So five years ago today we moved into our little base camp bungalow here in the bush. If you’d told me then we’d be staying this long, I would’ve never believed you. It’s quite possible I would have talked myself out of it. I certainly would have had a much different conversation with our now very-long-term cat sitter. (God bless you, Rob.)
Potjie (poy-kee): Noun. Afrikaans. A three-legged pot-bellied cast-iron pot used for cooking over a fire. Usually by pot-bellied beer-drinking men.
It’s that time of year around base camp where we feel it’s not quite hot and dusty enough, so we light a huge fire and gather round to cook in cast-iron pots all day long. It’s the annual Potjie Cooking Competition, an homage to our South African employees and contractors. Last month Seb and I celebrated our fifth.
I was poking around online the other day when an article called “The 20 Most Peaceful Countries to Visit” caught my eye. It was one of those slide show-style type of articles… the kind where you must click “Next” for each new piece of information, and is badly written to boot. I’m generally against click-heavy articles, but every now and then with an interesting topic and pretty pictures, they suck me in.
Their top 20 was filled with Scandinavian countries, of course, and the usual European suspects along with Canada (#7), New Zealand (#4) and Australia (#9). I didn’t realize already-on-our-wish-list Japan was so peaceful at #8, and one really big surprise was Bhutan at #18, a Himalayan mountain kingdom that officially measures their “Gross National Happiness.” I think our travel wish list just grew a little bigger.
I wore this t-shirt yesterday in honor of NASA’s historic fly-by of our favorite dwarf planet. Something which I most likely would have missed in the weekly news over here if it weren’t for my super smart, scientifically-minded, space-news-following husband. I’m giving it a good try, though. Lately we’ve been settling down in the evenings for our second viewing of last year’s DVD purchase, Cosmos with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Despite watching an entertaining host and a highly-produced extravaganza of color and special effects, complete with cartoon demonstrations for the imaginatively challenged, not to mention having learned some of these things in school once upon a time… I remain utterly, hopelessly lost. The music and graphics oddly put me in the mood to visit Epcot Center, make me hungry for funnel cake, and then put me right to sleep. This science stuff might as well be fiction to me.
Not to say I’m not a nerd; I totally am. Just a capital-memorizing, building-databases-in-my-spare-time kind of a nerd, not a nerd with, you know, the slightest ability to understand algebra or astrophysics. Yet even I can find this t-shirt funny.
One of my three amazing sisters-in-law posted an article on Facebook recently about the lingering shame of breastfeeding in public. I agree; I think it’s a strange society indeed who uses sex to sell nearly anything, who maintains a thriving porn industry, who worships scantily-clad celebrities and models and even tries to dress like them while shopping at Walmart… yet who gasps audibly when faced with a mother breastfeeding her child in public.
I think we’ve got it backwards. We’ve oversexualized breasts to such a point that it seems dirty for a baby to actually feed from them. We don’t want to know about it, and we certainly don’t want to see it.
Apparently even doing it behind closed doors is not far enough away. An office coworker of mine Continue reading
I’ve known since about age eight that I had a problem with wanderlust. My earliest memories of “farsickness,” as the Germans awesomely put it, were while listening to a vinyl recording of Lady and the Tramp. Funny that a story inspired by a place in Missouri has so many foreign influences, from the Scottish terrier to the Siamese cats to the spaghetti scene in a cobblestone alleyway with Italian-accented musicians playing accordions. I played that record over and over until I probably wore it out.
Besides Walt Disney, it was my mom who encouraged my interest in all things exotic, through books and music and art. And it was her who gave me my first experience abroad. Fifteen years ago, she took me with her to Europe to meet up with my brother who was studying in Italy. Mom, I know I wasn’t the easiest to get along with, but I want you to know how meaningful that trip was for me. I still think that the air smells cleanest in Switzerland, that the best meal of my life was at our little farmhouse B&B in Tuscany, and that my coolest travel story was being homeless for a night in Paris.
I never know what to get people for their birthday, but I hope this little blog post is a sufficient way to say happy birthday and thank you, Mom. Also, look what you started.
This is post #5 of an 11-part series, the ongoing saga I call The French Tales…
September, 2011: I’ve got approximately nine months of Rosetta Stone under my belt, and am headed to France for my first intensive French course. “Intensive” is the key word here: the course runs eight and a half hours a day for five days a week, plus optional evening and weekend activities, and I signed up for four weeks. I’m hoping, maybe even expecting, to leave fluent at the end. Ha! Sounds so naïve in retrospect.
“Embrasse” is a great example of one of those French words that means roughly the opposite of what it looks like. A false friend, in linguist lingo. You would think an embrasse is an embrace… but that’s “serrer dans ses bras,” which translates literally as “holding tight in the arms” and doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. Evidently, the French have trouble even translating the word for “hug.” They’re not so much the hugging type.
For my Mom, who loves loves loves the Sound of Music. And for Carolyn, who is expecting her first great-grandbaby any day now. Happy Mother’s Day to you both, and all you other fabulous moms out there!
Last month, just before leaving on our super-fantastic adventure to South Africa & Lesotho, my little lunchtime English class turned four years old. Four years, wow! There aren’t many jobs I’ve wanted to hold onto for four years in a row before. Who knew that the trick was making sure I worked for free?
There are lots of random green leafy things for sale in the village market just outside our gates. Sweet potato leaves, squash leaves, bean leaves, cassava leaves, and more. Many things I wouldn’t have thought were edible (and my husband still insists aren’t). For us foreigners they can be intimidating to buy… not only do they look unfamiliar but they’re usually touted under unfamiliar Swahili names: Matembele, Kibwabwa, Sampou, Sombe. But after weeks or months of nothing green at the company store besides cabbage and frozen broccoli, they can start to look pretty interesting.
Adventures in Congo 