Africa

The block of flats where Sandra lives in Johannesburg
The block of flats where Sandra lives in Johannesburg

Life is quite pleasant. I still have lots of things to do on my Laptop. We had ADSL installed on the 29th of December. A nice Christmas gift. The guy from Telkom came round and was surprisingly competent. The building is from the 1940s and the wires in the walls are so rotten that they cannot transport ADSL signals. So the poor guy had to thread a wire from the trunk line on the ground floor to my desk in Sandra's flat on the second floor. Of course the wire was laid the African way by nailing it on to the outside of the building. As this has clearly been done may times before I assume Swiss perfectionism is not required to get this to work! The speed is so so but at least I can upload my homepage and have full access to my email and backup facilities!

Sandra and I have started to watch the Swiss Tagesschau (evening news) which is published on the Web shortly after they air the program. I guess you get to be curious about what goes on at home when you are away. The weather seems to be pretty cold which is odd when you are enjoying summer here.

On new year's eve we watched the fireworks from Sandra's veranda.

I've been doing the housework which includes trying out some of the recipes in my recipe collection. On the 4th of January we had Jay and Nicole over and I tried out a fish dish which turned out well despite not getting the specified fish in the shop. Recipe here.

The other day I was enjoying my Sundowner on the veranda and idly watching a large cloud making it's way across the sky when it suddenly started to throw blots of lightning. I quickly assembled my camera on the tripod and was rewarded with a nice shot of a lightning bolt:

Bolt of lightning over Johannesburg
Bolt of lightning over Johannesburg

The 6th of January

Not Sandra's day. It started off quite nicely with a blue sky. We decided to get her drivers licence renewed. They seem to be valid for only five years down here. The renewal process is linked to fingerprinting and an eye test so you must go to the place in person and can't delegate this to someone. We knew exactly where to go because we went there on Saturday after a coworker of Sandra's insisted they were open on Saturdays. Naturally this was not the case. Sandra chose to go to Edenvale instead of the traffic department in downtown Johannesburg. Downtown Johannesburg has a very poor reputation and South Africans forcefully believe that they will be carjacked or mugged on their way in or have their car broken into, stolen or towed whilst in the building. Unfortunately these fears are not alltogether unfounded.

As we were coasting along the motorway in the morning traffic there suddenly was a loud grinding noise from Sandra's Hyundai. This disappeared with the pressing of the clutch and reappeared when releasing it. Sandra pulled over. The oil light light up. One tube in the engine had come loose and steam was trickling from the connection. Sandra's health insurance has some sort of assistance option built into it and some time later two guys pitched up with the tow car. They pulled us the 5 remaining kilometers to Edenvale where the Hyundai service workshop is quite close to the Traffic Department. They determined there that there is something seriously wrong with the motor and we had to leave the car there for further investigation. The latest news is that there is no compression and it will cost 1425 Rand to dismantle the engine to determine the cause of this.

Whilst the preliminary investigation was underway we made our way on foot to the nearby Traffic Department. Of course we are in Africa so we should not be surprised to find long queues of people waiting outside the building. As we discovered the line to the mainframe computer had gone down and they didn't really know when the lines would be back. They had been offline all of Monday and were hoping for restoration of service within half an hour. The thing that troubled me was that this seems to happen so often that they had a nice red signboard printed up saying in bold letters "THE COMPUTERS ARE DOWN. NO TRANSACTIONS ARE POSSIBLE". Sandra joined some irate South Africans who were "talking" to the black manager of the place. She managed to get him to offer the favour of calling her on her cellphone when the service was restored. We went back to the garage and waited for their complimentary driver to drive us to her office. This driver must have visited his uncle, granny, cousin, sister, girlfriend and offered to take them shopping because he failed to show up for 4 hours. His cellphone conveniently had an accident involving water recently. We spent the time waiting by me processing photos on my laptop and Sandra following up with her suppliers by cellphone. Then we received the call from the Traffic Department. Their computers were up again. The process was very quick. Sandra had to fill in a form, look through the machine and guess where the blobs were, have her thumbs printed, pay 165 Rand and off we were. Of course in the days of affirmative action there are probably 200 people to employ with this so her card will only be available in 8 weeks and she has to pick it up in person.

The driver eventually pitched up and took us to Rosebank. Sandra parked me in the mall with instructions to swap the sandals which were too large for my feet. (This is a separate story that I will tell you over a few beers.) I then went to see the 3rd part of the Lord of the Rings. It's OK but drawn out too long and a bit too pathetic. The battle scenes are impressive but didn't they do that in part I and II already? I was given some lottery scratch card. I scratched it and it said something "Manager/Supervisor". I was late for the film but the guy wanted to see my scratchcard too and promptly called the supervisor who led me to a back office where I was presented with an envelope and a big smile. I smiled happily back and hastily made my way to the theatre. After the film I discovered that I had won about 1000 Rand worth of Gym classes at some fintess centre!

Update 9.2.2004: Sandra's car has been fixed. The cylinder head was broken. It was rebuilt for 10'000 Rand and now Sandra's car drives again.

Fingerprints of a burglar trying to climb around the security gate
Fingerprints of a burglar trying to climb around the security gate

The next morning we discovered that the frames of the formerly glass doors to the courtyard of the building we live in have been stolen over night! The glass shattered some months ago when nobody kicked a football at it. Now the empty aluminium door frames have been neatly detached and stolen! To me this seems incredulous but down here some people really do steal everything they can get their paws on! Speaking of which: Between Christmas and New Years there was a loud crash at about 3 in the morning. All I saw was the lower part of the drain pipe lying in the courtyard. I guessed it had detached itself and fallen down. In the morning we saw very dirty fingerprints atop the pillar where Sandra had an extra burglar bar gate installed. The guy must have been trying to climb around the outside of the pillar where the drainpipe is attached to reach Sandra or her neighbours front door. He probably touched the drainpipe and the lower half fell down. He must then have run away. It's sad that the top part of the pipe didn't break away as he would then have fallen 2 stories down onto the concrete courtyard. The world and Johannesburg in particular would have been a better place without him.