Things that make me go "Hmmm..."

First impressions of a foreign land...

Cool things:

1. The weather - literally and figuratively...
   
   This is one of the warmest winters that have been experienced here according to some locals. While for us its a bit of an adjustment, its really not difficult to endure and there's not a lot to complain about. On the good side, there is snow, which, even at my advancing age is fun to play in and I do it eagerly, having 2 babies helps obviously. Throwing snow balls at the wife and kids is not beyond me and when I get the chance I take it ;).
   
   Melting snow is not so great, jolly great pools of black mush form especially on the roadsides and lie in heaps for days and days after everything else has melted.
   
   I've known about the existence of snow ploughs for a while, but never seen one in action. I had this idea of a long tail-back of traffic behind a caterpillar-like earthmoving monster clearing roadways, and maybe some of them are like this. The ones I've seen here are on rubber, not tracks and do about 60Km/h down the road easily keeping up with traffic and skimming the edge of the road. The problem is, that as they pass, the snow that they're ploughing scoops up into the air and lands with some force, meters away. This is great if you're in a car, but if you're a pedestrian it could be horrid.
   
   Its not that you can't go outdoors here, its just that you do different things. Hayley's tips: i) when it is just starting to snow, take a walk outside in the dark and look up into the sky. Watching the snow falling gently onto your face is stunning (or standing behind the double glazing in your undies and T-shirt and watching it fall in the streetlight). ii) Never leave home without your beanie and gloves.
   
   
2. The other weathery thing is the way you live here. The outside walls of the houses have got to be 2 feet thick, every window and door is insulated, windows double glazed and doors have some kind of laminar insulation and seals all the way around so that nothing gets passed them, not draughts, windy noises, nuthin. The windows can open a crack ingeniously at the top, almost like they were coming off the top hinge and so you get fresh air.
   
   Double glazing also keeps out the traffic noise and so on. Every South African home should be built with these things, when its just below 10 outside you can switch off all the heating and just with the way the place is built you can walk around in shorts and a T-Shirt.
   
   
3. The plugs...
   
   I may be easy to please, but this is SO nice - everything here is a 2 pin plug, like the ones in ZA, but here the sockets are made for 2 pins. One doesn't have to fanny about trying to get your 2 pin to stay in the hole or connect, or change the plug to a 3 pin. Very nice.
   
   
4. Public transport...
   
   The public transportation system here works! You can set your watch by the various busses, trolleys and trams about town.
   
   If you want to get to Prague, there's a bus every half hour and it costs a total of KČ 174 for a return trip (R58). Just to give you an idea, a litre of fuel here costs a Euro (close to ten bucks mate! put that in your complaints pipe...). To do the distance in an average car would cost about R170 just in petrol, so still cheaper to bus a family of 4 to Prague than drive there and you get coffee / hot chocolate etc on the bus. Hmmm. When you get to Prague, you walk 20M to the underground and off you go again...
   
   Conveniently there's a train that runs directly to the ski resort every day etc etc
   
   
5. Getting to the office...
   
   The trip to the office is about 1km and can be done by bus if the weather is a trifle disagreeable or if you are late. Otherwise, there is a very refreshing walk to work with the cool fresh air on your face and in your lungs, which is a very invigorating way to start the day.
   
   
6. Beer for lunch in the canteen...
   
   Don't even consider walking to the table with a water or tea with your midday lunch - you are heavily frowned upon. Topping up a very large glass with the local non-alcoholic beer from the tap is the only done thing - or order a PU if you are having lunch with the project team (learned that one the hard way)

Off things, if you can call them that

1. Shops...
   
   Boring Pick 'n Pay type shops being referred to here. The layers out of shops have no flipping clue. There is almost no sense to the way the Spar is laid out, for example, one type of product is next to another of its kind in one instance and then there are other little bits of it dotted around haphazardly. The mayonnaise is in the fridge with the butter; the honey is on the shelf with the muesli; the jams are with the chocolates; the peanut butter is with the pickles; and we are still trying to find the crushed garlic and marmite (or any savoury sandwich spread for that matter)!
   
   Also you have to pack your own shopping bags here. At PnP you can ponder your list of things to do while the teller rings up the trolley and all you have to do is flip out the credit card at the end and you are done. Here, not only do you have to do the usual unpacking of the trolley and pack you own bags, but the tellers are on speed. These Czech girls make them tills beep faster than a horny cricket in the mating season, and there you are packing up a storm in very undignified manner. The busiest part of the shop is the checkout, its like a 100m sprint.
   
   Hayley hates carrying the shopping home and our purchases are limited not by any other factor than what we can easily carry home herding or towing 2 babies who we have also got carrying backpacks filled with groceries ;). Fortunately, it is only a 400m walk!
   
   
2. The bureaucracy...
   
   Everything is complicated. To travel on an efficient bus you must first do the inefficient red tape of buying the ticket in a particular place instead of on the bus. If you want to work here there are about a dozen processes that need to be done monthly if this and quarterly if that and within 30 days of the other thing if something else is true - its like you need a full time accountant just to hold down a job.

Just things:

1. The language...
   
   The language barrier is difficult sometimes, a lot of the people here studied English at school so there is some very elementary understanding in some people, but most can't say a word.
   
   Large shops, banks etc will have a few people who can speak English, but you can see that every time you call on one of them its quite unusual. You'll walk into a bank, go to the Customer Service lady and ask her if she speaks English (Mluvite Anglicke - pronounced mlooveete anglietski and then there's a moment before she says "Moment" and hurriedly makes a call, jabbers away for a bit and in a few minutes someone comes down to deal with the foreigners.
   
   Prague is much easier to navigate, but like London, there are about a hundred different languages floating around at the average coffee bar, so I think they're more geared for it.
   
   
2. We discovered a washing machine that also dries clothes.
   
   
3. People appear to not be hung up on having flashy cars and big houses.
   
   
4. Most Czech people are born in, grow up in, live in, and die in the town that their parents were born in, grew up in, lived in and died in that their parents were born in....
   
   
5. We never seem to get to bed before 1am!

Dobrou Nots!

A Little Perspective

I happened upon an amazing discovery about a week ago...

We were on our way to meet Amber and Sarah's new school principle and head of teaching and, along the way crossed over one of the rivers in Plzen. There were half a dozen or so little wild ducks paddling about on the water and we stopped so that the babies could see them and ask the usual set of questions.

The weather was biting, I'm not sure what the temperature was, but I guess, if it was above zero, it wasn't far, at any rate, the wind makes sure that your experience of the low temperature is as uncomfortable as possible - more on this in a minute...

As I watched the ducks swimming toward us (they obviously assumed we had some food for them and someone had rung the tea bell) I considered how darn cold it must be for those little beasties bobbing about on water when the ambient is literally freezing. A moment of admiration or something passed and we moved on.

A few days later I was upgrading my warm-wear at a sale in one of the centres here and chose a down and feather jacket. I'm wearing it in the photos of us by the lake in Hayley's entry below, and basically have not worn anything else since I got it. This thing is fantastically warm, I mean unbelievably warm. With a long sleeved T-shirt you can wear nothing but this jacket and be really comfy even when its really cold.

I remembered the ducks paddling happily on the freezing water and thought "Hey, those guys have got it good!" they are no where close to cold. They are permanently padded up in a feather and down coat and are probably not aware that its cold out. Apart from those little pink feet, which must be made of some kind of pliable rubber so as not to go solid, all the mechanisms for moving the feet, walking and paddling are up under a cover of feathers and must be very cozy.

I don't know how many ducks contributed to the making of my jacket, but I thank each one of them for it. I recon I have a few more feathers in my jacket than the average duck, but then again I'm a bit bigger than the average duck, so I guess it must even out. So if you are drawn to pity a feathered friend flying or swimming by on a cold day, fret not, he is well warmed and you are probably feeling the cold more than he is.

This brings me to the subject of wind... meteorological wind you understand...

I have recently learned that there are 2 basic kinds of wind: warm wind and cold wind.

Wind is the same noun for the single as it is for the plural, like one sheep is a sheep and two sheeps are still sheep, so one wind is a wind and two winds are also still wind.

Wind (pl) are the same species no matter whether they are cold or warm, but there are some drastic physiological changes that wind undergo when they change from being warm to cold.

Warm wind are well fed and lazy. They are round in shape like a Buddha and are all jolly. They can move quite quickly, but prefer not to and are quite content to laze about in the sunshine and tell jokes.

If they bump into a person, they say "Pardon" in Wind as they bounce off of the clothing or skin and move on without quarrel. Because of their larger size, warm wind are far less dense than cold wind and are therefore quite light.

When the sun goes away and there is not enough warmth around for the wind to feed on, they all get hungry and grumpy and rush around vying for the little warmth that there is. The problem is compounded by the fact that all wind are quite tall (or long) and their height (or length) doesn't change when they become cold, but their girth certainly does. This change makes them long and thin, just like an arrow, and because they are naturally round, they form pointy bits at their head and toes.

Cold wind are packed together very tightly as they crowd each other for warmth and they move around very fast as they are quite uncomfortable and think that the exercise will warm them up.

When they bump into a person, their spiky heads or feet run right through your clothes and poke little holes into your skin, they don't bounce off anymore, and are happy to stay with you to warm up. They wouldn't think about trying to avoid you, or apologising, which is why, even when you are in a shelter of some kind, out of the main flow of cold wind, when they spot you, they school over like sardines and you feel a sneaky wind bite you some place you weren't expecting.

I never knew it, but this is why it feels so much colder when wind blows.

An afternoon in the country

So, what should one do on a lazy Sunday afternoon?

We walked across the road to the local SuperSpar and bought some edibles to satisfy the hungamonsters of the 3 & 4 year olds and headed off on bus 30 to the local lake for a picnic (all of about 10 minutes away)!


Strangely, this winter is incredibly mild. As you can see, the snow of last week is completely gone (next snow expected on Wednesday) and the lake is usually completely frozen over at this time of year.

Before coming here (and after A & S gave away their bicycles to the orphans) we promised the girls that we would buy them new bicycles to go riding in the forest with when the snow was all melted and gone. It is getting more and more difficult to find the excuses as to why we haven't got them bikes yet, but the winter chill will just have to be reason enough until then. The forest alongside the lake will be excellent for riding in as they have running and cycle paths around the entire lake and through the forests.

We are really hoping though that the real winter will arrive as I am itching to get a new styling pair of white ice skating boots to go skating on the lake with - not to mention all the skiing we were supposed to be doing. Holding thumbs tho, we are planning to find some ski slopes this coming week-end or the one thereafter.

Picture Postcards from PRG

(View of Prague from the Prague Castle)

So the stories go that Prague is the heart of Europe and the most beautiful city in the world. So far, I have no evidence to the contrary!

Today, we did our first sight seeing trip to "the big city" after living in our little town for nearly 2 week, 80kms SW of Prague. Since we don't have a car yet (and finding it more and more unnecessary), we took the "Big Yellow Bus" (as Amber calls it) to the city and then navigated with the underground and trams to get around.

Today, our plans were to visit the Prague Castle (Pražský hrad) and saw about a quarter of the castle during the day. Unfortunately, due to not having had breakfast and it being a bitterly freezing day (although the thermometers were lying that it was a mild 4 degrees, it felt closer to -10!), our stomachs demanded a hot czech meal of goulash and beer and a walm centrally heated 'restaurace'. So, we will definitely return to visit the rest of the castle (although probably during the summer months).

First sighting of the castle:

Below, a building that is particularly impressive architecturally and aesthetically, but I have no idea what it is for or when it was built:

The girls definitely fancy the guards - when we got home, the highlight of their days were the guards and the yellow bus - go figure! :

Inside the castle is a very impressive cathedral, St Vicus Cathedral:


Within the castle boundary is the row of houses that were home to the alchemists who during medieval times attempted to turn metal into gold. (don't think they ever found the elusive philosopher's stone tho ;) :


And then, enough was enough and we were VERY excited about having some hot goulash with dumplings and the ever prsent Pilsner Urquell!

They have it all wrong!

I have this theory that the Anthropologists have it all wrong. Key things we've been led to believe don't make sense at all, here's why.

According to the Good Book, people began their existence in a place called Eden. If memory serves, scholars think that Eden was some place in Lebanon. I think they're wrong - Eden was in Siberia. Why I think so will become clear below.

Follow this reasoning...

When we come home in 2007, we walk into a toasty apartment with double-glazing central heating great big thick brick walls and one could walk around in the nick if one was so inclined without raising a chill of any kind and certainly oblivious to the -n outside. When we leave the apartment, we tuck up into thermal undies, mohair socks and thinsulate boots, goretex gloves, ski jackets, beanies and scarves.

One can feel the bracing chill of the wind on the face, which reminds one that its is actually cold. But apart from your chin and lips going numb after a while one retains ones operating temperature quite effortlessly, and upon boarding a bus or train, getting into a car or shop one can shed all the above and do ones doings in a T-shirt.

I've heard people say that snow is warm. This is my first real experience of real snow, and there's lots of it around at the moment. Based on this limited experience I can tell you categorically that snow is not warm, its not even cool, its outright freezing and when the wind blows along 3 day old ice and snow lying 2 feet deep on the ground if there was any doubt this will erase it. If you dip your hand into the snow to make a snowball, your hand is going to come out close to frozen.

This is how we live today, but to understand how things began we have to go all the way back to... well the beginning.

Lets say that people have been around for a few thousand years to adopt the creationist point of view.

Six thousand years ago, give or take a few...

One day Adam and Eve are strolling through the garden of Eden and they come across this odd looking object in the yard. Eve says to Adam

"Honey what do you suppose that is?"

Adam shrugs and wonders what the cricket score is. Eve is intrigued though and persists.

Eve - "Adam, are you listening?!"

Adam - "Huh?", "Oh yeah", "...ummm I don't know baby, lets go to Bill's house and see if he knows what the final score was" (they didn't have telly in those days)

Eve - "Adam!"

Adam - "Honey I don't think you should be fiddling with that it looks complicated"

Eve - "Nonsense, its just a stick with a knob on it. Here, let me give it a pull..."

Eve pulls the lever with the red knob (now you know where the whole apple error came in) and there is this dull grinding, grating noise deep in the earth beneath their feet. Its not particularly loud, more like a distant rumble.

Startled, Eve quickly tries to push the lever back to the vertical position she found it in but its stuck and she tries to force it. Adam is nervous and joins in, together they heave on the lever. Sure enough it breaks off!

Adam looks nervously around and says:

"Hunny we better get out of here"

Eve steps back looking at the lever lying on the ground and slowly turns to follow her husband who's already 20 paces away.

What has actually happened here is that the lever was God's axis control for the earth, Eve, by fiddling with the control adjusted the earths axis to the odd angle we know it to be today. We also know that it is the angle of the earths axis and its rotation around the sun that brings us the seasons, summer and winter. So from the perfect climate in Siberia in the pre-adjustment days the earth has now tilted and the weather is changing...

Meanwhile, up on the hill, God is having a cup of tea when this all happens and the sudden adjustment causes His tea to spill on His white robes.

"Darn!" He says getting up and flicking the drops off His coat. Thinking for a second He says "Let there be Vanish!". Immediately in a bright pink flash, you guessed it - the stubborn stain has, well... Vanished. He pauses for a moment and smiles to Himself thinking how happy Eve is going to be 6000 years from now.

On arriving at the scene of the original sin He sighs and calls for His kids:

"Adam!, Eve!"

A few days later, back at the cave things are starting to change. Eve turns to Adam one evening rubbing her shoulders and comments:

"Good heavens I believe I'm cold!"

"Huh?"

"Adam, I said I'm feeling cold!"

"Don't be silly woman, the temperature hasn't ever moved a degree since the beginning... you're imagining things." Adam turns back to the paper and has a sip of beer. (Yes, they had periodicals and beer in those days)

Eve rolls her eye's and looks around for something to warm her. She stands next to the fire for a few minutes and takes some comfort. She realises that this is not going to be a good enough solution for when she goes to Gill's tea party on the other side of the garden though.

That evening as they retire, lying on their straw bed she's still feeling cold, and is getting good & grumpy. Adam is feeling something too, but it has nothing to do with temperature. He spoons really close to her and kisses her on the neck. Eve leaps out of bed, now that she has all the ammo she needs.

"You unfeeling..." (she searches for an adjective for a few seconds, but because they hadn't come up with swear words yet and because chauvinism had not yet been associated with the pig, she settles for...) ...man! How can you even think about that when I'm so uncomfortable and cold??!"

She spins on her heels and walks determinedly out of the cave. Adam looks dumbfounded after her with unspoken words in his throat, hand in mid gesture. He sighs, rolls over and within a few seconds is sound asleep.

Thinking deeply Eve leaves the cave, her mind gnawing on her husbands insensitivity and this new and serious problem.

She looks around the entire Garden for something to warm herself with.

You might be wondering how she could be looking around the garden in the evening, but remember we're in Siberia, and the sun is up for a long time during the day, well it used to be, and still is in the summers when temperatures rise into the 40's (centigrade), but this is changing now and the sun is low in the sky when, resigned, she sits down on a log, holds her head in her hands and cries.

Nearby, Wooly the sheep sees her distress and comes over to comfort her. The big sheep gently rubs up against her, Eve is glad to have the company and leans against the sheep, hugging it.

Over the next 2 hours she relates her woes to Wooly, who not being able to speak the language endures in friendly silence nibbling on the green grass occasionally. All spoken out, Eve feels much better, and without realising it has forgotten completely that she's not feeling cold, mainly because she isn't. As she stands and bids farewell to her friend the sheep, the cool breeze reminds her suddenly that it really is getting cold.

The realisation seems to dwell with her in an odd way as she walks back to the cave containing her snoring husband. Eve walks into the dim cave and can hear Adam snoring from the entrance, suddenly like a tidal wave it hits her. She stops dead in her tracks and a slight and very sly smile appears in the corners of her mouth as one eyebrow raises.

Eve wakes Adam roughly, whispers in his ear that there's something he needs to do for her tomorrow, and then she gives him the night of his life...

In the morning Adam wakes up feeling like he's been mauled, he's hardly slept and he's tired. But he can hear God calling for them and so he sits up and puts his feet on the floor. Eve is still sleeping peacefully next to him and shows no sign of stirring even as the call gets louder. Something is bothering Adam as he stands up surveying his surrounds, and when he looks down he almost falls over the bed with shock. There's been some shrinkage! Dazed and confused as to how this could have happened he sits back down again catching his breath. After a few moments he's inclined to lift his feet off the floor and as he becomes aware of this, he realises that he's... cold.

Rousing Eve, for the insistent call, Adam walks out into the garden with his wife and shivers, he tucks her under his arm and together they walk off in the direction of the call. They stop at a nearby fig tree for a snack and Adam gathers some ripe fruit for himself and Eve in a fig leaf. For a moment they pause and eat. As they finish, Adam tosses the empty leaf into a thicket and notices that his hand is colder as he does so. He examines a leaf on the tree and notices for the first time that its soft fur-lining on the underside is quite warm to the touch. In a nanosecond he covers his delicates with the furriest leaf he can find explaining happily to Eve his discovery and picking some leaves for her to try.

Eve is a smart girl, even for a blonde, and she stands back, weight on one leg and hands on her hips looking at Adam slightly side ways with a knowing expression on her face and taking pleasure in what is about to happen.

"I told you so!" she says

"Huh?" says Adam, picking more leaves.

"You're cold too!"

"I am not"

"Oh yes you are"

This goes on for a bit... they hear Gods call and drop the argument walking off wearing four fig leaves between them and feeling marginally more comfy.

Soon enough they arrive at the spot of the transgression and see God standing there in a warm heavenly coat, arms folded and tapping His foot.

"Ok, which of you can tell me about this?" He says holding up the broken lever.

Adam says "It was Eve!"

Eve elbows him in the ribs so it bruises, but before another word can be said, God says

"Well now its broken, and I can't fix it"

Adam and Eve look sheepishly at their toes and squirm about in the uncomfortable silence.

After a about a minute of deafening silence God says
"Well, that's it... you'll have to leave the garden"

Adam - "Why, we love it here"

God says "Me too, but I'll leave it to you to see why"

And with a poof (not a gay you understand, but a sound that goes "poof!") and a little smoke for effect God vanishes before their eyes. (Don't worry, nothing to do with the pink stuff :) )

Adam looks at Eve with a completely blank face, she returns the look for a second, then her brow furrows and she kicks him in the shin.

"That's for telling on!"

So, here we are. The garden is cooling rapidly and as the days go by the fruit begins to fall off the trees, the leaves start browning and dropping off in the wind. Soon Adam and Eve (in her new sheepskin coat and boots) are standing in the entrance to their cave surveying the changing landscape of their once pristine garden and wondering about the future.

Adam says

"It's getting worse" and it is.. the fig leaf is not doing the trick anymore and there are fewer and fewer leaves on the tree every day, so a change of underwear is getting to be a worrying issue.

Eve agrees with a nod.

"What shall we do?" she says

Adam, looking out at the sun slung low in the sky comes up with a stroke of genius that would turn out to save the entire human race.

"Lets follow the sun"

This was before men had to ask for directions - the sun is a pretty obvious landmark and having rounded up, Bill, Gill, and all the other people in their sheepskin coats and boots, Adam and posse moved South.

After a long cold trek they came to some horribly inconvenient coastline, and to make a long story short weren't prepared to stop there, so they invented boats and set off again. They only stopped when the sun was directly overhead. When it was, they turned right in their boats and sailed until they found the first piece of ground, they got off the boat, took off their coats and reveled in the warmth and sunshine.

They were so happy to be there in the warmth and sun, they were also tired from all the travel that they lay down on the beach and fell fast asleep. When they awoke later they were all brown as berries, you know how hot the African sun is and they didn't mind the change because they were warm again.

From that day on they swore that they'd never go back to the freezing place they'd fled and they said they'd always follow the sun. They spread out as the population grew and so, before the first person could die in the cold wasteland of Siberia all those thousands of years ago, leaving their remains as a clue to the real origin of life, the oldest dated known human remains are found in Africa, or on the way there.

So how do we know that life didn't start in Africa? Well if you walk outside my apartment right now clad in nothing but fig-leaf undies you will be dead before morning. See, back then, although God was inventing stuff all the time, people weren't discovering His inventions until much later. Glass has been made for hundreds of years, but no one had double-glazing until relatively recently. Thinsulate and Gore-Tex are very recent and you can go back to the source of humankind now even in the coldest of winters with these marvelous inventions. But I tell you this, people couldn't survive there because of the cold, and anyone who wandered too far North or South would have turned around long before his toes turned blue.

Even the ones with sheepskin coats.

Plzeň

Ok,

I know you all got the e-mail with the extreme weather conditions and are dying for the pics of our noses freezing off and the likes, so here goes... Oh, and Michelle, to answer some of your questions:

1. Can humans live there? Yes, I do believe we have seen one or two of those, although we are still trying to communicate with them
2. Will your life expectancy lengthen if lived under a semi frozen state? I do hope that it will slow down the wrinkles, not to mention the varicose veins - will keep you posted on this one.

So, after only 2 hour sleep the night before and some hectic logistics to get onto the aeroplane, we find ourselves at our apartment in Plzen (80kms from Prague) with a welcoming committee with flowers and some basic groceries. The downside we discovered, was that although expecting a furnished apartment, the furnished term meant 3 beds, 1 couch, 2 chairs and a table. We had no knives, forks, toaster, washing machine (and a weeks worth of laundry), plates, potato peeler, fridge, kettle (and an extreme thirst for a cup of tea), etc. Petra (part of the welcoming committee) had foresight of this logistical issue and had planned to take us back to Prague to shop at the one-stop-buys-all-at-really-bargain-prices IKEA. And so, we make the 80km journey back to Prague with 2 very worn out babies and bought knives, forks, toaster.......

And so, just after midnight, we have finally got to the point where we can have our first cuppa tea.

Our apartment is really fantastic. It is is very spacious and brand new. I am one bus stop away from the office (probably about 800m) and there is a 24 hour Tesco (like a PnP hypermarket) about 4 bus stops away (2Kms). Our block of flats is the one that wants to get noticed on the streets ...

We are on the 4th floor, so we have a great view:

From the back balcony:

From the front balcony up and down the street:

We arrived at the most magical moment. During our first full day in Plzen, while we were having lunch, it started to snow.

And by the next morning, the view from our balconies looked something like this:

And the girls immediately took to the spirit of the occasion with a frozen dessert from the window sill

When we saw those extreme weather forecasts, we immediately and forthwith went out and bought the girls snow suits as their tracksuit pants and jeans were just not living up to the task of keeping them dry in the snow -

and we were not able to stop them from finding the biggest, tallest pile of snow wherever we were walking and piling though it up to their knees. We also took the opportunity to get them a sleigh and bum-boards.

From us, till next time, Dobrou noc! (Good night!)

A Semblance of order?

Yesterday was an important day - I finally got to take our groceries off the window-sill and put them into an actual fridge!

When we got here (to the apartment), although there are beds, some chairs and other bits & pieces there wasn't an appliance in sight. After a very busy week in Londinium, and with babies being what they are we had generated about a ton of laundry and were fast running out of clothes that hadn't endured at least one days wear. :s

The pressure was on to get washing machines, fridges, toasters, kettles etc etc into the house so we could wean off "Old Mc Donalds" for din dins and yesterdays shirt for warmth. Heck, we didn't even have a spoon or a mug for a cuppa! Can you imagine the gravity of the situation?
Abbreviating the story, a whole pile of machines arrived at the apartment yesterday and haven't stopped working since.

My faithful ol Tesco packet of refrigerables like milk, ham, butter and so on have been keeping fresh in the perma-fridge that is the Czech outdoors on our dining room windowsill. I'm sure many a neighbour has pondered the strange doings of these foreigners, turned to their children and spouses and wondered about the future of their neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, we are now refrigerated!
It seems ironic that one needs a fridge when the outside temps are in the mid teens below zero.

3 Big Suitcases, 2 Laptop Bags, 2 Barbie Bags, 1 Small Suitcase ... and a Week in London!

15 - 22 Jan 07

Our first stop - London

I had this really great and determined idea that we would only have 2 suitcases between the 4 of us (with my romantic notion that I want to be able to fit everything into the boot of a car to move off on a whim to any foreign destination at the blink of an eye... and with the very real concern that navigating the London underground with anything more that 2 suitcases would be a huge schlep!). However, come 2am, the morning we need to vacate our house, with about 7 hours remaining to fit my still mountain of "stuff" into the 2 small bags, I gave in to the fact that we would indeed require the 3rd suitcase. Colin chose the biggest mutha suitcase that he could find, and so,

here you see us at Oliver Thambo Int. (JHB International) with 2 very overweight trolleys of luggage - 3 large suitcases, 2 laptop bags, 1 small bag on wheels and 2 x barbie suitcases on wheels for the girls (oh my gosh).
Well, believe it or not, we managed underground and about 2km to the hotel without any incident (albeit very wary muscles after lugging the bags up a few flights of stairs in the underground).

Our first and biggest priority when landing in London was to go hunting for warmer clothes. Fortunately, we arrived just at the right time - post christmas sales of between 70% and 80%, so we got a few bargains (including a snow jacket for me for 3 pounds!!). The girls, without needing to say, got new pink jackets...The weather was rainy and windy - actually, a hurricane slipped passed the south of London, so let me rephrase - it was rainy and blowing a gale and the degrees centigrade had lost their foothold and started plummeting after we arrived. But, this wasn't going to deter our sightseeing or expeditions.

Piccadilly Circus (above) was one of those spontaneous stops. We had to take a detour tube as the hurricane threw some trees in the way of the one we were going to take and when we saw Piccadilly as the next stop it sounded like a good idea to go up and take some photos. The reason why none of us are wearing our hats in the arctic gale is because they were blown off before we could take the shot :)

It was however a very fortuitous stop as "Lillywhites" (a sports gear store) was having a huge sale and we walked out with more pink jackets for the girls (6 Pounds); jeans (2P); and snow jackets (3P) - what a bargain!!!

The only downside of traveling in the underground at this time of year (apart from all the soot that you blow out of your nose at the end of the day) is the extreme temperatures experienced from outside to inside the tube and you invariably find yourself frantically tearing off all the layers of clothing each time you get on the train, only to have to put them all back on again 3 minutes later (particularly having to navigate little fingers that don't like finding the sleeve holes).

By Thursday however, the news stories on TV changed from extreme weather conditions to what was happening on the local Big Brother (because the weather became fair and because big brother got really interesting). Which meant blue skies!!!! We took the opportunity with both hands and took to the skies on the London eye! And of course, no trip to London is complete without doing the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge and Windsor Castle.

And of course the girls had to see the queen's crown at the Tower of London.

While out and about, visiting castles and the like - you would never guess who we bumped into - they even invited us in for a cuppa tea ;)Our departure from London saw us packing once more into the wee hours of the morning after having dinner with friends. You would think we were used to fitting all our stuff in and out of our suitcases since we have packed them 3 times prior to this (from JHB; from Zim and from Sedgefield), however, we now had to fit all the extra jackets and boots and god knows what else into the already borderline 80kgs that we had and stretched to capacity suitcases. We were then up at 5am to navigate the underground once more to Victoria station. This I don't understand. A central train line that takes people on long journeys has 4 or 5 flights of stairs to navigate with luggage from the tube station to the train station - Unbelievable! We were then seen unpacking and repacking all our luggage in the middle of Gatwick terminal trying to get our mutha suitcase to weigh under 32kgs and to split the load with the other 2 already bulging cases! Needless to say, we had to pay for 9kgs of excess.

Next time we move I am going to be ruthless and keep to my 2 suitcase philosophy!

P.s. in case you were wondering what we did with all the stuff at home that wasn't sold or packed or stored ...

A big truck from one of the charities came by the next day, picked it all up and took it to homeless aids people.

Gerike Point Paragliding

In all the time we've spent at Sedgefield over the past number of years there have been dozens of people faithfully dangling from their paragliders over Swartvlei, Gerike, Map of Africa in Wilderness etc.

In all that time I don't think we ever considered getting up there and experiencing the freedom. Maybe it was a foreboding after Pierre's attempt to pile-drive a rock with his coccyx, and spending the next 6 months having been forced to temporarily change phylum from vertebrate to crustacean. Anyway, for whatever reason, we never did anything.

Not really sure I can say what changed it but we decided to go for a tandem flight and called the guys from Paragliding SA. Its run by Roland and Christie, and for a small fee of R 350.00 you get 20 minutes of coastal gliding over what has to be some of the most beautiful coastline anywhere on the planet.

The first thing that struck me was the view from Gerike. It was breathtaking, odd, having spent so many weeks in this place I've never seen it from this perspective. Anyhow, paragliding or no, anyone who visits Sedgefield should drive up there or, even better, take a horse-back ride up. There was lots of evidence on the roads that horses had indeed been there in the recent past.

Going up, I had an idea in my mind that we'd spend the 20 minutes dangling from the kite in a nice, near-silent meditative reverie. I looked forward to that, the serenity was a big draw for me.

So after taking in the view for a few minutes and watching Roland's newest student prepare to take his first flight off the Point fight the nerves while he made his way shakily to the take-off pad, Hayley got the first go.

The strapping in and so on went quickly and without much delay they were off and flying along the cliff towards Sedgefield. It looked magnificent. Roland has made about 5000 flights, flies competitions and obviously spends a great deal of time flying other people around too. When they drifted back towards us a minute or 2 later I got a fore-taste of what I would experience. The serene idea of hanging in mid air for some time and coming down for a nice cup of tea and scones was unceremoniously dispatched as Roland stood the glider on its end, snaked it through the sky and did all kinds of horribly un-serene things like picking bits of veg off the side of the cliff while flying past, buzzing the on-lookers on the pad and generally tearing up the sky.

While I rapidly developed a new set of expectations Hayley was shrieking with delight as some new aerial contortion was being executed before us. Roland executed a skillful top landing and soon enough it was my turn.

I hopped into the harness with my new set of expectations and looking forward to the whole thing. Off we set in much the same way as Hayley had done. Flying away from terra firma with nothing between you and the elements is something I can highly recommend and I'll probably do it again sometime, its a lot more windy than I thought though. The wind really comes at you and unless you turn your ears into it, all you can hear is buffeting. Anyhow Roland enquired after my emotional stability and I gave him the go-ahead to do his best...

The last time I ever got flung around like that was when the indomitable John Henry was prepping for his private pilots licence and I went along for a training flight, again with a horribly inappropriate set of expectations. One clear cold morning off we set to sector something-or-other in determined fashion. From the back of the plane I asked "what's sector something-or-other?" ("Sector One" I think...)

I was informed that there was "lots of sky" at Sector One and apparently this was what the day called for. Made sense to me and en-route i wondered how much sky there actually was at Sector One and why we'd need so much of it. Turns out that Sector One is some aviation black hole where no flight paths are booked to make way for the maniacs that go there to fall out of the sky on purpose. Johns instructor would bend the plane into a particular shape and then say "Ok, your plane" and let got of the controls. It would then be John's turn to bend the plane back into something that resembled a flying machine again. I don't think I'll ever forget the sound of the stall siren in a Cessna, and when i drink milkshakes now I can empathise with the ingredients.

Digressing is one thing i do very well, but before I go any further, back to the paragliding...

Roland executed something I think is called a "Wing over", basically it involves turning the glider hard in one direction causing the pilot and posse to be flung out by the centrifugal force. I recall looking "up" at the wing and seeing that we were better than level with it, and the horizon was turned through more than 90 degrees. Then, you do the same maneuver, just in the opposite direction. Repeat until boredom or nausea makes continuing un-fun. The result is a giant swinging action across the sky with moments of near or actual weightlessness at the crest of the swing. I wonder if its possible to loop a paraglider....? we flew so close to the cliff in the rushing air that i could and on one occasion did lift my feet to clear the bushes. Unbelievable. He calls it scratching, apparently not your feet though... scratching for lift. Anyway we had plenty of that and the scratching was more for fun and effect. It achieved both. At one point we buzzed the on-looking family on the top of the hill and I was close enough to Hayley to High-Five... if she hadn't ducked...

The man fly's extremely accurately and if there was any doubt, this soon becomes very apparent. The other maneuver I'll mention is the "Spiral Dive". Its one of dem tings what is it that makes the ground approach very quickly as you cork-screw around the center of a large circle pulling a few G's and testing your fortitude.

Marvelous stuff this paragliding is!

Welcome 2007!

Happy 2007 everyone! May you all live your dreams!



Well, here we are. 2 weeks to go! It is a very surreal experience sitting in a no mans land between our old life and the next, between the old familiar and the complete unknown, waiting time out, riding the calm before the inevitable storm. It is not however with daunting or dread, but with the kind of excitement that comes from deep down in the belly and catches you with a grin on your face when you are not looking.

I have very deep expectations for 2007. It all started with a dream that we chose to become reality. Funny enough, the most difficult part was merely to make the decision, to realise that there was no reason not to execute on the dream. Making the dream reality almost seemed to happen by itself.


One thing is for sure though, there is certainly no better place to wait time out than this!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone, here's to a brilliant 2007 for all.