Boring stuff

I can no longer use jet lag or my lack of acclimation to the water, altitude, driving, etc. as an excuse. I am not on holiday; I am living here now so I need to establish a "life" for us. I have to get to the boring part of immigration, not that packing and unpacking were all that interesting! I have to find some doctors, a dentist and establish a relationship with a vet for the dogs. So it's time to start another list!

1. Vet - This is easy. Everyone seems to have a dog or a cat in my little townhouse complex. And they all go to nearby Parkmore Veterinary Clinic. So I will too! The husband and wife vet team are very friendly and lovely, they have a fully stocked shop for food and supplies so I do not have to go to the expensive chi chi pet store at the Morningside Mall. Eukanuba specialty dachshund food, greenies, and frontline. They have it all. Plus they will board small dogs which is good to know if Isabelle our dog sitter is unavailable. Check!

2. Doctors - At a minimum we will need an Internist, a Gynecologist and a Radiologist for my mammograms for me. May need other specialists in the future but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. (This may take a second list.)

Also a good Travel MD. We had one in Morristown for the myriad of shots we needed to get before emigrating - Yellow Fever, Tetanus, Typhus, Typhoid, Smallpox, Whooping cough, Hepatitis AB and Rabies, and for our initial Malaria prescription. (A step up from my first safari to Kenya and Tanzania in 1979. For those vaccinations I had to wait on line at the creepy federal Department of Health on Varick Street in lower Manhattan.) We can probably do all that with a general practitioner but the travel specialists stay very current and that is important I think in this part of the world. Vince already found one here in Morningside, the Netcare Travel Clinic, when he had to get the third of his series of Hepatitis AB vaccinations before I arrived so we are good there. One check, with a few more to go!

3. Dentist - This is going to be difficult! I loved my Dentists in NJ. Part Dentist, part Psychiatrist, they were patient and kind and they put up with my beastly brattiness. In other words, they gave me as many drugs as I requested. Novacane, gas, probably would have given me morphine just to shut me up!  I HATE going to the dentist. HATE HATE HATE. I went to a Dentist for a while who was also a good friend of mine who will remain nameless. I had to stop going to him because I couldn't be my bitchy self one day in his examination chair and then have a cocktail with him at a party the next night knowing he was judging me. And I couldn't realistically contain myself in his office for very long either. Eventually I would release the kraken and start screaming like a two year old when the teeth cleaning hurt! Thank goodness I did not have that problem with doctors too. I was good friends first with my Dermatologist, my Ophthalmologist, and even my (gulp) Urologist before becoming their patient back in NJ! I am actually a pretty good doctor patient. But dentist patient? Might be a while before I can check this one off!

I do have recommendations for both a general practitioner and a dentist from some expats who work with Vince so I will start there. This is going to be a trial and error kind of thing. Boring for sure but at least with the luxury of time. For now.

How did I miss this?

I missed this premiere this past Earth Day! I do not get HBO here so I will have to try to figure out how to get a copy some other way. I have my best men (man actually ... only Vince) on the job trying to figure out how to get Netflix or Hulu.

The documentary features Cynthia Moss, Director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project as well as the Program Director and a Trustee for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. We toured her camp and were treated to a lecture by her when we visited Amboseli National Park in 1979.

Along with meeting Cynthia we also met the famous Echo, her celebrated matriarch elephant, who was the subject of a book and documentary called "Echo of the Elephants." Now that documentary I do have!

Apartheid

Along with the Big Five, World Cup Rugby, and and the Cape of Good Hope, one of the first things that come to people's minds when you mention South Africa is apartheid. So I decided to be a tourist (one of the helpful recommendations from The Happy Migrant blog in order to help you get your bearings) and visit the Apartheid Museum in downtown Johannesburg to find out more about it.

I didn't know much about apartheid before I went to the museum except that it was bad, and President Nelson Mandela was instrumental in its demise. My only tangible reference for Nelson Mandela, besides once waving to his motorcade as he made his way down a Manhattan street on his way to address the United Nations, was located in the education and exhibition gardens at the Greater Newark Conservancy headquarters. GNC, a non-profit in downtown Newark NJ, encourages urban community gardening and city greening and its exhibition garden showcases good gardening practices amongst many different themed-gardens including a colonial garden, a butterfly garden, a therapy garden and Native American garden. There is also a Nelson Mandela Freedom garden (Nelson Mandela was a fellow gardener) which has as its centerpiece a little patio with cement columns and an open roof having the same dimensions as the tiny cell Nelson Mandela inhabited for more than 20 years. Even with the open walls and ceiling it is an imposingly oppressive space.

As a rule I do not really do well with touring prisons and museums dedicated to bad things like concentration camps, the holocaust, or uprisings and revolutions. I had nightmares for days after visiting Alcatraz Island in high school. And as there was no way I could visit Dachau while in Germany, I will have to work up the courage to visit Robbens Island off the coast of Cape Town where the original political prison and the actual cell of Nelson Mandela is found. A must-do! I hoped the Apartheid Museum would be educational and uplifting like Mandela himself.

Upon arriving, you are given the choice of entering the museum through a door marked White or Non-White. But just as you are not given the option of your skin color when you are born, you are not given the option of which door you can go through at the museum. When you buy your ticket it tells you who you are, a White or a Non-White. I got a little nervous when I drew Non-White; Vince drew White. He traded with me but I needn't have worried. The extent of the experience consisted of walking down the same photograph-lined walkway separated by a wall of prison bars. Once we entered the main lobby, we were reunited.


There is a 15 minute movie that plays at the beginning of the museum which gives you the history of South Africa from its early cave inhabitants to its tribal era to the Dutch occupation, British rule, Boer-British conflicts, the discovery of gold and diamonds and finally the dawn of the National Party reign and apartheid. You are then released to wander at your own pace through the museum exhibits depicting South Africa's subsequent history through television and news footage, photographs and artifacts.


The Museum itself is extremely well done and not as graphic as it could have been. The most disturbing exhibit besides some of the live footage of the rioters and police response was a room with 121 nooses hanging, each one representing one of the political victims executed by the government. It certainly did not represent everyone who died during the apartheid era which made the display that much more chilling.

Even though Nelson Mandela is of course well-represented in the permanent exhibition, there was an additional temporary equally impressive exhibit dedicated to his life story which we also toured. It was the uplifting story I was hoping for when learning about apartheid.

Johannesburg has many more sights which played a more integral role in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. The Lilieshief Farm and the Rivonia Trial Museum, Nelson Mandela's and Archbishop Tutu's House in Soweto (on the same street, it is the only street in the world which was home to two Nobel Peace Laureates) and the Hector Pieterson Museum and Memorial to name a few. We will surely tour them all over time but the Apartheid Museum was a great place to begin to understand the big picture and apartheid's place in the turbulent history of South Africa.

And as a final note, I did leave the Apartheid Museum with an unexpected smile on my face. It was the result of a tradition I reinstated from the days when we would travel with our sons when they were young, the silly souvenir contest. We would scour the national park gift shops or even better, road-side souvenir and rest stops, looking for the silliest souvenirs we could bring back from our trip. Then we would find a reasonably impartial judge to decide which one of us won. There was a 3 point scale. The souvenir had to represent the trip the best, had to be relatively useful, and had to be cheap. (This got me started on my extensive floaty pen collection by the way - 200 and still collecting!) Somehow either Nick or Alex always won (we had very soft judges and they were very persuasive). Although I contend to this day that I was robbed with my buffalo "pie"-shaped Frisbee from Yellowstone.

The Apartheid Museum gift shop provided me with an uncontested silly souvenir for our home, coffee mugs for Whites and Non-Whites. When you see that kind of silly souvenir in the gift shop it gives you hope that wounds will someday completely heal and everything will be okay.

Cradle of Humankind

I probably should have been an anthropologist or an archaeologist. It has everything I would have wanted in a career - travel, culture, lots of cool treasure to display in your house like fossilized narwhal tusks and shrunken heads. But I went the practical route and became a computer scientist who morphed into a marketing / salesperson who morphed into an entrepreneur / venture capitalist who finally morphed into a not-for-profit event planner. I justify any regrets by saying that I would never have met my husband if I had taken a different path and pursued my dream job. He is my consolation prize!

But still (not-so-very) deep inside I am a closet anthropologist / archaeologist. I always check out archaeological museums and sites whenever we travel no matter how obscure and hard to get to they are and I always drag my consolation prize with me! (Just ask him sometime to tell you about the detour to the Ladin Museum I made him take while we were on a ski holiday in the Dolomites!)




I also try to take in and study the local culture through whatever means they choose to express themselves, be it dance, music, art, or theatre. I have even tried to express myself first-hand in some places, such as my tango lessons in Buenos Aires for instance and my calligraphy and illumination instruction in Dublin.

I found a Roman coin!

But I did manage to get my shoes and hands dirty on an archaeological dig one summer in Macedonia. I was part of a group excavating the Byzantine layer of a site called Hereclea Lyncestis in the Republic of Macedonia. Part of the reason I chose Macedonia is that my father's father's family probably came from a town in Albania called Durres when it was (briefly) under Macedonian rule. Durres changed names many times in its history depending on who was in charge, the Greeks (Dyrrhachion), the Latins (Dyrrachium), the Turks (Dirac), the Italians (Durazzo), the Slavs (Drac, the original spelling of my maiden name before Ellis island), or the Macedonians (Drach, my maiden name). Who knows what my father's father's real last name was. I doubt the town was named after us. Quite the contrary. His grandfather and his great-uncle emigrated to Slovakia from Macedonian-occupied Albania and were probably called "the brothers from Drach" and the more Slavic name Drac stuck.

Anyway, Macedonia seemed like a good place to go on a dig. I had been to Czechoslovakia before including the town where my father was born - and I still have relatives - in the High Tatras but I had never been to Macedonia and would probably never go there on a regular vacation. (Who goes to Macedonia on vacation? Only Czechoslovakians. Bad joke.)



The weather was fine, not as oppressively hot as say Egypt or Israel and not as cold and windy as the Orkneys can be even in July. Our accommodations were nice enough in an air-conditioned hotel off the pedestrian center in the charming and culturally rich city of Bitola instead of the typical trailer isolated on the excavation site. They offered one or two consecutive three-week sessions as opposed to a minimum of six months on most digs. And I happen to be very fascinated by the Byzantine culture. I preceded the dig with a week touring the Byzantine hotbeds of Istanbul, Athens and Thessaloniki to inspire me and had a truly wonderful experience overall. A dream (job) come true. I hope to do something similar here in Africa someday.

In the meantime I will have to "settle" for the nearby Cradle of Humankind with its fascinating Visitors Center at Maropeng and the Caves of Sterkfontein. Not a bad consolation prize either. In the Cradle of Humankind the largest cache in the world, about 1,000 hominid fossils, have been discovered spanning several million years. The oldest hominid fossils from the Cradle are more than 3-million years old and belong to the genus Australopithecus.

The world-renowned Sterkfontein Caves is home to the oldest and most continuous paleontological dig in the world. It is also the site of discovery of the famous pre-human skull affectionately known as “Mrs. Ples”, and an almost complete hominid skeleton called “Little Foot”, dated 2.3 and 4.17 million years old respectively. No one knows what still lies hidden in the rocks of the Sterkfontein Caves. The World Heritage Site status the area now enjoys ensures that what is deep within its core will be protected and explored forever.

Lucy in Times Square

They were just finishing the Olduvai Gorge Museum in the Ngorongoro Conservation Park in Tanzania when I was there in 1979 and I was not able to see the Leakey's discoveries first-hand. I did however see Lucy, the oldest unearthed hominid skeleton who was found by Donald Johanson as part of a Leakey excavation, at the Times Square Discovery Center in New York a couple of years ago. Coincidentally Lucy just returned home this very month from her six year American tour. She is now back in Ethiopia where she was originally found by Johanson in 1974!

I am very lucky to have the Cradle of Humankind nearby to visit as often as I want and perhaps someday to even get my hands dirty again there in the Caves. I did ship my gloves and boots to Joburg just in case!

How to talk like a South African

I've noticed that some of the local slang has already started creeping into Vince's speech especially when we are haggling and browsing at the markets. I saw this posting on Facebook on the Imara Kamba Simba page and grabbed it so I could get with the program. (Imara Kanba Simba is an Imara Group-sponsored road rally team which supports the PutFoot Foundation.) 

I also really like the way our housekeeper Cecelia and many of the local ladies address me as Mommy or Mama. I assume it is similar to the way we use Ma'am or Madam and the French use Madame but I find it much more endearing.

And the Afrikaans also have their things. For instance, they like to end their sentences with "heh." Kind of like our "right?" or the French "n'est-ce pas?" Only not always with the inquisitive inflection. It is more like a period or a confirmation of what preceded it, almost implying that it is a fact.

But my favorite "thing" is the way they tell you a telephone or cell phone number. If there are consecutive same numbers they say "double" or "triple." For instance, 011 884 2225 is said "zero, double one, double eight, four, triple two, five." If you are not expecting that cadence (try it, it's weird!) you get all muddled, especially on the phone. I know I sounded like an idiot repeating my number to all the realtors when I first came here  with my "zero. one. one. eight. eight. four. two. two. two. five." but I lacked confidence.  Now I can double down with the best of them. Hoping I get a quadruple at least once!

The Father of Modern South African Art

We went to see the opening of an exhibit on a South African artist named Gerard Sekoto at the Wits Art Museum on the campus of Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand . We went mainly because the exhibit was in conjunction the posthumous publishing of a children's book Sekoto wrote and illustrated in 1973 called Shorty and Billy Boy. It is a tale of two naughty dogs or as he describes them "two notorious dog-chaps" and since we have two naughty dog-chaps ourselves named Lou and Serge we thought it might be fun to check it out. I had also recently co-written a children's book myself with my sister called The Library by the Sea, (illustrated by Kristin Shoemaker-Schmidt, published by ..., oh well... it hasn't been published yet but we're working on it!) and I am very interested in seeing the work of other children's book authors.

A Portrait of a Cape Coloured School Teacher, Omar

The Wits Museum did have the original handwritten manuscript on display complete with his original watercolor illustrations and we did buy a copy of the book which had just been published with the support of the French Institute of South Africa. But we found out that Gerard Sekoto was not really a children's book author and illustrator after all. He was much more than that.  He was a great South African musician and artist recognized as a pioneer of urban black art and social realism.

The Song of the Pick

Born in 1913 in Botshabelo in the eastern Transvaal, Sekota established his career as an artist in Johannesburg, Cape Town's District Six and Pretoria before leaving South Africa for France in 1945 where he stayed for the next 45 years until his death in 1993. Gerard Sekoto is considered by many to be the ‘Father of South African Art’. As a South African, some of his works have achieved extremely high values in the international art market with pieces carried in private and corporate collections around the world.  In his birthplace of South Africa however, he is still relatively ‘unknown’ amongst the general public.

Yellow Houses District Six

The recipient of many awards and high honors including South Africa's Order of the Ikamanga, the highest award the country offers for achievements in the Arts, Sekoto was named one of France's distinguished Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Sekoto exhibited often in Paris at galleries and in museums and I am sorry I never came across an exhibition of his work when I was there.

For more information, check out his foundation's website, gerardsekotofoundation.com.

Before and After

consulting with Santana

I have been coloring my hair since I was in my 30's and the first gray hairs started popping out! I ran through various shades of brown and red over the years until I have now completely lost track of my actual natural hair color. (My father used to describe it as chestnut brown; that's all I know.) Besides, after two sons who played all kinds of contact sports throughout middle school, high school and college, the number of gray hairs on my head has probably surpassed the natural brown ones anyway. Really, what does my original natural color have to do with it anymore?

I was curious from time to time growing tired of the chains of monthly touch-up routines, but never enough to justify actually letting it grow out. There was always an event around the corner that would involve photographs and I wasn't sure I was willing to live with an ugly mistake being recorded for posterity in someone else's wedding album or graduation photos.

But once I knew I was moving to a place where no one knew my checkered hair history, I became once again intrigued with the idea of letting my hair go natural just to see what's what. I told my hairdresser in NJ what I was considering and she absolutely refused to be a party to it, forbidding me to even do it once I finally moved. (If she reads this blog post I half expect her to pop over and give me a good dressing down over it.)

So I waited until my move was complete and went to my local mall salon and had a consultation with Santana. We decided the best strategy was to highlight the crap out of my hair with a ashy blonde to blur the line between my current shade of reddish brown and the new growth. We also decided to cut my hair  shorter to further decrease the playing field of growth. I had just seen Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Punk Costume Institute exhibit last month in New York so we decided to go with a 20's bob (cut) with a 70's punk attitude (color). The last time by the way I put this much thought into a hair transition was when I grew my bangs out in the 8th grade!

6 hours, 108 foils, 3 cappuccinos, 2 rounds of conditioner, 1 toner application and 3 or 4 inches taken off the bottom and voila! After all, I had only recently sold most of my earthly possessions and moved half way across the world. Clearly what I needed now was a little more change in my life!

African Tuk-tuks

"Was that just a tuk-tuk that puttered by? In Joburg?" 
 

As it turns out, yes it was! Tuk-tuks are being imported into Johannesburg for use as an economical alternative to the traditional higher-priced taxi cabs. Tuk-tuks are three-wheeled, open-sided "auto rickshaws" used throughout Asia. The name tuk-tuk comes from the original sound of the engine,"tsjoek ... tsjoek ... tsjoek". The engine has been upgraded since the original 2-stroke but the cute name has stuck. 

We used tuk-tuks in Thailand in place of the forever-idling, meter-eating taxicabs in the traffic-clogged streets of Bangkok. (A symbol of Thailand, I even bought a 14K gold tuk-tuk charm with three movable wheels for my travel charm bracelet as a souvenir of Bangkok!)

gold tuk-tuk in the middle of my travel charm bracelet

The problem we found out rather quickly was that the open sides offer you no protection from the non-catalytic converter engines of the other cars idling all around you. Bangkok in the 90's was like what I imagine New York to have been like in the 40's and 50's without catalytic converters to reduce carbon emissions. Dirty and sooty. 

As we sat in the endless traffic jam, my contact lenses slowly became caked with black carbon until I could hardly see. I had to pop them out at my destination and give them a serious cleaning before I could put them back in. We started using the Chao Phraya River with its wide open space and its longboat taxis to get around the city whenever possible after that. 

Fortunately Johannesburg has neither the air quality problem nor the traffic congestion of Bangkok and I stopped wearing my contact lenses a long time ago anyway. I will definitely try one out the next time I need a ride to the Mall from my house.

Origins

The oldest documented piece of art was produced around 70,000 years ago by the San Bushmen and was discovered on rocks in the caves along the southeastern coast of South Africa. We learned this at the Origins Centre in nearby Braamfontein.

It is not, as we were previously told when we visited Lascaux and Les Combarelles, found on the walls of the caves in southwestern France. The San rock art preceded the French cave paintings by almost 30,000 years! I love rock art. It always seemed to me to be both ancient and modern at the same time.


Having just recently been in Boston where I visited Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, I learned that rock art is not just "art for art's sake." The archaeology of rock art is very much related to the ethnology of religious ritual. Archaeologists and Ethnologists agree that most rock art was produced in conjunction with an attempt by man to connect with the spirit world through a combination of art, dance and ceremony.

I have visited many archaeological sites besides Lascaux showcasing very fine examples of rock art such as the petroglyph figures carved into rock surfaces on the big island of Hawaii, rock carvings of animals in Alta, Norway and the hand-shaped  pictographs painted onto rocks in the Northern territory of Australia. And in fact I have been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and have managed to see some of these religious ritual ceremonies in person. 

Vince and I were inside Newgrange in Ireland on the winter solstice when the dawn sun shines through a narrow shaft and illuminates the ancient Celtic pictographs inside the underground room only twice a year. We coincidentally had a wedding that afternoon in Dublin and were able to get a ticket for the solstice ceremony in the early morning. We had to get up in the middle of the night to drive the two hours to be there before dawn but it was worth it.

We watched the serpent Kukulkan slither down the side of Chichen Itza in Mexico when the sun hit the stone steps at just the right angle during the spring equinox. On the field in front of the temple, descendents of ancient Mayans danced and worshiped in their feathered costumes below the serpent's head. The spring equinox fell in the middle of Pingry's spring break that year and we happened to be spending it in nearby Cancun. We were able to find room on a bus tour at the last minute which took us from our hotel to the temple for the whole day. 

 

And we were in Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain on the summer solstice once at the start of a two week vacation with our sons to London and England's West Country and Paris and Normandy in France. We had just landed at Heathrow that morning and were coincidentally driving west to the Cotswolds on June 21. 




We had planned to stop at Stonehenge on our way without realizing the significance of the date. But as soon as we saw the Druids in their white robes processing to the center of the circle we realized our great luck!





Besides the display on the origin of art, the Origins Centre museum lays further claim to identifying the very DNA from which all of mankind stems, the origin of the human species. According to their display on the Origins of Humanity, we are all unified by a genetic thread that traces humankind back to a common ancestor in Africa. 

Now that I have been to the Origins Centre, I would of course really like to visit the UKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park and see the San rock art in person.  Maybe we can even plan our visit to coincide with one of their ceremonies if they allow guests. But since we are all related anyway, we wouldn't really be a guest as much as part of the family.

The List

I am a consummate list maker. I make lists every day for shopping, to-do lists of tasks for myself and honey-do lists of little jobs for my husband. These lists are usually made to be completed and discarded or in the case of the honey-do lists to be noticed and ignored, turn yellow with age and discarded.

I also keep lists of recommendations for travel. I have a list for things-to-do-and-places-to-go-and-places-to-eat in Paris, London and New York, three cities I frequent and plan to frequent forever. I even have a Smythson of Bond Street leather address book labeled "New York London Milan Paris" with sections for each city. These lists I do not make to discard. At most, I will cross something off the list or erase in the address book if the business closes or the recommendation proves unsatisfactory.

faire du leche-vitrines @ Bell'occhio

I have one list I treasure which I did not start myself. It was given to me about seven years ago by my friend Nancy who runs a lovely shop in Montclair, NJ called Parcel. If you are ever in Montclair, NJ you should visit Parcel on Bloomfield Avenue. I highly recommend it so put it on your list.

Bell'occhio in SF

The list Nancy gave me is for the greater San Francisco Bay area and it is a list of shops Nancy likes to visit when she goes on buying trips there. At the time she offered me a copy of the list, my husband had just taken an apartment in San Francisco to split the distance between New York and Asia where he was traveling for business. Coincidentally my oldest son had just transferred from Rochester Institute of Technology to an art college in the East Bay as well. So now half of my family was living on the west coast and half was living on the east coast. (Sort of. My younger son was living in Pittsburgh, PA attending Carnegie Mellon University but it was east of the Mississippi anyway.)

the turtle doves @ The Tail of the Yak, Berkeley

I was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area regularly, almost monthly in fact, and usually had a lot of free time during the day. Nancy's list was long but I managed to visit all the shops on it within the first year. My husband gave up the apartment after about three years but my son is still there and is now working in game animation. So in the last few years and before I moved to South Africa I still visited the Bay area fairly regularly, at least once a season, in order to see him. I always brought the list with me. I had three or four  shops which I visited every time I went west. I added to the list over time. Places to eat, things to do, places to visit and a few shops I discovered on my own. The list became a living thing and I passed it on to different friends if they were moving to San Francisco or visiting for an extended time and asked for recommendations. They usually came back with recommendations of their own which I added to the list for my next visit.

In the same spirit I just received another list from a South African expat living in New Jersey named Helena. I was introduced to Helena by my friend Deb in the months preceding my move to Joburg. It is a list for things-to-do-and-places-to-go-and-places-to-eat in South Africa. Helena sent the list to me saying, "This has been put together by various locals over about 10 years, and keeps circulating - enjoy!" I love it! Once again this list is a living thing which is passed around, added to and amended as it goes from person to person.

It makes me happy to know I am not alone. I am part of a nation of list makers and as it turns out, it is an international one at that!

Tambo is not just the name of the airport

I found out who O.R. Tambo is. I did not even know he was a "who." I thought it was just the name of the international airport I use to fly in and out of Joburg. But it turns out he most certainly is a "who" and there is currently an exhibit going on about him  curated by the Apartheid Museum.

This kind of connecting of the dots will help me to settle into living in South Africa and establish my sense of place. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my husband many years ago while we were touring around northern Vermont. I grew up in the birthplace of the American Revolution in the northeast of the United States of America in one of the 13 original colonies. So in grammar school, details of the Revolutionary War between the colonials and the red-coated British were staple fare in history class. My husband on the other hand grew up in the mid-west, specifically in Minnesota and Kansas, where other American conflicts such as the Civil War and the French and Indian War as well as the whole Manifest Destiny, "Go west, young man" and Oregon Trail wagon train concepts were much more topical subjects in his schooling. Still I was surprised when he commented as we passed a statue of Ethan Allen in downtown Montpelier, "I cannot believe they erected a statue after a furniture store here!" "You mean Ethan Allen as in Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys?" I replied. "The who?" "The Green Mountain Boys! Didn't you learn about them in school?" "No." So I dusted off my Third Grade Revolutionary War patriot memories and explained who Ethan Allen really was, also known as the lecture on "what came first, the Ethan Allen furniture chain or the Green Mountain Boys?"

Much the same with O.R. Tambo. Born five years after the birth of the African National Congress (the ANC) Oliver Reginald Tambo spent most of his life serving in the struggle against apartheid. 'O.R.', as he was popularly known by his peers, was born in 1917 in a rural town, Mbizana, in eastern Mpondoland in what was then the Cape Province (now Eastern Cape).

Tambo, along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, was a founding member of the ANC Youth League in 1943, becoming its first National Secretary and later a member of the National Executive in 1948. In 1955, Tambo became Secretary General of the ANC after Walter Sisulu was banned by the South African government under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1958, Tambo became the Deputy President before being exiled himself in 1959.

According to the ANC website, among black South African leaders, Oliver Tambo was probably the most highly respected on the African continent, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. During his stewardship of the ANC he raised its international prestige and status to that of an alternative to the Pretoria Government. He was received with the protocol reserved for Heads of State in many parts of the world.

During his years in the ANC, Oliver Tambo played a major role in the growth and development of the movement and its policies. He was among the generation of African nationalist leaders who emerged after the Second World War who were instrumental in the transformation of the ANC from a liberal-constitutionalist organisation into a radical national liberation movement.

He returned to South Africa in 1991, after over three decades in exile. At the ANC's first legal national conference inside South Africa, held in Durban in July 1991, Tambo was elected National Chairperson of the ANC. He was also chairperson of the ANC's Emancipation Commission. Unfortunately he passed away before seeing the cause he worked so hard to promote come to fruition with the election of Nelson Mandela as the nation's first freely elected black president.

So the next time I run through O.R. Tambo Airport to catch my flight, I will have to keep my eyes open for a statue of the airport's namesake. I am sure there is one.

POWER OUTAGE WARNING

That headline in The Star newspaper certainly got my attention! According to the front page article, repairs to several power stations and overdue maintenance will mean a lower output of electricity this winter. That, and the usual seasonal electricity usage increases in winter, practically guarantee a number of blackouts over the next few months. So I ran out to the Woolies to stock up on torches (flashlights), batteries and candles in anticipation of the impending darkness.


Now on a related topic, they do not recycle in South Africa (stay with me; it is related.) I guess they have bigger fish to fry what with apartheid only (relatively) recently being outlawed and rhino poaching still rampant. But it bugs me coming from a place where recycling and composting had become an integral part of my daily routine. So as we also have been collecting a large number of wine bottles which I have been loathe to just throw into the trash, the thought occurred to me, "These wine bottles would make great decorative candle holders if they just didn't have that narrow top part!" In other words, instead of recycling my old wine bottles which I can't do anyway, I can re-purpose them as candle holders for the candles I need to have for all the power outages that are forecast for the winter. See? Related.

So I sent handy-dandy Vince (he really is) out to the local hardware store to get a glass-cutter and set him to work. Now instead of an endless supply of wine bottles filling up the garage, we have an endless supply of very attractive and unique candle holders around the apartment. And as an added bonus I do not have to feel bad about all that wine we seem to drink. I am doing my part to be a good South African citizen and reduce electricity. Bring on those power outages!

Happy Days at the Jozi Craft Beer Fest

I had to employ a guest blogger for this post for a couple of reasons. First, I was out of town when this event was happening in nearby Emmarentia, having gone back to the USA to finalize the last details of our move, for a week long farewell blowout in New York City, for my niece's graduation from Boston College and my nephew's Purdue crew regatta in Philadelphia at the Aberdeen Dad Vail. 

Secondly and probably more importantly, Vince is better suited to write about a Beer Festival anyway. I bought him a ticket and sent him on his merry way.

I am in the dead center 

You see, I am not a big beer drinker. I only drink beer occasionally usually with Mexican and Chinese food or on the Fourth of July. Yet in spite of this lack of commitment, I did go with my husband once to Oktoberfest in Munich years ago. It did not go well for me. After ordering one giant frosty mug, one humongous pretzel and singing one round of "Ein Prosit" while linking arms with Vince and our fellow table mates in the Spaten tent, I figured we were done. "OK, what do you want to do now?" I asked Vince. He looked at me perplexed.  "What do you mean? There is nothing else. This is it. Relax, we are going to be here a while." And we were.

Vince went back to Oktoberfest again later, several times in fact over the years, and always without me. Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit.

"Jozi Craft Beer Fest: one guest blogger's quest to sample a hundred beers from 40 South African micro-breweries - Vince Kasten, Guest Blogger

During the fall South Africans participate in all manner of sports - double marathons, iron man triathlons, and 100 mile bike races to name a few. On the whole they're a robust and outdoorsy bunch. I'm neither, so at 10AM on a cloudless, amazing weekend day I headed for the Jozi Craft Beer Fest. As it turns out, Johannesburg residents also treat beer drinking as an outdoor sport.

 The fall weather drew a big crowd of relatively young, fit and attractive people (and they looked that way "before" I started to drink). Almost everyone was with a group, except me it seemed, but that was ok, for me this was not about enjoyment, it was about fulfilling a solemn commitment as guest blogger. So along with my official beer mug I got 200 Rand worth of Coupons (Ron White fans will understand) and began sampling - if you can call a pint a "sample."

The advertisement for the Beer Fest said 100 beers from 40 micro-breweries. I only counted 30 or so beer tents, but the 100 beers sounds about right. Here's what I had: Copper Lake Brewery Jozi Pale Ale, Smack!republic IPA, Roeks Blonde, Everson Pear Cider (an nice pallet clearing fizzy alcoholic drink, and the only tent with a guard dog - a Dachshund named Keg), Cockpit Brew FokkerWeisen, Drayman's Jolly Monk Rauchbier, a small glass of a nondescript white wine from Alphabetical Wines (motto: Internationally Famous & Hangover Free) and a shot of a single malt South African version of Irish Whiskey.

I should probably have sampled more as I take the role of guest blogger seriously, but I also take my
freedom seriously and had to drive home. 30 years ago my buddy Ric and I each drank our way around the world (28 beers from 28 countries) in two days at a place called Turtle Krawls in the Florida Keys. Today at the Jozi Craft Beer Fest I didn't make a dent, but the day was more about the sun, the music ("Play that Funky Music White Boy" was popular...), and the fall crowd. It was not as much fun as it would have been had Darlene been there with me (my official position, despite the sms I sent both the boys about how they should think about moving to South Africa given the large numbers of tall, blonde, athletic females that apparently like to drink beer), but it was a good way to spend a sunny Saturday."

You can get anything in NYC!

I had to go all the way back to NY to find the basket I want to buy to hold the multiple bags of coffee beans we use for our morning french roast coffee in Joburg! Seriously, we have been looking for just the right size and shape basket to put on our kitchen counter.







We've been describing it to the purveyors at the Bryanston Organic Market, the Rosebank Craft Market and even the Old Biscuit Mill Neighbourgoods Market in Cape Town. They either do not have any or they look at us like we are nuts. But we found them at the Union Square Market in Manhattan! Proving yet again that you can get anything in NY! Anything!

They are made in Senegal and they most definitely do exist. But rather than spend the $70 only to hand carry one back to Joburg which would be silly,











we will bring pictures instead to show the seagrass lady at Bryanston, our best bet in South Africa to find one. And I am sure they will cost less than $70!

A Couple without a Country

Chase at one of their famous parties

Chase and Isobel are friends of ours whom we met through Overlook Hospital's Mother's Group class. Our son Alex and their daughter Brittany were born at Overlook within days of each other a few months before we met. Vince and I had taken our Lamaze class there before Alex was born and at the suggestion of our maternity nurse I signed up for their Mother's Group class which would begin a couple of months after his birth. The class consisted of lectures and hands-on demonstrations on infant nutrition, baby CPR, ways to baby-proof your house, etc. I signed up for the class partly because I wanted to learn about all that of course, but quite frankly even more because I wanted to meet women in my community who were going through the same things as me at exactly the same time as me. I didn't want a mentor; I wanted soul sistas!

I had taken a maternity leave from work about a month before I had Alex and very soon after he was born, Vince and I made the decision to make my leave permanent and for me to stay home with Alex until I felt comfortable going back to work. (It took me 21 years to feel comfortable by the way!)

Isobel @ the same Halloween party!

This was a shocking decision that was wholly unpremeditated. I had been an ardent feminist since high school having been extremely influenced by the women's movement of the 70's. I did not change my last name to Vince's surname after Vince and I were married, was a card-carrying member of the National Organization for Women and had even attended NOW conventions in the past. I supported Planned Parenthood and subscribed to MS magazine. I had majored in the male-dominated disciplines of math and computer science in college. I had two Masters degrees (an MBA and an MS in Computer Science), wore "power suits" to work in venture capital in NY and pretty much defined myself as a PROFESSIONAL WOMAN (all caps).

The phrase "having it all" had not entered the vernacular yet. That ideal would come in my younger sister's generation. For my generation, we either had careers or we stayed home with the kids. Anyone who tried to do both risked doing them both very badly.

But even  as a little girl, I never once daydreamed about getting married, never mused about what my wedding dress would look like, never played "Bride and Groom" with my brother, never practiced writing my name as "Mrs. John Q. Anybody". (Oddly enough I did play "Nun" when I was little which I consider the world's second-oldest profession.)

I didn't babysit in high school. I didn't particularly like other people's kids and never really yearned to have children of my own. I didn't necessarily "not want to have children." I just simply never thought about it. We had waited five years after we were married to have our first child and totally enjoyed the yuppy phase of our marriage. Once I got pregnant, I had planned on giving birth and going back to work after three months, the standard maternity leave at the time. Stay home with my baby and "just" be a mother? If a fortune teller had predicted this future for me from her crystal ball or tarot cards, I would have told her, "You have got to be kidding! You might as well tell me I will be joining the Contras and running guns to Nicaragua! That's how ridiculous it is! I want my $2.00 back."

But what I didn't foresee, what I was totally unprepared for actually was the truly life-changing effect motherhood would have on me, the amount of love I would feel for my son and the amount of anxiety and dread I would experience at the thought of leaving him with a nanny to go back to work. So I didn't. Instead I crossed the bra-burning, Equal Rights NOW picket line to the other side (or that's what it felt like anyway). And it was the best decision we ever made.


But with every decision comes unforeseen consequences. Once I stayed home I felt like the proverbial fish out of water. In addition to the exhaustion and the post-par tum depression many mothers feel, I suffered from a kind of post-life depression. I had completely chucked my old life and had entered the brave new world of the stay-at-home mom. It was as if I had a life transplant or was swallowed alive or abducted by aliens and dropped into an episode of Leave it to Beaver and I was expected to be Mrs. Cleaver, wearing my pearls while baking a pie.






I needed to find out if the aliens had abducted anyone else so we could band together for survival like in Planet of the Apes. So very early on in the first months of stay-at-home motherhood, I brought Alex to an introductory class for Gymboree. We sat around in the Gymboree circle and introduced ourselves. We were asked by the group leader to tell everyone a little bit about ourselves, where we lived and the name of our baby, etc., and as an ice-breaker, to also tell the group of anything that had changed in our lives since becoming a mother. One by one the other mothers went around in the circle, introduced themselves and said things like, "Things have not really changed that much for me and my husband. We were always homebodies and now we just stay home with our baby" or "I don't get enough sleep but that's about it."

I was dumbfounded. I was in a circle of Stepford Moms! When they got to me, I launched into a tirade that lasted about a half an hour. "What has changed in my life? How about everything," I started, "I do not know who I am anymore. I am lonely and sad and miss interaction with adult people. I love my son but I miss my independence, dinners out, the excitement of my old life, the fast pace, the accolades when I did a good job, the power I felt making my own money, the constant boosts to my self-esteem. My life has been turned upside down in every conceivable way, my equilibrium is completely off. Nothing is the same. My entire life has done an about-face. I miss getting dressed in the morning and going to work. Blah blah blah!" They all stared at me in shock. I might as well have said I had joined the Contras and was running guns to Nicaragua!

I didn't go back to that particular Gymboree class. I was afraid they would chase me out with sticks like Mother-stein for not immediately embracing the joys of motherhood as they all had. But before I went back to any Gymboree at all, I went to my first Mother's Group class at Overlook. There I found many confused and bleary-eyed women who had had big jobs before they had children and big dreams besides motherhood and were having similar feelings of life vertigo. Sue was a chiropractor, Dede had worked for the NJ Division of Motion Pictures promoting New Jersey as a location for the film industry, Adria was in PR on Madison Avenue, Aleece in Finance on Wall Street, etc., etc. Then there was Isobel. Isobel was a Professional Expatriate. Whatever, she was a professional and they were all my soul sisters!!! We all clung to each other emotionally, shared our similar stories of self-doubt and loneliness, sought and gave advice without judgement, slowly started becoming ourselves again, and vowed to meet weekly with our babies alternating at each others' homes once the hospital class sessions ended.

Now back to Isobel, the Professional Expatriate. She and her husband Chase were both serial expats, a kind of couple without a country. A British citizen who had never lived in the UK, Isobel grew up all over Asia. Her father had been in International Finance and she had lived in Pakistan, Hong Kong and Singapore, among other places. Chase was originally from Arizona and had become an expat in the days following the Vietnam War representing American Express in Saigon. (I wish they had blogging back then. His stories were unbelievable!) They met in Hong Kong and married there, lived in several other Asian countries before moving to Chatham, NJ to give birth to their daughter Brittany at Overlook. They had adopted the expat experience as a permanent lifestyle. They were wild party animals who lived the life of the international jet set. And they added just the right amount of spice to our new Overlook Mother's play group.

farewell dinner menu

Isobel and Chase lived in Chatham for seven years, the longest they had ever lived in any country. Then as we all expected would eventually happen, they were transferred back to Asia, to Jakarta this time. However, just as they were about to move to Indonesia, Isobel found out she was pregnant! With seasoned expat aplomb, they altered their plans and based themselves in Singapore instead to take advantage of the more modern medical maternity facilities. Vince and I visited Isobel and Chase in Singapore after their son Cameron was born as part of a big Asian trip we took that also included Bali, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. I got to see a Professional Expatriate in her native habitat!

Singapore

Unfortunately we and our Mother's Group all lost track of Chase and Isobel after they had been gone from the States for a few years. Chase changed jobs from American Express to work for the Bank of China and the last thing we heard via their Christmas card was that they had moved from Singapore to Hong Kong. I still wonder about them especially now that Vince and I have joined the expat community ourselves.

If you are out there Chase and Isobel and you read this ... call me, soul sista!