Touching Base

What I'm reading: Skinny Dipping, by Connie Brockway; Pursuit, by Elizabeth Jennings

After a wonderful, if exhausting, week in San Francisco at the RWA National Conference, I'm enjoying some decompression time in Oregon. The guys are off doing manly stuff, and I'm totally content to stay in the house with the bird and cats. The weather is marvelous compared to Florida, and I have plenty of reading material. Plus, of course, a WIP in need of attention.

The Kiss of Death tour was an interesting look behind the scenes at Customs. We watched them X-ray cargo containers, and saw how every vehicle entering the port of Oakland goes through radiation scanners. I wonder if everyone on the tour decided it was too complicated to contrive a plot based on smuggling anything into the country – and out's not that much easier. Our delightful leader (with a perfect romance heroine name – Roxanne Hercules) answered our questions, but had no qualms about saying, "I can't tell you that."

Our tour ended at the San Francisco airport's International terminal where we watched Duffy the agriculture inspection beagle in action and had a chance to see how incoming passengers are screened.

They use beagles for this kind of work because they're in high passenger traffic areas and aren't likely to be seen as the kind of threat the larger, aggressive dogs would be. The German Shepherd types are used in the cargo areas, and are usually sniffing out drugs, not apples and sausage. Duffy's handler said Duffy is just about the most laid-back dog he's ever worked with -- and I think Michelle Gagnon proved his point.

Allison Brennan spoke at the annual dinner, and it's always nice to hear a Big Author admit that they've run into situation where they've had to rip apart huge chunks of a book and start over.

Wednesday was a 'free day' and my husband and I played tourist, walking from the hotel to Fisherman's Wharf. We opted for the scenic route. Our route took us t through Chinatown and North Beach.

A walk of under 2 ½ miles isn't all that much, but the San Francisco hills made it something we'd remember for the next few days.

I'll post more as I find time.

Contest reminder

June is half over... still plenty of time to enter my website contest for some souvenirs from my trip to South Africa.

All the details are on my website.

The one-week at home mark

A brief interruption of my journal entries to reflect on the trip. It's taken a week, but I feel almost normal again, whatever normal means. At least I don't feel like my rear end is twenty feet behind me. Chaos still abounds, but it's the everyday level of chaos. The kind I'm used to.

My ‘to do’ lists and piles don’t seem much bigger than they usually are. I decided to sit back and reflect about the things I noticed, both on my trip and then what struck me about being home; the good and the not-so-good.

In no particular order.

Things I noticed in Africa:

That the one thing I forgot to pack was my binoculars, but Dan was busy with his camera most of the time, so we shared without too much conflict.

Driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the street. Glad we weren’t driving. Takes awhile to adjust to small children and dogs sitting in the ‘driver’s’ seat. And to know which way to look when crossing streets.

No big gas guzzling cars. And the busses, both city and the fancy tour busses are manual transmission. I saw more of ‘my’ car (Honda Fit Sport) while we were there than I have since I bought it here last February.

Everything sounds different, even though English is spoken. The accents, the cadences are much more varied over there. Of course, here, nobody asks me where I’m from.

No Internet access most of the time. A true vacation!

Someone else made the bed every day.

I didn’t have to cook or grocery shop. Some hotels had guest laundry facilities, thank goodness.

Huge breakfast buffets daily.

Almost no clocks in the hotel rooms. Only one hotel on our entire trip had a clock.

Haphazard provision of wash cloths, but bathroom towels, even the less-than-plush ones, were twice the size of US hotel towels. Nice to have something that wrapped all the way around.

Having to remember room numbers and how to navigate from bed to bathroom in the dark. Figuring out how the toilet flushed. Adjusting to different beds and pillows almost nightly.

The contrast between city and veld, of cattle wandering the streets, of people wearing bright-colored native attire and carrying loads on their heads. For some reason, I thought that was only in the movies. Becoming complacent about seeing certain species of wildlife. Signs in hotels warning against feeding monkeys.

And, now that I’m home:

No more five-am telephone wakeup calls. Instead, it’s the seven-am roller coasters at Universal.

Brewed decaf in the morning, which wasn’t ever available (see Rooibos tea, below; my switch rather than dealing with the icky instant stuff)

Being able to pee on my own schedule, not the tour guide’s.

Finding the bathroom in the same place every night, and the furniture hardly moves at all (aside from the universal law that says inanimate objects move just enough to get in your way).

Light switches where they belong, in the room where they turn on the light, not somewhere on another wall entirely.

Feta cheese no longer appears on almost everything (although I like it, I think I had enough. Even the Palak Paneer I ordered at an Indian restaurant used feta instead of the traditional cheese.

Remembering to continue taking the malaria pills until the 20th.

No longer living in one room, usually smaller than our master bedroom and only one bathroom. A month is a LONG time to be in close quarters. Thank goodness for the two hotels we stayed in with suite layouts.

The language itself is different, drawing heavily on British and Dutch roots. Some vocabulary adjustments I made:

Bakkie – pickup truck
Biltong – dried, spiced meat (jerky) usually made from game
Biscuit – cookie
Boerwors – sausage, grilled on the braii
Braii – barbeque
Chips, crisps – French fries and potato chips, respectively
Ja (pronounced ‘yah’) – yes – usually repeated. Ja ja.
Just now – Any time from immediately to the next millennium. (You’re in Africa)
Mealie – corn (maize), ground into a fine powder, mixed with water and cooked like very thick grits or polenta. Served as a side dish under many different names depending on where you are.
Robot – traffic signal
Rooibos – (pronounced ROY boss) red South African tea (available here too, usually called ‘red bush’).

Last night's dinner at Mama Africa was very good, even though they lost our order and we had to wait over an hour for our food. The 'garden salad' was a combination plate of cucumbers, tomatoes, pineapple, carrot-raisin salad, corn salad and I'm sure something else I've forgotten, so it wasn't like we were starving. The waiter came by several time to say our food would be out "in just a few minutes". He also made a point of telling us there was no gratuity included in the check, although there was a R10 cover charge per person for the live music which started about 5 minutes before we left. We picked up a cab from outside the restaurant and gave the driver the name of our hotel, which is "Southern Sun Waterfront" to distinguish it from "Southern Sun Cullonen" (almost adjacent). We got within sight of the hotel and he turned the other way taking us to the entrance to the waterfront. We said, no, it's a HOTEL, the Southern Sun and pointed to the big sign on the top of the building. He still couldn't find it, trying three other hotels. Finally, we told him to drop us at the Cullonen, and we walked the rest of the way. Needless to say, we paid him what the fare should have been, not what he ran up on the meter.

Now, back to the journal:

At 1:45 am, the smoke detector in our room started chirping that its battery was low. It didn’t take long to decide that we wouldn’t sleep with it beeping, so Dan climbed up and disabled it. However, by now, I was awake enough and didn’t get back to sleep well, so when I woke up at 4:50, I got up and decided to shower before the drive. From listening to others, the early morning hours seem to be the best time to get hot water. There was coffee and tea and rusk in the courtyard under a tree filled with bright yellow and black weaver birds and their intricate nests.

We drove the short distance (everyone’s figured out their seating in the new bus, and someone actually managed to convince Allenby that she’d switched seats with the consent of the previous occupant) to the Hwuhwule Game Preserve. We switched to the 10 passenger open vehicles, met Roy, our driver and headed out at a little after 6. It was well past ‘first light—I think that’s around 4 am—but I don’t think anyone minded. The sun was out, and it was glorious. Our first glimpse of wildlife was a small group of impala, followed by zebra and white rhino. Over the course of the drive, we also saw giraffe, brindle wildebeest, Cape buffalo, wart hogs, Nyala, and numerous birds, including the widow bird, stone chat, purple crested lurie, and kite.

And there was a working dung beetle, forming a sphere twice as tall as it was. By 8 am, the weather had grown overcast and colder, and the wind chill subtracted a few more degrees from the temperature. The sweatshirt moved from being a cushion for Dan’s camera to a needed article of clothing.

Dan’s camera seemed to be working, and his lens afforded much better wildlife pictures than my little point and shoot, although I still snapped away. This morning was the first time it really “felt” like Africa, although that’s an unfair generalization, since the country is far more than wild animals and scenic vistas.

We drove back to the hotel in the open vehicles this time, having to stop occasionally for cows crossing the highway. Highway speed in those vehicles is a windy affair indeed.

Back to another sumptuous buffet breakfast (ox liver was one option), a bit of a break, and then off to Zululand for a tourist’s view of their culture. The tour begins with a greeting from a Zulu warrior in his language, after which our tour guide explains in something closer to English that we cannot enter without asking permission from the inhabitants and the spirits, and she tells us what to shout. The response to enter is given, and we file in: men first, then the ‘mamas’ followed by the maidens (there were a few on the tour). We moved from craft area to craft area, each time requesting permission to enter. I wonder if the artisans ever get fed up with all the tourists and their cameras and say “no.”

We saw spear making, shield making, pottery making, basket making, a beehive shaped home, bead making (where we learned that if a young man wants a bride, he sends beads to her, and if she accepts, she makes a necklace which her sister returns for her. The bead colors are significant: white for purity, red for ‘my heart bleeds for you’ and black for ‘give my father 11 cows so we can set the date’) a healer, a fortune teller. We also learned that married women wear read hats and cover their bodies, while unmarried women go topless. We sampled Zulu home brew (pretty awful). A dance demonstration followed, with yet another buffet meal after that. These included Zulu offerings as well as more familiar dishes. I don’t think ice cream is a traditional native food, but it was good. The guides loved my “Will Sell Husband for Chocolate” t-shirt, and I would have given it to our guide had I anything else to wear with me.

Back to the hotel for the rest of the day ‘at leisure’. Since we were stuffed from two buffets, and the choices around here are the hotel’s dinner buffet, a KFC and a Wimpy, we walked down to the supermarket and found the fixings for a light meal of scones and cheese.