‘Happy End of the World’ ! .. come and celebrate with us, says this poster from a bar here in Stellenbosch.The Mayan glyphic symbol for one baktun (144 000 days).
The Mayan creation story holds that three unsuccessful worlds were created by the gods, each running for a cycle of 5,125 yrs (13 baktuns). Man was created in the fourth world that started around 3113 BC, and the fourth cycle ends 2012.12.21. (Today! Gasp!). Actually, it’s just the start of a new cycle, say many Mayan scholars. So just as the world did not come to an end on 12.31.1999, it probably will not come to an end today (but as of this writing, it is still Dec 21 west of me, so we’re not completely out of the woods yet! ).
The cover of the South African published book ‘Die Mooiste Sprokies van Grimm’ (‘The Fairest Fairy Tales of Grimm’).
The brothers Grimm’s fairy tales were first published in 1812, so this year marks their 200th anniversary.
I have had my eye on a South African publisher’s ‘Die Mooiste Sprokies van Grimm (2010)’ (The Fairest Fairy Tales of Grimm’) with illustrations by artist Piet Grobler for a while now, and today I finally purchased it.
This is my favorite picture in the whole book. Yes, that is Red Riding Hood. And check out the wolf’s long hairy ears, his sly eyes, his toe in the water, with the predator fish about to gobble up the innocent little one. The perfect undercurrent for what is about to transpire in the fairy tale !
May I present her majesty ‘Queen Victoria’ (Vicky), the blue Burmese cat? She was an addition made some 11 months ago (as a kitten) to my brother’s household in Australia. Queen Victoria treats her subjects with the disdain that they deserve : ). She is currently accommodated in a cat hotel with assurances of the caretaker that she will be given special attention.
P.S. [Picture and information from Wikipedia] Queen Victoria’s reign of 63 years and seven months (1837 – 1901) is longer than that of any other British monarch and the longest of any female monarch in history, and known as the Victorian era.
And here is the feline Queen Victoria’s ‘yes? can I help you?’ stare (or is it just that she is looking into the bright sunlight?).
Australia’s currency is the 5th most traded in the world (behind the US dollar, the Euro, the yen and the pound sterling). My brother brought back some Australian bank notes from his stay there. Hey, what’s that? I want it! I said when he opened his wallet, and promptly traded with him for South African rand. The surprising thing to me was that all the notes are in polymer, and have been like that for a long time, since about 1992. There were issues initially with colors fading and ink coming off, but those have all been resolved. The polymer bank notes last longer (than paper), are much harder to tear, more resistant to folding and soiling and are waterproof (and also washing machine proof). They are easy to process with teller machines or vending machines, and at the end of their life can be shredded and recycled. (Not bad. But even with all that, I wonder if Americans will ever bite and take to polymer money. We still refuse to let go of the paper dollar bill and make it into a coin).
Queen Elizabeth II on the front of the Aus $5 bill. Those are eucalyptus leaves (but where is the koala? I want a koala bear on there!).The building on the back looks like something out of Star Wars, but it is only Parliament House in the capital city of Canberra.On the Aus $10 note appears Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson (1864-1941) – author, journalist, composer, clerk, poet – who wrote about Australian life. I love the windmill in the see-through pane in the lower right corner.This is Mary Gilmore (1865 – 1962), a prominent Australian socialist poet and journalist.The Aus $50 note. From Wikipedia : David Unaipon (born David Ngunaitponi) (1872 – 1967) is a widely known indigenous Australian of the Ngarrindjeri people, a preacher, inventor and writer. He broke many indigenous Australian stereotypes.
Edith Cowan (née Brown) (1861 – 1932) was an Australian politician, social campaigner and the first woman elected to an Australian parliament. The five stars in the pane are the Southern cross, the smallest of the 88 modern constellations, and known to every good boy scout in South Africa and Australia.
I see a 100°F/ 38°C for Friday in the weather forecast here! .. so best to lie low in the shade of a house or a tree, right? And drink lots of water, juice and iced tea.
Weather forecast in Celsius.Weather forecast in Fahrenheit.
The ‘Whispers of Summer’ juice blend is one of my favorites.I love this turquoise can of iced tea with the red letters ‘Bos’ (‘Bush’) and the lion that makes me think of Louis the Lowveld Lion.And here is Louis the Lowveld (‘Low Lands’)Lion, created in 1974 by cartoonist Wim Bosman. (Bilharzia is a tiny parasitic worm. I think that’s a hippopotamus that surprises the baboon).
Sunday was another beautiful blue-sky day here in the Western Cape. My brothers and I went to lunch with our cousin at the wine estate of Vergelegen (Dutch for ‘far away’). A little bit of history : in 1700, Dutchman and Cape colony Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel was granted the property of Vergelegen. He set out to build a main house and others in a style under the Renaissance influence of wealthy estates and palaces in Europe at the time. However, his lavish spending on the property and other actions trying to establish a monopoly in the trade of wine and meat for himself caused a revolt under the free ‘burghers’ (independent farmers), and led to his recall and return to the Netherlands in 1707. The estate was sold several times after that, most recently to the mining company Anglo-American in 1987. At that time wine was no longer produced, but within ten years the estate was recognized as producing some of South Africa’s finest wines.
This is the ‘library’. It used to be a wine cellar, but is now lined with book cases and books, and there is a very old pool table inside on the lower level.
Vergelegen (‘far away’) wine estate is marked ‘A’ on the map. It is on the outskirts of Somerset West, a short drive from Cape Town and Stellenbosch.This is a scene of the surrounding landscape depicted in an old painting from inside one of the buildings (I did not note the artist). It still looks like this to this day.This is the herb garden with its neatly-trimmed hedges in the foreground. The ‘Stables’ restaurant building where we had lunch is on the left and the reception/ wine tasting building on the right.The 2012 Sauvignon Blanc was a little ‘young’ but crisp and citrussy. They had none left of earlier vintages!Here is the main house, viewed from within the large octagonal walled garden in front of it.Some – not all – of the lunch party. That’s me on the left, two of my brothers to the right of me, and my cousin and her husband.These camphor trees are from China and Japan and were planted between 1700 and 1706 on the Vergelegen estate. They were declared National Monuments in 1942.The window frames, clapboards and outdoor furniture pieces are well-maintained and in great shape.
(Late post). South African President Jacob Zuma is facing a challenge for leadership of his party (the African National Congress) at the ANC conference that is currently underway. He has come under fire for his leadership as President – or the lack thereof – in the face of challenges such as the slowing economy, joblessness and spiraling corruption and waste in the South African government. The picture from the Financial Mail is from an event in November at his home in Nkandla, a village in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Mr Zuma will nonetheless probably be re-elected ANC party leader, virtually assuring him of another term as the country’s president from 2014, due to the ANC’s overwhelming political dominance.
P.S. The internet problem here has been solved. (Yay!). The visitors here at the family residence with all their wi-fi devices gobbled up all of the monthly data allotment from the internet service provider in one week (of course).
[Front page of the Financial Mail magazine] Can South Africa endure seven more years of Zuma? asks the Financial Mail magazine. Mr Zuma is wearing a traditional Zulu warrior leopard skin jacket and brandishing an assegai (a light spear for close combat).
I’m making this post from my cell phone. The Internet has been down here the last two days. aargh. It’s a DSL connection. The ISP says it’s the phone company, and we have already established that the addition of two iPads, two iPhones and two notebook computers to the wifi router is actually NOT the problem!
I was my turn today to pick up my brother and his family from California at Cape Town airport. They arrived on Air France via Paris, on the Boeing 777 shown below. Check out the international arrivals board – 1. showing only about a dozen scheduled arrivals for the day (so Cape Town is a small airport by international standards) and 2. arrivals from some interesting places such as Antarctica and Maun. The flight from in from Antarctica is probably on an Ilyushin Il-76, a Russian-made transport plane. There was one on the tarmac when I came in on Wednesday. And Maun is a small town of modern buildings and mud huts in the north of Botswana on the Okavango Delta.
This Air France Boeing 777 at Cape Town airport has just arrived from Paris.The international arrivals board shows scheduled arrivals from Antarctica and from Maun in Botswana.
Our Lufthansa Airbus A380 from Frankfurt to Johannesburg was also namedthe ‘Johannesburg’. It’s a big bird, and on take-off it feels too slow and sluggish to lift off from the runway, but then it actually does. I sat upstairs on the wing. That was a 10 hr flight, and then a ‘hop’ of 2 hours from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African airways got me to my final destination. Cape Town was at a sweltering 36°C (97°F) today, but the day temperatures are projected to go down somewhat for the rest of the week.
The Lufthansa A380 ‘Johannesburg’ after our arrival in Johannesburg on Wednesday morning.Front view of the A380 at the gate at Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.Here is the view from our approach into Cape Town International Airport. That is the iconic Table Mountain straight ahead with Lion’s Head to its right, and Table Bay in front of it (the Atlantic Ocean).
I came in at 7.30 am this morning and my flight out to Johannesburg is only at 10 pm. – so I checked into the Airport Sheraton for a day room. It was not cheap (€150), but completely worth it. As for my connection in Toronto – I had to hustle to make it since I had to go through customs and come back in through security (not clear to me why, maybe because I planned to switch airlines in Frankfurt). Here are pictures from Toronto and from Frankfurt, unfortunately all from indoors, but hey – best to stay inside since it’s pretty chilly outside in both these cities, this time of year.
The colored rings inside this giant skylight at Toronto’s Pearson International airport are mesmerizing.Lots of turquoise Air Canada planes with the maple leaf on the tail. I arrived in an Embraer jet from Seattle, and we took a Boeing 777 across the Atlantic to Frankfurt.This giant indoor artwork is at the boarding gate in E terminal in Toronto. Seattle has similar piece but as outdoor art, in Olympic Sculpture Park in downtown Seattle.This is 7.30 am in the morning in Frankfurt. The airport is on my left and I am walking across the skybridge to the Airport Sheraton to catch forty winks (quite a bit more than forty winks, actually). There is still snow on the ground from Monday, but it’s all clear for tonight, so there should not be any delays.Hansel and Gretel (or the witch’s) gingerbread house in the lobby of the Sheraton.This is early Tue evening and I am back in the terminal for the flight out to Johannesburg at Tue night at 10 pm.I like these sharply dressed ‘birds’ on a billboard inside the airport .. even though it was not clear to me what they were advertising!This is at the entrance of Z terminal where we will take off from. Looks the the theme for the decorations is ‘World Fairs’, since there a Shanghai Pearl Tower (2010), a Seattle Space Needle (1962) and the ‘Atomium’ from Brussels (1958). Oh, and the Eiffel Tower which was the entrance arch to the 1889 World Fair in Paris.
I am all re-assembled after the TSA security check – cell phone, watch, belt, shoes, jacket. A little earlier at the check-in counter I ran into a little obstacle. The Air Canada agent said ‘Your yellow fever vaccination documentation, please’ .. this after staring at her monitor for a few minutes (you just know something is up). Of course I did not have one. I was not even checked in yet – booked the ticket through United Airlines, and I found out last night that Air Canada allows on-line check-in from some US cities, but not from Seattle. Anyway – I said ‘Well, I travel to South Africa every year and it’s never been a requirement’ before another agent came to my rescue and confirmed that it’s just a guideline and the traveler’s responsibility.
What is yellow fever anyway? It’s a viral infection transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito.The majority of persons infected with yellow fever virus have no illness or only mild illness, but some 15% of cases progress to a severe form that can cause jaundice and bleeding and organ failure. Darfur in Sudan has one of Africa’s worst epidemics in decades, with a total of 732 cases and 165 deaths.
Here is the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control’s map of yellow fever areas in sub-Saharan Africa. It says ‘No Risk’ for South Africa.
I am taking off for Frankfurt Monday morning for a Tuesday morning arrival there local time. Then on Tuesday night I will continue south to Cape Town via Johannesburg. Yes, it’s a lot of stops! but I managed to get a business class seat on most of the segments, courtesy of United Airlines miles. (Will I ever get myself to fly coach again all the way on these long international routes? I hope so). The other thing to do to prepare these days is to load the smartphone apps for the airlines you will fly on, and even the airports you will visit, onto your phone before you leave. That way you have the updated flight information and airport information handy for the whole trip. So for me it’s Air Canada to Toronto and Frankfurt, then Lufthansa to Johannesburg, and South African Airways to Cape Town.
Here are the gory details of the trip stops and flight times. I am breaking it in two with a little layover in Frankfurt, just enough to catch some sleep in a day hotel, and then I will continue to Cape Town.A map of a new airport’s layout is always handy. I have connected through Frankfurt airport before, but I don’t have a photographic memory !It’s winter time, and so there is always the possibility of snow to delay one’s departure and time. Frankfurt does not have snow in its forecast for the next few days, fortunately.
Winter does not stop the Seattle beer lovers from having one, and Friday night one of us (you know who you are!) had an Elysian Bifrost Winter Ale. It weighs in at 7.5% alcohol by volume! I thought ‘bifrost’ simply means doubly frosty or cold (which is certainly implied by the beer label picture). But in Norse mythology Bifröst is a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard (earth) and Asgard, the realm of the gods. So that explains the bridge that was shown in the movie Thor.
Hey! This was in the mail when I came home last night : the 2012 Christmas Card from the President. (Yes, I’m sure 30 million of these were sent out : no matter, I still think it’s pretty cool). That’s First Dog ‘Bo’ on on a snowy front lawn at the White House. It’s not a real picture but actually a painting by Des Moines, Iowa-based artist Larassa Kabel.
The consultants have left the ‘salt mine’ in Salt Lake (City) for the week, so I am at the airport and about to board my 2 hr flight to Seattle. It’s been a tough week with more all-day workshops, but we think we made a dent and in the words of the project manager ‘earned some respect’ from the workshop participants. (Pictures were added Friday morning).
Krispy Kreme doughnuts for sale at the gate in Salt Lake City airport. We bought doughnuts from Walmart for Tuesday morning – not as good as the Krispy Kreme ones. Doughnuts are an American invention and have been around for more than a century!And here is the flight path from Salt Lake City to Seattle (difficult to take a crisp picture with my cellphone!). The red lettering says Rocky Mountains (in Spanish).
This is on the way in to work on Monday, a little later than usual so the sun was just up high enough to color the sky above the snow-capped mountains a beautiful blue. We’re in Ogden on Wall Avenue (with a strange familiar tone to it because of Wall Street?), one of the main north-south avenues.
‘Avenue’ also makes me think of the ‘classic’ Electric Light Orchestra song ‘The Way Life’s Meant To Be’ :
Well, I came a long way to be here today
And I left you so long on this avenue
And here I stand in the strangest land
Not knowing what to say or do
As I gaze around at these strangers in town
I guess the only stranger is me
And I wonder (yes, I wonder)
Yes, I wonder (oh, I wonder)
Is this the way life’s meant to be?
Salt Lake City is a small airport and it’s very convenient not to have to catch a shuttle bus to a rental car location away from the airport. This picture is from Sunday night. I had just exited from the baggage claim and the rental car counters and garage are on my left. The snowflake decorations offer a little chilly cheeriness against the winter’s dark.
It’s 10 pm Mountain Time and I am at Salt Lake City airport waiting for my colleague to arrive from the East Coast so that we can share a rental car. We may stop at the In-n-Out Burger with its ‘animal style’ burgers and others on from the not-so-secret menu. I think it refers to terms that the servers and customers started to make up – apart from the official items on the menu. The In-n-Out is next to interstate I-15 on the way up to Ogden. I just had a banana and a piece of pumpkin loaf ‘bread’ (it’s actually cake!) from Starbucks – and I think that was dinner for me, though.
[From the Salt Lake City airport website] These LED Christmas ‘trees’ at the airport entrance are simple, but look very festive.Here’s the In-n-Out Burger menu that shows the ‘animal style’ burger .. everything is sort of mashed up together instead of separated lettuce, pattie and cheese. It’s certainly a menu for carnivores !
The Life of Pi is showing in the USA and a group of us went to see it in 3-D here in Seattle. (For the mathematicians : yes, Pi as in the mathematical constant. I loved the scene where the boy writes out Pi to hundreds of decimal places from memory. Maybe a nod to India’s proud history in contributing to mathematics?). It’s a spectacular film, and I liked it a lot. If one didn’t know, one would never say the tiger is almost all ultra high-tech computer graphics technology. (In only a very few scenes – such as the tiger swimming in the water – was a real tiger used). The Pacific Ocean is a terrifying tsunami-wave storm at times, and has a sheer mirror-pond surface at others. The story is full of metaphors and layers. I would say it asks of the reader or the movie-goer ‘What is your story?’ ‘What do you believe?’ ‘What lets you survive?’.
[From Wikipedia] Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. .. In 2012 it was adapted into a theatrical feature film.
