going back

so i've been back in brooklyn for a while now. getting up early and cooking things and reviewing corporate legal documents and taking the subway and showing trader joe's a lot of love and wearing layers.

and i have been considering: will i go back to joburg? (or cape town, my, that would be much better.) this depends on several factors, namely, my bank account balance, fulbright & dean's award success and/or failure, whether or not i need to be with family, and whether or not i have to move again and pay the cost of that, etc.

i'd like to return, especially with more self sufficiency. as long as four months can feel while it's happening, when you get home all you can realize is the things you did NOT do. and those things occur to me all the time now.

good timing, bad timing, closing arguments

the last post! i am leaving at the end of this week, so here are some reflections. get ready for some bad grammar...

this trip was well-timed because it came at a good juncture in my personal life, because it helped me write law school applications immensely, because i had a subletter covering part of the rent, because the courses fell right in with the gallatin/nyu machinery where i needed them to, because the african winter is wonderful, because the ending date lets me go back to work for a while before i go back to school, and because i genuinely enjoyed the company of the students participating this year & look forward to keeping in touch.

this trip was poorly timed because i missed all the volunteer opportunities in an election that has me caring about a candidate for the first time ever, because just now the rand hit 10 to the US dollar and i am about to leave, because i wish i could have worked more before i left, because i wonder if the ny board of elections ever got any of the forms i sent, and because i have to sort out my book list before nov 1st.

IHRE has a lot to improve on, especially in terms of academic difficulty and administrative organization, but as long as you're not a big old crybaby and have realistic (read: low) expectations, you can adapt it to be a pretty positive and useful experience by pursuing the things you find valuable and slacking on the things that do not benefit you. pretty obvious advice. surprising how many people would prefer to complain though. in many ways the problems that IHRE as a program had are not very different from problems i notice sometimes at NYU, so i was not overly frustrated by a new host of constraints/obstacles here. the educational consumer mindset is strong but that's endemic, it's not unique to IHRE or NYU or Bard.

so, on a scale of awful to amazing, i would suggest 'good'. i hope to return another time, not as a college student, hopefully with a local source of income and not just a chunk of savings, and see what more there is to do and learn.

rocks

this is interesting and concise and a really good argument to keep in the back pocket when people ask me why i don't wear jewelry (the occaisional exception for wood/cloth/enamel type jewelry) and never want to be proposed to with a ring (the usual response to this is what kind of woman are you!?!): just say no to diamonds.
after finding out a lot about the history of the mines here in the course of research for work and also about the retail end of the business back home in ny, jewelry is even less tempting. mining is BIG MONEY here. so are retailing and wholesaling diamonds in the US and all over the world. we all know that wherever there is BIG MONEY there is also BIG EXPLOITATION and third world slavery in some cases, so why not stay away from something you don't need?

weekend away

this past weekend i went up to my friend's lodge near the southern border of kruger park, in a town called hazyview. it was hotter than hell up there and i got a nice sunburn despite preventative measures, but it was a very good time. incredibly relaxing right before exams.

we cooked a lot. we braai-ed (i am again reminded of why i need to be a vegetarian, ugh). we drank an enormous amount of booze for three people. we snuck into the resort pool. there were trampolines. there were towns nearby with nationally famous places to eat pancakes, and waterfalls to see, and 90m drops you could bungee off of if you paid some people some money. there was a pick and pay right nearby to furnish us with things i do not eat in johannesburg like fresh herbs and sesame buns and chickpeas and fancy cheese. it was quite nice. the whole area is economically driven by logging and forestry so there are a lot of man made forests and logging wastelands interspersed in the hills surrounding the nearby towns, as well as curvy, cop-free roads that would make the stig from top gear whoop with joy.

here is the house and its backyard:

the river behind the house up-close, at dry season size. the river at high ebb is so nice for hippos at night that the resort actually employs hippo guards whose job is to walk around looking for hippos with a radio. one kind of snuck up on me as i was on a run and scared the crap out of me, unintentionally.

slightly blurry shot of the little balcony on the 2nd story of the house.

view of the river behind the house from the patio.

view from the patio down the row of backyards (all the lodges on this street were the same).

i owe this particular friend who drove us up to his place a lot because he has shown immense hospitality for the whole trip. we joke that when he comes to see new york, i will take him to my old neighborhood at metropolitan and bedford ave, ground zero of brooklyn hipster kids, and he will finally feel at home. apparently almost no one he knows shares his music taste here, although it is the uniform taste for most brooklyn college kids; not to mention all the shows we have in comparison to south africa. i can't talk about the shows too much because he gets filled with jealously right away: "you saw sigur ros when you were fourteen? aw, man, go to hell!" you can see why we get along!

lesson learned...again

university housing is the same everywhere!

our building was built in 2002 & 2003, so it is gloriously new, but it was built by the laziest contractors with the cheapest building materials possible, according to the really nice woman who is on house committee who lives next door to me. it was a 25 million rand project, and definitely does not look or feel like it was, at all. this became relevant to my life when last night the city turned the water back on finally, and when i finally flushed the toilet, it flushed for the next eight hours continuously! apparently the change in pressure triggered some problem which then revealed a bigger problem... when they called a plumber, who by then had had a really long day already (it was 10pm), he found ROCKS inside the pipe components.

so on a more positive note, the water pressure here is so good it can lodge small rocks in your narrow pipes, all the way up on the third floor!

while he was replacing a bit on the top, the pipe was open and someone turned the water on downstairs, which sent an awesomely gross three foot stream of brownish water all over the bathroom, flooding it. this rocks in the pipe business happened in several rooms, i think, because he was around for a while. classy! i pay about the same rent here as i do at home (i converted it once out of curiosity, maybe us$10 less, another university real estate scam) and even though our building was built in 1913 or 1912, our shit does not break all the time. when it does look like it might break, our super calls a plumber before we even know something is broken. because he is great. because alma dropped many millions of dollars on that gut renovation a few years back and they're determined to keep major repairs low by actually fixing things when necessary.

on the other hand, though, someone may have been robbed on our floor (at home, not my floor here) yesterday, so let me not brag to you too much. apparently daryl heard the sound of "someone smashing in/at a door with a sledgehammer and/or crowbar" very very early in the morning, which understandably terrified him. especially because our huge concrete bomb shelter walls insualte a lot of noise, so i bet it was really loud. hope it was some jackass pratt kid who locked himself out trying to get into his place without calling a locksmith, but who knows. we have cameras in our lobby and elevator area, so maybe we'll eventually find out what happened.

as the plumber was finishing up, nearly midnight, my house committee friend asked if i was going to request a better room if i come back next summer to do more research-y work at wits. i replied i would probably live where all the postgrads live--in flats in melville, usually shares. they are really affordable, and a city bus runs between melville and campus during the day.

at the current rate of exchange i could rent a LUXURY one bedroom in braamfontein for us$150 less than my brooklyn rent, and that would be a really unnecessarily nice place for a student. wits is furthering my hypothesis that living on campus is always a bad idea.

debate night

boy am i glad i watched the debate last night.

things i read today in the commentary:

"I like this format. I like to see one candidate actually move gracefully while the other lurches around like a drunk penguin."

"mccain: my friend my friends my friend"

"This debate started badly but its beginning to improve, in the same way that not being repeatedly hit on the head is a definite improvement on being beaten over the head."

“This is the man that sang ‘Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

"It’s so refreshing to spend an election cycle NOT talking about gay marriage, abortion, and windsurfing."

"Q: Senator McCain, this question is from the internet… A: What’s the internet?"

“… or som’in like that… uhhhh...” Wow. Really? Did he really just avoid actually talking about anything by summing it all up within “or something like that”? "

"Obama keeps talking about the government, what the government will do. It’s almost as if he’s applying for the job of running it or something."

"Hey, Senator McCain. Bob Dole and 1996 called. He wants his campaign back."

on a more serious note, i very much enjoyed obama's ideas on healthcare and the economy. they made sense to me, because i agree that healthcare is a right, and that the economy has stalled because of things other than the housing crisis which we need to also address (wages and benefits flatlining, deregulation, etc). mccain kind of came off as a crazy, twitchy old dude, which can't have been good for him.

raise that white flag of defeat

i am headed back to kruger this weekend...and there is a bottle of amarula there waiting for me. i hope we get a chance to grill some things. like chicken legs. and red peppers. it will be such a wonderful break from reading articles about Bible Spice (palin) on wonkette and pandagon and wanting to claw my eyes out. and a break from working on this 4000-word paper, which i already wrote a shorter version of for my midterm. in the same class. college is not too hard.

also: presidential debates tonight at 3am south africa time! if they'd turn the water back on in our building sometime before then (please, please) i would be much inclined to shower and stay up late and watch them with other americans. there's no way the former president of harvard law review can lose a debate to near-senile free market wackjob, is there?

things i am going to miss

[not in any specific order]

1. pap and gravy/egg white omelets/massive and cheap bunches of spinach.
2. the birds, even though they wake me up too early.
3. eating lunch in the matrix for less than a US dollar/getting gelato for one dollar.
4. clubs that make me want to actually go out: carfax, trance sky, candi bar, blues room, radium beerhall, buzz 9, sixes.
5. nino's hangover breakfasts.
6. friends i made during this trip & potluck dinners with them
7. lots of light & the big crossbreeze in my room thanks to big windows.
8. hearing people speak african languages everywhere.
9. some of the courses, or at least the spirited discussions therein.
10. being able to hear crickets at night.
11. the lack of air pollution.
12. the way living on campus involves almost no commute.
13. strawberry juice, guava juice.
14. nino's coffee.

i'm sure there are more, but i have to go read augusto boal because we are doing theater of the oppressed tomorrow at 8am. risky business.

rich food + booze = no.

last night we had a birthday party for a well-loved american girl who turned 21, which consisted of a potluck dinner, delicious but incredibly rich cheesecake, drunken dancing at a surprisingly fun party in braamfontein, and more of the same dancing at rupaul.

i am reminded by the combination of dinner, super-rich cheesecake and vodka/cheap wine/cheap beer that my body doesn't like being overloaded with multiple indulgences at once. it should be easy to quit drinking, because drinking is financially unsupportable in new york in my case, unless my bar of choice is sending a friend to costco on my behalf. i've never gotten drunk out of sheer boredom in new york either, which seems to be a habit here. what helps is to live with a straightedge vegetarian, i got that advantage. (alas, resisting the urge to eat things such as cheesecake is much harder for both of us.) so a couple more weeks of partying, and then i'll be home, and that's it for a while. at least until some gastric recovery occurs.

the party in braamfontein is part of this series called "the end is nigh". so they have the end is free, which we went to. since they are free, they attract a lot of crazily dressed college kids. it's in a great old warehouse building that reminded me of williamsburg/bushwick house parties.

rupaul was also nuts. she performed on the carfax courtyard stage, outside, and there was a nice breeze (the nights are warmer here now). we got fancy viva la glam wristbands:


and she had a white wig on that was about two feet wide:

(photo from rupaul.com)

what i learned was: rupaul is super tall and unbelievably fine. she has olympic track star arms, and an impossible hourglass figure. of course the show included runway walks and costume changes (blue sequins to pink sequins!) and diva-tastic dance moves, what else. highly recommended if she ever comes to a stage near you. turns out the ticket price goes to supporting SA Pride programs next year--saw that today after the fact, but it's good to know there's a cause and we didn't just give money to the club as usual.

rain

we got the first small rains of the season last night, which was lovely, even a little thunder and lightning. i can't wait for it to really pour, i haven't seen a rainstorm for maybe half a year at this point. on the downside, this is a high lightning strike area, so you have to unplug your electronics when a storm comes along. not as bad as central africa though. i think the eastern congo is highest, since they have year round thunderstorms.

some people stayed up till 3 am to watch the VP debates on the tv in our building's lounge room (usually it is monopolized by really serious soccer fans but not at 3 am). since i am pretty elderly in my sleeping habits so i went to bed earlier than that. i heard palin sounded like a wind-up doll, how predictable.

seven of my fellow students in the program went to durban over the past weekend and got mugged at gunpoint, all together, in broad daylight, while walking to the beach just after going to see a famous mosque. one of them was saying last night she almost can't fault the muggers for doing what they did because they legitemately needed what they stole, and they only took some of what people had on them, as well. no one got hurt, thank god, but i think it served as a wakeup call (or perhaps a reminder) that we are really conspicuous here, which limits where you can reasonably go and at what times you can go places.

that is a big piece of advice for people who might want to do this trip in future years from nyu: your movement is going to be really restricted, and for someone who prowls around new york at all hours seeking adventure, it's like being trapped. expect to be at home a lot in a building that is designed like a high security nyu dorm, expect to need a car, expect things to be segregated, expect people to tell you to go to malls for fun, all of which might be weird, especially for a new yorker.