My First Weekend

---

I arrived in East London, South Africa on Friday June 23rd around 11:30 am in the morning. The beginning of my trip was a little rough. I didn’t set my alarm correctly and actually changed the time on my clock when I went to bed Thursday night. I woke up to Spaz, my cat, licking my face. I looked at the clock and I had overslept by quite a bit. I jumped out of bed and found that my clock was 40 minutes ahead. I was still running late, but I had allowed a lot of extra time for traffic. I left as quickly as possible, sat in a lot of traffic, but still made it to JFK by 8:30 am when the check in for my flight was to begin. There was no line at all and very few people at security. The flight actually took off a little early. I think it was the largest airplane I have ever been on. The flight was fine. Having on demand movies on your own screen is very nice. I had a short amount of time to get to my domestic flight once in Johannesburg, but everything was very smooth and moved quickly. With the exception of accidently getting connected to a porter, who tried to tell me I wasn’t tipping him enough money, the airport was very easy to get through. My flight to East London was much more bumpy than the oversees one leaving me with clogged ears.

The East London airport is fairly small. I called Charles, our local contact, and he said that he would come around 1pm to get me. We had lunch along with Charles’ fiancée, Christine, while waiting for Noble and Alex to arrive. We also walked around a mall.

Two things stuck out as we drove through East London:
1. Homeless boys begging at cars in the street for money.
2. The way people will cross the street anywhere they want, even against green lights – scary

We walked around the mall and then went to the airport to pick up Noble and Alex.

Charles drove us to the Rose and Ale, a B+B type of place that describes itself as a fully self catering flatlet, where we were spending the weekend. It was a long drive because of weekend traffic. We were in a suburb called Gonubie within walking distance from the ocean. We walked to dinner at what seemed to be the only restaurant around – The Deck. It is upstairs at the Gonubie Hotel right by the ocean. It was refreshing sitting in the non-smoking section by a large open window. There was really nothing to do at night. We hung out in the living room. Our place has a kitchen/living room combo, where Noble slept and a bedroom with a full bed and 2 twin beds. The bathroom was off of the bedroom. Everything was perfectly nice. It was cold and the wind almost never died down. Apparently this happens about 3x/winter. Our rooms did have an electric heating panel on the wall, but I still slept in layers of clothing with quite a few blankets.

Saturday, June 24th
Weather – mid 50s, dry, very windy with a few clouds
The wind was so strong at night that I thought I was hearing the ocean. I slept rather well for about 10 hours, waking only twice. I still felt a bit off, I guess from jet lag. We took a walk to the beach and down the boardwalk watching the waves swell and spray with the wind. We went to the Heavenly Pancake House for breakfast. We, then, walked down the road along the beach before heading back up the road into the wind (a workout) past the Rose and Ale and up to the market to get breakfast and lunch for the next couple of days. We worked on the workshop schedules for both Western Cape and Eastern Cape for a chunk of the afternoon. We took a break for lunch – cheese melted on bread and soup. Before sunset we walked up past the supermarket to see the river that flows down into the sea by the beach. Relaxing for a bit was followed by dinner at a new restaurant which was inside at a hotel just off the beach. At one point I asked if anyone had any idea how fast the wind was and Noble said it was fast enough to give me an afro.

Sunday June 6/25
It really took me two days to feel "normal" again. Jet lag is such a strange thing. Though I had no problem sleeping at the proper hours. I just felt really off during that first weekend.

It was cold enough that we didn’t go out to walk. We were basically stuck inside working on our workshops for the week. In the afternoon, Charles came over with Nobubele to talk about the week. (They both work for the Eastern Cape Department of Education.) We found out that the participants might not know as much about ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as we expected. They left us a car so that we could get to the workshop location Monday morning. We had dinner at the same restaurant as Saturday. Unfortunately, this is the day my computer stopped working. It was so strange. It seemed to be working fine, but the Internet connection seemed much slower than everyone else’s. I decided to restart my computer, but it would not restart. It was so strange. Nothing odd had happened when I turned it off, but it just hung when I restarted it. I tried a lot of things I know that will fix little oddities, but nothing worked. I had forgotten both my system disks and a firewire cable to connect to another mac for repair. Both of these things made me very mad. Noble looked online for possible fixes and problems, but nothing worked. It would be another week before I would have the cable to connect to Noble’s computer and try to repair mine.

---

Photos

Gonubie
Looking toward town.