new home for my blog

Hi I moved my blog over to http://www.neoscribes.posterous.com/

old woman at my building

Wednesday night is fast replacing Thursday, Sunday and Monday as the day when some of the most random things happen to me in Cape Town.


This week was not different. While on my way back home from getting something to eat, I jumped out of the lift to be greeted by this old lady with no teeth. This old woman, let us call her Merriam (“emphasis on the a”) because that is her name.

She had a pan in her hand which she covered with a pillow case. The explanations was that she was looking for an African lady who had just moved in and the stuff was a gift. At this stage I am literally two doors from my place and I really want to dart for my door because it is rather dark and I do not trust an old woman with a pan in her hand after dark. Call me ageist if you like but anyway.

So this lady, Merriam, ignore the disinterested look on my face and launches into a history lesson about her. You see you can see Table Mountain from where we are sitting and this lady shows me a street near the top of the hill and says that is where she grew up to Jewish parents. At this point my knees are freezing because I am wearing a dress that barely covers anything really and yet, out of politeness or stupidity I am still listening to this old lady.

She jumps from one subject (her son in London) to another (our landlord, religion, food, war) with the kind of ease that only a demented person can muster.

And you know what, as I lose feeling in my toes and knees, I am starting to like this toothless old lady. Because I know that if I ever live past 50 without jumping off a building I might be her. Well not exactly but you know what I mean.

Eventually she lets me go and promises to bring me some soup and bake me some rock hard scones and off she goes disappearing towards the lift looking for her African woman at 9pm in the evening. Only in Cape Town?

I have just nominated myself

 
i think we have an ego issue :)

hiking in the bundus

So one day I was really itching to go on the quad bike with the research assistant at the NGO I was working at. You see part of his job was to go up the hills in the quad bike to go and map up a few plots and check up on progress. So he had a really cool job because he was clever enough to study conservation while I was wallowing away in journalism school.

Anyway, so one day when it was not that busy in the office, I offered to go help the eco warrior with his research up up on the hills. It is only not that I realise how crazy that was. But I wanted to drive a quad bike up and down the hill, so off we went.
Now, please take a moment to look at the picture I have posted with this post and you will realise how high up we were. And you know how when you are driving past the hills and they look very green and the grass looks like it is up to your knee? Well it is not. Nearly 10 minutes into the climb I was panting, exhausted and really tired of having to fight off the long grass off my face. It really did not help that eco-warrior kept telling me about the snakes that he sometimes came across.

I regretted the hike terribly. And my legs, oh my poor legs were so sore. But eco warrior was hiking like he is just taking a stroll to the corner store while I was panting like those people on “the biggest looser.” Three hours later we were done. I had climbed steep hills, jumped over streams and just generally put my body through the most excruciating exercise regime I have had in my whole entire life.

Please look at the picture again and notice my smile. It was completely fake. I was just smiling at the camera. Deep down my body was going “death is better!” given the chance I would probably do it again but this time I would stick to driving up and down on the bike while eco-warrior does all the hiking.

break...

http://tinyurl.com/2wcpn5f

I have been a bit lazy to blog these days. Not because I do not have the time. But actually because I have too much time. Too many opinions. But sadly not enough words with which to express them. So I choose not to write.

baGhana Baghandisgusting

http://tinyurl.com/3yhym5b

So my beloved South Africans are so caught up in all this world Cup madness that it seems that amnesia is turning out to be one of the side effect.

a little bit of background if I may: South Africa is hosting the 2010 Fifa soccer World Cup which is ending on July 11. So for the past three weeks we have had days of drinking, hugging, kissing and just behaving like we are a festival somewhere in the bush, even though we are in the middle of Cape Town.
The tourists are here, so we are being gracious hosts and since we do not speak much Swahili, Portuguese, Dutch, French etc drinking and screaming loudly seems to be working quite well for our international relations.

http://tinyurl.com/3axc23u

So everyone is happy and we have even brushed the xenophobia under the carpet and are calling the Ghana team, baGhana baGhana, now. You see our South African team, Bafana Bafana, bombed out in the first round so it seems we have adopted Ghana as our own, for now

This is in Stark contrast with what people have been saying in the city though. We (the media) have received reports that xenophobia violence is going to start all over again after the World Cup.

So you can see my confusion, and that of my fellow colleagues. Because on the one hand we all love each each other and on the other hand we are threatening other Africans with violence.

All the genuine and false comradie is mixed into a little cocktail glass provided by Fifa.

So now that Ghana is out of the World Cup, we love or hate them again, depending on how well your bank balance looks.

South Africa is a very Schizophrenic country. it seems.

NYT pics :oil

As you may already know, there was a disaster oil spill off the coast of Louisiana (i think) and BP has been trying to do damage control for days. The oil is still spilling out of the bowels of the sea and oiled birds and fishes are washing up all over the coast. It is an environmental disaster. makes one remember that as much as you want ot help, sometimes you cant. So i was going through the pictures section of TIME magazine. http://www.time.com/ and found a few catoons that they put up at the time of the oil spill. I keel these two sum up how i felt about the oil spill at the time...

There is a fake BP account starte by what i assume to be environmentalist. it is worth following ;) http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR