There is so much to tell that is already happened. I hate playing catch-up but some of has been really amazing and I feel I can skip it.
Im the sole driver of the company car, a pretty nice VW jetta that we loving refer to as baby blue. Its just like a jetta in the states except the steering wheel is on the wrong, the right side. Drivng here was somethig I had to get used to really quick. At first ths thought keeps jumping into your mind screaming "what are you doing! Youre on the wrong side of the road and were gonna die!!" wide rights and tight lefts, and no left on red. I managed to adapt pretty quickly but my manual technique is a bit rusty after a semester of not driving one at all. I started teaching the other intern how to drive today because sometimes you just want to be driven places. It will also help a lot when she can drive so that we dont have to do everything together all the time. Honestly I really dont like driving all that much anyways.
Some of you may have noticed a hairy faced Simon Eisenburg inthe photo in the last post. Thats right he came out to visit me for a few days and we pretty much had a blast. He came to two Grassroot Soccer events and he said he had fun. He got a pretty good sense of the stuff Ill be doing out here for the next few months. Besides that we explored Port Elizabeth nightlife, which seems pretty bland. We checked out the Boardwalk, which basically has nothing to do with a board walk. Its not actually on the beach. Its a couple hundred meters back and its like a fun park of some sort. An adult disneyland complete with a casino, a handful of fastfood places, a couple bars and the kind of tourist shops that you might see in an airport or the Africa section of an american fun park. Inside the boardwalk you really could and might as well be in the united states or any other country for that matter. I mean its nice but I dont think Ill be going back.
That night was kind of a disaster from the start. First we went this bar called the the slurping owl or the chirping owl or something. Everyone was an Afrikaner and virtually everyone was over 50. Just imagine a little pub full of large people dancing to an unremarkable band with an electronic drum set. We drank our beers and fled quickly. The only girl under 30 was a waitress and she was too busy to give me decent direcions to a younger spot, but I think she was interested.
The next night we checked out the bar thats in all the tourist books. It is an English pub
called Barney's aand its supposed to be a great place. It had great potential. THere were people of all ages and skin colors but, alas, the same band from the night before at the chirping owl was playing. They did sound a little better tonight because the crowd was a little more energetic but they weren't good enough to get me off my bar stool. I was content with watching these two women just tear up the dance floor. One was a mixed woman who appeared to have an old white sugardaddy that she would drag around the floor everyonce in a whil. The other was a striking tall skin-and-bones indian girl. In all seriousness I think they may have been the two best dancers Ive ever seen. They could go on spinning eachother round for 5 minute stretches without breaking, and I didn't get the sense that they had ever even met before.
Hopefully next time there will be a different band.
thats all for now. I still havent talked about my most interesting cultural experience so far, where the picture in the first post is from.
thanks for tuning in.