as I saw it) “elitism” in the news, I started recording interviews with immigrants, homeless folks and night-shift security guards. I felt like Che Guevara at a Cambodian sweatshop, Jerry Falwell at a swingers party, Richard Simmons at a…. You get what I mean–indignant and self-righteous.
Trees and cell towers from Yeoville, an appropriately named mixed-ethnicity working-class neighborhood
But however new any of this stuff felt, none of it should have been any newer than Beyonce or Build-a-Bear. Income disparity, racism, xenophobia/immigration–what are more American than those social issues? (Back home, ya know, the “Negroes” are getting “uppity” and the “Mexicans are invading.”)
Being an American living in SA has the same out-of-body flavor as being a kitten looking in a mirror. Okay, it’s a bit of a fun-house mirror–sometimes the doilies and morés are more 1950s-America, the hair more ’90s, the tea-sipping politeness more British, the ketchup more vinegary. But I cannot imagine a parallel universe with more deep-down societal similarities–and more to teach us about, well, (the) US–than has South Africa.
* * *
A family photo
Back to real people now–Lynda, for example. She’s a successful 40-ish businesswoman and works from home for her two-woman marketing company. She’s driven and punctual, but she’s also fond of movies, her dog, travel, New Age music and philosophizing. She wants, I think, to write a book someday on cross-cultural symbolism–after recently seeing a building near Madurai (south, south India) with both a swastika and star-of-David on its front façade, I suggest those as starting points.
Near downtown
For the two months I lived at Lynda’s house, she treated me like family. She threw me a birthday party the week I arrived, and her siblings and their kids all came over. In fact, not only did they come over, but they brought platters of home-cooked appetizers, two cakes, plenty of alcohol and presents–presents!? I have never felt such complete hospitality anywhere.
Not to be outdone by their daughter, Lynda’s parents essentially adopted me as a grandchild. They did all the things grandparents do–fed me delicious dinners, told me stories, gave me advice and took me to art and theatre shows.
* * *
Five houses right from the intersection near the bottom-left, just in case you'd like to visit
After two months, I decided to move closer to the two newspapers where I was working. I found a great little backyard room in Joburg’s only real hip neighborhood, called Melville–beautiful tree-lined streets, four jam-packed used book stores in a square-half-mile, ethnic restaurants, lots of foreigners, artists, journalists.** My room was part of a “commune” and had its own bathroom and a sliding door opening onto a tree-shaded pool and patio. A “commune,” in SA lingo, is just a collection of rooms on one property–so no full-moon drumming, rainwater plumbing, sitar strumming or naked Fridays, unfortunately–but the people there were great.
A lazy Melville street
There were some quiet Congolese guys on one side who were always lifting weights on the patio, and a Coloured guy and his girlfriend. He eventually got a job at the Shell station down the street. Tshego (guttural “g”) lived across the pool from me–an easy going, skinny kid from Pretoria who popped the collars on his polo shirts. He worked in a call center doing loan collection for a big bank, but he wanted to start a TV travel show. He had a sweet computer and called me “Captain America,” and we were good friends. Tryphina and Tumi were, too, and their boyfriends were pretty chill and always around. Tryphina got a job as a secretary at a burn-survivors charity, and Tumi was working on her degree–in history or something useless. Brian, a big tall guy from Cape Town lived in the back, but I think he got kicked out at some point for not paying rent. I dunno.
The commune's white wall, under the jacaranda trees
A 30-something Turkish guy named Okan owns the place. He also used to own a lingerie shop, and he apparently keeps two loaded shotguns under his pillow at night. He’s really a jolly fellow, and tubby enough to be called “jolly,” but the shotguns and the lingerie are usually the only two ways I describe him. He also liked thrillers and 9/11 conspiracies–person number two now–and another friend of mine said he plays a mean traditional Turkish flute. He was thinking about going back to Turkey because his father is sick, but then he traded the lingerie shop for a bakery called “De La Crème,” and I don’t think he’s going back anymore. He’s a nice and casual guy, but he was never the most attentive landlord. He forgot to pay the electricity bill for a few months, so they shut it off one day and my meat rotted. From week to week the pool would morph from blue to brown to hot-green.
The view on Saturday
My room always smelled a little funny, too, but I chalked that up to the bed frame and took it outside a few weeks after a moved in. When the rains started, however, I realized I had probably put the mattress on the floor for nothing. Drips of water dropped on the edge of the bed, mold seeped from the carpet, little spots grew on the bathroom walls, and my paradisaical room became a hazmat zone. The mold got bad enough that I started sleeping in the bathroom with the door closed. Then I moved to sleeping on the back seat of my rental car and entered the room SWAT-style to get underwear.
Eventually the rain became less intense and my car less comfortable, and I went back home. I decided the mattress was more of a problem that the bed frame, so I took the mattress out and brought the frame back in. I got a couple of big pillows to make it feel less wooden and achy, and I positioned it so that I could sleep with my head out the door–for fresh air, see. At about 8:30 each morning, when Tshego would start up his thumping subwoofer, I’d pull my head in like a turtle and close the door.
When in want of a model, how about a portrait of the artiste?
I never got Okan to patch the leak or clean the mold, but I still think he’s a great guy. He let me sleep on the couch in the Big House for periods of several weeks in the months after I moved out and leave my junk in box in the corner, and he’s an excellent cook. Once, when I mistakenly thought my car had been stolen–long story–he went looking for it with me downtown at night, with the requisite shotguns tucked in his sock and belt.
After I left, a Dutch journalist (we’re everywhere) moved into my room, and she finally got Okan to fix the roof. But when I was packing up my stuff for India in early March, she was moving out in a huff. He’d apparently forgotten to pay the electricity bill again.
Mafeteng, I think, Lesotho
* * *
After a week in Lesotho around Thanksgiving, I decided to get out and travel more; Joburg was getting tiring and too much like real life. In responding to my first progress report, the Watson folks had agreed; “get out of the office, already” was one particularly memorable line. They liked my second report better, and it continues the narrative from here.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* The “Dutch Reformed Church” (DRC) in this case, I believe, is more specifically a Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk (NG Kerk), which–although these two names are synonymous in South Africa–is actually among a family of denominations whose roots go back to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Among these is the Reformed Church in America and several southern African denominations, including the predominantly Coloured and black URCSA and the arch-conservative Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk. The NG Kerk is the largest of these, and it is a generally conservative, Afrikaans-speaking denomination, perhaps best-known internationally for its moral justification of apartheid. Calvinist religion was once the backbone of the Afrikaner community (one example), and South Africa remains a very religious country across all ethnic communities. While I was driving through small town after small town across the interior of the country last month, I couldn’t help but notice that a beautifully preserved NG Kerk church was usually a town’s most prominent feature. The main street, almost always called Voortrekkerstraat, would dead-end into or pass around an advent-calendar white church–whose designers seem invariably to have overestimated their towns’ populations.
** For an enjoyable, albeit over-rosy, overview of Joburg city life–including mentions of new fashion, new music and hip spots like Melville–check out this enjoyable Travel and Leisure Magazine article.
(written early and mid-November 08 — Johannesburg, South Africa)
Well, it’s been three and half months now, and sometimes it seems like it’s been no time at all. I arrived at the beginning of August, four days before my birthday, and now the malls around Johannesburg are already gearing up for Christmas. Other times, I feel as if I’ve lived in Joburg for years. I can nearly name the downtown streets in order, and friends back home say my accent is ever-so-slightly un-American. Time moving simultaneously quickly and slowly–I suppose this is a classic traveler’s paradox.
Yes, I am only a traveler, but my day-to-day life causes me to forget that fact now and then. I’m renting my own little room in a suburban backyard, and I drive a car. When my housemates ask where I’ve been in the evening, I tell them: “oh, just working late at the office.” But as I walked down the sidewalk toward the Dept. of Home Affairs last month, I reminded myself that “work” was not the right word to use with immigration officials. I repeated to myself what I would say instead: “Hello, I would like to renew my tourist visa, please.”
It’s the nature of my project, I think, that makes me feel as if I’m not a tourist. As proposed, it has three parts: work as an assistant to investigative journalists, work at media-related nonprofits and visit journalism schools. I have since added a fourth component: interview journalists I don’t have to time to shadow. In my first three months, I have managed to do all four.
* * *
I have interned at two major South African newspapers, begun writing a report for a local media NGO, visited a journalism school and spoken casually with journalists from half a dozen media outlets. Starting shortly after my arrival, I worked for two months at The Star, one of South Africa’s largest non-tabloid daily papers, where I helped reporters with research and interviews, wrote a couple of articles and assisted an editor with research for an ongoing investigative project. The project is related to the shady land deals of certain city councilors, in which councilors profited from selling off pieces of municipal land–environmentally sensitive plots in some cases–to developers.
In September I also began interning at the Mail & Guardian, a well-respected weekly that has its roots as a feisty anti-apartheid paper. The M&G does some of the best writing and investigative work on the continent, and working there was at the top of my South African wish list. I have since written an average of one and a half articles a week and offered other miscellaneous help in the newsroom. The investigative team has kept me busy doing research on another long-term project. This investigation deals with a shrimp farm on the South African coast, in an environmentally sensitive area, which is organized and bankrolled by dodgy American businesspeople. They thought I would enjoy talking to other Americans–and that I might be able to understand US government-related aspects of the story. I’m not so sure. In any case, doing this research gives me the chance to hang out with and learn from one of the top investigative journalists in South Africa, and I couldn’t ask for anything better. I’ve found the atmosphere at the M&G to be very welcoming and collaborative, and I have been constantly busy and consistently enthusiastic about what I’m doing. The investigative team has been very candid and inviting, and I’ve learned a great deal. Last weekend, they invited me to go with them to visit a source for the shrimp farm story, in a small town a couple of hours outside Joburg.
I plan to keep working in the M&G’s Joburg newsroom until I leave the city in mid-December, but I already left The Star in October. Being at both newspapers at the same time was become unworkable–not only because I was feeling overloaded but because having a desk in each newsroom became a bit sticky. The editor at The Star whom I was helping with the land deals project took me with her to meet with a source for the story, but the same guy was also a source for somebody at the M&G working on the same story. He mentioned my name, the M&G mentioned it to me, and I quickly realized that it would be awkward to be at both papers at the same time. On the other hand, it is only positive that I was involved enough with a newspaper that they cared whether I was working somewhere else. When starting out on the project, I think I would have considered that a triumph.
In addition to working at newspapers, I have recently started a research project with an NGO called the Media Monitoring Project. The MMP does mostly what its name suggests–quantitative media analysis–but I’m working on an independent qualitative analysis of media coverage of “service delivery protests.” These are demonstrations from people, usually living in poor conditions, about the government’s lack of response to issues with housing, health care, transportation, social services or utilities. I expect my final conclusion to be that the media often covers these protests superficially, without delving very far into the actual living situations of the protesters or the specific government policies in question.
A month ago, I spent a couple days visiting with people at the University of the Witwatersrand graduate school of journalism. As former journalists themselves, the professors were fascinating interviews, but I don’t think I’ll be able to say much about the school itself until I visit others. As with newspaper newsrooms, I’ve never visited a journalism school in the States, so I have little to measure it against. I plan to visit the j-school at Rhodes University, the country’s most prestigious in December or January.
* * *
In my original proposal, I figured that one of my biggest challenges would be making contacts, and I also assumed that I would have to gain the trust of editors and journalists before I could actually write articles or assist with investigative research. I also wondered if reporters would be leery of taking me along to interviews because I’m American and White. Working at newspapers, I supposed, would be the cornerstone of my project. Even as I mentioned in the proposal that I hoped journalist friends would introduce me to life beyond the newspapers’ home metropolises, I also suspected that I would have to make a concerted effort to get out of the city.
Who’d have thought, but many of those concerns turned out to be valid.
Looking back now, it seems strange that I ever would have had trouble finding contacts. The document on my laptop called “Watson Contacts” is now 18 pages long, full of color-coded names and notes-to-self. When looking for contacts now, all I need do is ask my newsroom neighbors or send a note to the staff email list. People even volunteer contacts, like a US embassy spokesperson I was interviewing the other day. “I should put you in touch with so-and-so at the Delhi embassy,” she said out of the blue. “He’s a crusty old guy, but he has lots of press contacts.”
But last summer, things didn’t work like that, and I fretted. “Watson Contacts” had several pages of names, but I had only secured one unequivocal guarantee from a Joburg editor, despite nearly a year of following leads and cold-emailing. The editor who agreed, with whom I worked on the investigation at The Star, was a friend of a friend of a student of a professor of an acquaintance of mine who went to my high school–but whom I’d only met once in Chicago three years ago. That was the kind of stretch I was making to find contacts.
I was right to assume that editors would want me to help them out with things unrelated to my project, in exchange for my taking up space in the newsroom and having access to reporters. But I was wrong about what these trade-offs would be. I figured I would sit huddled in a corner with my laptop, but I’ve been given a parking stop, a desk and a telephone at both newspapers–and even a company email address at The Star. I also supposed I would spend most of my time fact-checking, running errands, writing obits or doing research, if I were lucky. A reporter friend at The Star thought this was hilariously naïve. “I give you one day before an editor gives you something to write.” One day it was. (To be fair, I did do some grunt-work. I once spent several days running back and forth to the Johannesburg High Court collecting documents from a court case.)
* * *
While I’ve settled into Joburg life, I long to travel more, and I’m always looking for excuses. Middle-class South Africa is more like middle-class America than anywhere but Canada, I think, which has made me worry sometimes that I’m not getting a unique cultural experience. By mid-September, I had still not left the city, so I decided unilaterally to get on a bus and travel to Pietermaritzburg, near the eastern coast. The ruling-party president was to be handed an important court decision in that city, and I figured The Star could use extra interview material from the throngs of supporters who planned to demonstrate outside the courthouse. The newspaper couldn’t, as it turned out, but it was good to get out of the city anyway–and fun to witness a little South African political history. Just before leaving The Star, the newspaper sent me to cover a rural youth soccer tournament, which took me out into the desert on a corporate prop. I was offered a similar sort of story recently at the M&G. This time I would be doing promotional writing for a new game reserve, but I would get a free stay in a luxury game lodge out in the boonies somewhere. Soon, I’ll also submit a request to you to travel to Lesotho to meet an editor or two…and visit friends for Thanksgiving.
For the most part, however, I am a full-time urbanite. I listen to the radio during my morning commute. I go to plays, concerts, bars and museums; and take walks in the park with friends to glimpse nature. I buy Chinese take-out when I’m in a rush. And in general, I’ve been living here for the past few months, not visiting.
* * *
There are, of course, times when that is obviously not the case. Like a traveler, for example, my day-to-day emotions are as topsy-turvy as the markets back home, and there have been times when I too have wished for a bailout. After feeling that I was hitting a stride in mid-October, the last week of that month began a frustrating slump, fueled primarily by a string of unlucky events.
Three of these events were related to a well-known feature of Johannesburg, and one that is perhaps most instrumental in dissuading would-be fellow tourists: crime. Sure, I knew all along that Joburg had a vigorous underworld; I just didn’t expect to run into it three times in three weeks. First, a pickpocket pockets my cell phone in a bar–a hassle, but nothing serious. Then, I experience my first big-city, broad-daylight mugging–a bit traumatizing but thankfully nonviolent. And just last weekend, to round off the hat trick, a bunch of thugs trying to make off with my rental car make off with my shoulder bag instead, a bag so chock full of personal notes and doodads that I probably should not have been carrying around with me in the first place.
Around this same time, several other stresses also entered my life. I was asked to step in for a health reporter at the Mail & Guardian, and although this was a nice thought on the part of the editors, it caused me to spend more time in the office. It was also around this time that the first spring rainstorms revealed a ceiling leak in my cute little backyard room, which in turn revealed why the room had always smelled a little musty. Now the must had turned to toxic mold, however, so I slept in my car and on the bathroom floor for several days. And when I wasn’t sleeping in it, my car was having mechanical problems.
But as of this week, my life is getting back in order. My throat and nose didn’t much like the mold, but I seem to be healthy again. My room is doing better, and I now mitigate its toxicity—and my landlord’s laziness—by sleeping with my head out the window. (No kidding.)
* * *
In other news, some recent financial accounting shows that I’m not overspending outrageously, so this is also good. Renting a car here in Joburg is one of the biggest strains on my budget, essentially doubling my monthly accommodation cost. (During the few days when I was living in my car, I felt particularly slighted.) Joburg is the only place where I planned not to use public transport, however, and car rental isn’t the extreme expense it is in the States. I’ve managed to get bargain-basement rates, and having a car has made my time in Joburg incalculably more productive, adventurous, safe and doable.
A former Watsoner mentioned to me that being in Joburg without a car made it virtually impossible to really see the city. Local public transport is complicated, unreliable at non-rush-hours and occasionally dangerous. Cabs, meanwhile, run on NYC prices. “Legalized extortion” are the words I think she used. So I decided to get a car, and—beyond driving on the left—it has been a very educational experience.
Around the time when my room was disintegrating and criminals were walking off with things, I was renting a car from a local company called—and the name really means something here—Rent-a-Wreck. I once went through three different cars in one day, including one car with broken locks on both passenger and driver doors. But hey, now I know how to break into my car through the trunk.
When I leave Joburg next month, however, I’ll appreciate being back on public transport.
* * *
And it’ll be nice to be a real traveler again, too.
(2383 words)
Filed under: Daily life
On October 1st, three things happened: South Africa and I had our two-month anniversary, I moved to a new house, and I forgot my mother’s birthday.
Yesterday, three things also happened: I renewed my visa through January, I bought a comforter and pillows, and I sent my mother an email.
Today, I took a shower.
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.
