If Only British Airways did Snow Ploughs like they did Croissants

That was a lovely Christmas break. Back to the blog. Ingvar is no longer in Africa; he’s in England. God save the queen! Not feeling the same sort of pride for Her Majesty’s airlines though. When my flight back here took off on December 18th, the departures board read: BA054, London-Heathrow, 21:35, Gate A18, Delayed until 21:00. To the casual observer, it would seem as if it took off 35 minutes early. But no, it was actually delayed by 47 hours and 25 minutes. A bit of snow, and Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, just stopped working.

From my experience, the English have a poor idea of what constitutes ‘extreme weather’. When it’s 23˚C out, the BBC warns of heatstroke, and when it’s snowing, everyone just gives up. No! That’s not what you do! When it snows, you move the snow away. Ice is neither radioactive nor dark magic, so attack it with steel brushes and grow a pair. If you can invent a jumbo jet, you should be able to clear some ground from which it can take off! I read an article on Helsinki airport the other day, and it received 188cm of snowfall during the past winter alone but last closed in 2003 for THIRTY MINUTES. Britain used to be a glorious world empire, so much so that loads of people kept our colonialist sports, tea, and religion (shhh…they don’t like to think about that last one). How far we have fallen. It is time for us to step up, meet Finland’s majestic, golden standard, and not do this:










The good news is that during my two extra days, British Airways put me in a very nice hotel, where I had my first full English breakfast, ever. That might seem odd, given I lived in Cambridge all year round for twelve years, but my parents are both vegetarian and not British, so bacon wasn’t a big part of my childhood. For those of you who don’t know, a full British fry-up is baked beans, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages, hash browns, bacon, scrambled eggs, and then maybe some toast and black pudding. The British Empire wasn’t fueled on Weetabix with skimmed milk you know.



Good news is, I finally discovered the point of the fried tomatoes! For years I’d heard about them, but I was always baffled. They always seemed like the worst way in the world to cook tomatoes (and they are), but I then realized that they serve two vital purpose in the heavy, grease laden mosaic that is a British fryup. First, they provide moisture, and second, they provide sweetness. Because everything else on that plate is unnecessarily dry and salty. In the sarcasm world, I’m British. In the culinary world, I’m not; the second day, I had some delicious croissants and guavas.

I did eventually catch my flight, but not before I conquered the mammoth line at the BA counter, which had three days of passengers in it. Thankfully, I managed to move forward about 500 places in 3 hours…or was it 3 places in 500 hours? Tough to tell sometimes. But now I’m back here, and I'm delighted. I’ve also realised that the best thing about England is its names. Our towns sound ridiculous; it's almost as if Britain exists to make maps funny. All of these places are within driving distance of my house: The Gog Magog, Orton Brimbles, Six Mile Bottom, and Nedging-with-Naughton. The last one could be a whole upper-class sentence on its own.

“What are you doing dearest?”
“Nothing, I’m just nedging with Naughton!”
“Oh splendid!”

Naming your places like that is one thing, but naming your people like that is another. A few days ago, my sister, Sinead, met a family with the surname “Snodgrass”. How fantastic is that?

In the end, this holiday was all about Christmas, which was wonderful. We celebrated with a traditional Christmas dinner of Chinese noodles, a hard boiled egg/carrot/mushroom dish, tofu, and apple pie. In my family, the Asians do the main course, and the Americans do the dessert. For any of you who have ever tried to eat a Taiwanese cake, you will understand why it is that way round.

Service will resume as normal on this recently neglected blog, but in the meantime:


2010 was awesome.

Communications; Internet is Back!

Internet is back!! Oh I could not be more thrilled!! ALA has taught me to appreciate three things: internet, forks, and chairs. After four months of using them in scarcity, I can’t get enough of them.

On the other hand, I’m getting pretty used to these utilities shortages. In fact, when power came back Saturday night, I wasn’t even excited…although that was because I knew that there would still be no Internet. In my opinion, communicating is the only thing that you genuinely need electricity for. Think about it: all other power cut problems can be solved with bonfires, pens, and candles. With those three things you can cook your food, write your papers, and see your papers. Some would say the last one is a luxury. What more could an ALA student want? (And what more are we encouraged to do?)

There’s a famous quotation by John Donne that says, “no man is an island”. Well, it’s wrong. If you live in a 200 student school and there’s no Internet or cell phone access, you are an island. You’re a small lump of rotting wood that nobody even cares about, floating around in the Atlantic Ocean with a single sea cucumber attached to you for company. I love over-extending metaphors.

After a few days without links to the outside world, I was getting desperate; I was about ready to build a gigantic lighthouse, right in the middle of the quad, to transmit morse code messages to Jo’burg.


..- .-. --. . -. - .-.-.- … . -. -.. …. . .-.. .--. .-- . -. . . -.. -- --- .-. . -.- . - -.-. … ..- .--.*
(U-r-g-e-n-t. S-e-n-d h-e-l-p w-e n-e-e-d m-o-r-e k-e-t-c-h-u-p.)

We might ostensibly be about leadership, but we’ve got our priorities straight.

Anyway, it’s obviously not that bad, because we have people here to talk to. But face-to-face interactions have a problem as well: some of us have no feel whatsoever for appropriate conversation volume. This is most obvious in group settings, notably these two:


Listening to one person speak.
Picture this: you’re sitting with 200 other people, listening to a renowned guest speaker, perhaps the CEO of a major bank, or the founder of your school. The audience is quiet and attentive. People are wary of even shifting too loudly in their seats. Then some fool next to you turns his head and begins a normal, well-projected conversation, without a hint of compunction or remorse. He doesn’t even lean towards you! Does he have no sense of shame? Can he not hear himself? Murmuring is a vital life skill, and some would do well to learn it.

However, I’m tentative about over-promoting whispering, lest the following situation become more common:


Room full of people, with many separate conversations.
Last Wednesday, all of the first years and gap years were in the back of the factory. We were in groups, and conducting an exercise centered around facilitation and NASA. Yes, ALA is a wonderful place. Anyway, things were going okay until a couple people decided to “speak up”. And by speak up, I mean make a light swishing sound with their lips. No matter how hard we tried to get them to be louder, they wouldn’t. We just couldn’t hear them over the eleven other conversations in the room. I’ve drawn a graph to better describe the problem:

(click to enlarge)



“Sotto voce” should be considered a real, medical affliction.


Finally, a fantastic piece of news! It’s almost more exciting than the return of Internet. We got our uniforms last week! Nope, I’m not happy because I’m obsessed with looking presentable. I’m happy because I only brought seven days worth of clothing to ALA, and now I can do laundry a little less often. Hallelujah!

Not sure I can vouch for their measurement process though…

(I drew this with inches instead of cm after the first panel. Ignore that. click to enlarge)



Some of the girls really are swimming in their tunics.

*This really is morse code

Thanksgiving in Jo'burg

Last Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving (!!), which was amazing because we had no concrete plans whatsoever on Tuesday morning. But Tuesday evening, Mr. Peter appeared out of nowhere, dragged us to a supermarket (even though Gaciru and I felt like we’d contracted the pneumonic plague at the time), and made us buy supplies. When he asked us how many people we wanted to cook for, we answered fifteen, which turned out to be a horrible mistake pretty soon after.

Then we started cooking. Actually, before we could bring ourselves to do that, we purged Mr. Peter’s kitchen, which smelled of not-so-fresh fish and coconut milk at the time. We were certain it was contagious; Gaciru though Mr. Peter was going to catch something when he made a piecrust with no shoes on (Mr. Peter that is; the piecrust was exceptionally attired).

Then we started cooking. At first the going was slow, because with the exception of Julia, who was well versed in the arts of cranberry jelly and apple pie, none of us knew how to cook any of the dishes that we were making. Undaunted, we took it upon ourselves to re-invent what felt like every single one of the USA’s traditional dishes. We peeled and chopped four bags of potatoes, boiled yams, prayed to the poultry gods that the turkeys would defrost in time, diced many onions, and tore numerous sprigs of rosemary. We even created a new type of vegetarian gravy with eggplant and soy sauce, although it quickly became clear why no one had done it before.

Regardless, we did pretty well, especially given that Mr. Peter’s kitchen was modeled after a shoebox and clearly not built to prepare large meals. He did save our turkeys (for which we are ETERNALLY gratefully), but apart from that we were triumphant and independent. When we served the food on Thursday evening, I was shocked and Julia and Gaciru were past delusional. Thursday morning, I would have thought it more likely that we’d end up hosting a family of triceratopses than finish preparing the dinner.

As is often the case whenever someone brings a holiday to another continent, we found ourselves explaining ours over and over and over again. We had numerous versions of the Thanksgiving fable, ranging from Julia’s



To Gaciru’s



After two straight days of cooking, we ate in a surprisingly familiar way. What makes Thanksgiving dinner feel like Thanksgiving dinner is not just its traditional spread of dishes, but a sense of family. And Thanksgiving at ALA was incredibly familial. I am grateful for Mr. Peter, and for all of the fourteen guests who came.

Following our meal, we engaged in a traditional dog pile on top of Akan. Trevor went first.



Unfortunately, there were a couple drawbacks to our feast.
One, none of us could move. I’m told we suffered from something called “the itis”



Two, Boubacar had difficulty concentrating on anything for about an hour.

The Legend of Peter the Positive and the Origin of ALA Power Cuts

Once upon a time, there was an isolated kingdom named “Swaniford”. And in that most diligent of lands, there lived a young population of diverse youth, who came from many distant nations. Granted, most of them were from Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya, but indeed they were diverse. And in Swaniford, the young Swanifordians toiled all day, sweating their own caffeine-saturated blood over a variety of three letter acronyms: SRB, OID, CIE, CSP, SAT, and of course that most pervasive of abbreviations: TBA. It was rumored that the mighty founders worked with fiendishly complex combinations such as WDYDWYDWYDYDWYDDWDY, but reports were unconfirmed.

Yet because of their tireless work ethic, the scholars of Swaniford were not always cheerful, and in their times of need, they looked for a human of incredible bounciness, remarkable cooking skills, and immense disregard for humor boundaries. Thankfully, one such man existed, and his name was Peter the Positive. Peter the Positive lived in his den of joyfulness on the second level of the residential edifice, and almost all Swanifordian scholars visited him at one point or another to receive their dose of earsplitting sanity. Particularly the girls, because they lived on a fortuitous side of the building and could visit him after check-in, which was unfair. Anyway, Peter’s kindness was so overwhelming that the students were even able to overlook his kitchen, which was a borderline health hazard. Whenever the inhabitants of Swaniford were sad, they looked to Peter for guidance, and in that way, he kept happiness throughout the land.

Unfortunately, Peter the Positive could not continue so tirelessly forever, especially during that most hectic of times, the Christmas Holidays. He soon found it necessary to recharge periodically. So great were his energy needs that he drew his vitality not just from sleep and food, but also from his surroundings, and in particular the electrical sockets. Even today, you can always tell when Peter the Positive is in a state of deep-recuperation, for Swaniford is plunged into a period darkness. We mortals like to call these periods “power cuts”.



It seems that Mr. Peter is resting more and more these days.

Business Hours are Over! ... Temporarily.

Silly Little Culinary Annoyances

Yesterday, I learned about how Senegalese salesmen price their goods. It's time forrrrr:
(Click to enlarge)


This Is Africa; we bargain.

So onto the theme of this post. If you’re a student at ALA, and not me, your academic life feels quite similar to what I imagine drinking water from a fire hydrant would be like. And if that weren’t enough, there are a number of other ways that your existence could be made harder, most of them in the dining hall.

If you’re vegetarian, you could suffer from an extreme protein deficiency, curable only by mass ordering margarita pizzas.

Also, apparently the bread is laced with preservatives. Don’t eat it! Actually, there’s no way to survive without it. Go ahead, kill yourselves! I do.

And if you do manage to avoid the bread, you have to have cereal for breakfast, and you’re in trouble then too. Here’s why: At the beginning of the term, we had a lot of small, very shallow bowls, and some big hexagonal ones. Because I enjoyed eating more than three cornflakes per sitting and wasn’t able to find a pipette with which to douse them in milk, I used the big bowls. Then, for no discernable reason, the big bowls vanished! Now, eating cereal is one of the hardest parts of my day. It requires concentration, fine motor skills, and balance.

ALA Guide To Eating Cereal.

1. Fill a bowl with between 10 and 15 Branflakes/Cornflakes, or 3 teaspoons of Rice Krispies.
2. Even them out along the base of your bowl with a plastic spoon.
3. Fill the bowl with milk, very slowly. It is recommended that you actually pour into the milk carton’s cap, and transfer it to the bowl that way. Pause after each capful to inspect potential space for the next one.
4. When the bowl has reached maximum capacity (around 5 capfuls), pick it up and walk gingerly back to your seat. Caution! – if your bowl deviates more than 4˚ from the horizontal, all of your breakfast will be on the floor, and you’ll start to feel a lot like the Danaides.

(The Danaides were forty-nine maidens in Ancient Greek mythology who were condemned to an eternity of trying to fill leaky jugs with water in the underworld after they all killed their husbands.)



Okay so what really happened is that we lived like that for about a week, and then found a workaround (thank you Entrepreneurship class!). We began using separate mugs for cereal and milk. Now we don’t have to eat cereal out of saucers!

Nothing makes life hard for us Americans like the absurdly heavy South African soda cans though. What is going on? A Fanta can in Gauteng is about three times heavier than its US equivalent. Honestly, they might as well have been hand carved from granite, lined with lead, and then given an anchor. Not only are they a waste of good aluminium, but they’re very off-putting. I have been trained to feel how much liquid is left in a can, and an empty South African one feels like it’s about two thirds full to me. The experience of drinking from them is always a huge let down. I’ll be looking forward to that last mouthful of ginger beer, only to tilt the can back and realize that I had it five minutes ago. It’s a lot like seeing a really attractive girl flirting with you on the other side of the street, crossing the street, introducing yourself, and then discovering that despite appearances, she’s actually in her middle ages, and dedicates her entire life to cataloguing and naming her toenail clippings.



South Africa needs lighter soda cans.

Lions, and Giraffes, and McDonalds Oh My!

It’s come to my notice that anyone reading my blog would have a very difficult time working out what my daily existence is like. So today’s blog post is all about the recent five day holiday, which was fairly typical going for my life at ALA. Heh.


Saturday
On Saturday, I did not go off campus. I stayed at school, vegetating and basking in the glory that is a non-class Saturday. In the US we like to say, “Thank God it’s Friday" (there’s an entire restaurant chain named after the phrase). But only the most pious of students would ever thank The Almighty for an ALA Friday. Here, Fridays are just glorified Thursdays.

We rounded off the day with ALA’s first all-night movie marathon, which fizzled out at about 4am, when all of the exhausted zombies in attendance finally got their priorities straight. It’s a miracle the whole thing happened at all though; Mr. Peter had to dig deep within himself to find the trust to allow teenagers to watch a late-night movie unsupervised. I think his thought process went something like this:

ALA students have hormones
At 3am, they will be sleepy. They don’t sleep enough anyway.
They will also be in closed, dark rooms.
Sleepy teenagers with hormones in closed, dark rooms.
AHHHHHHH!!!!!

Fair point actually.

Before we could leave the dorm, the teachers made us line up and walk out in single file. I thought we were going to have to remove our shoes and go through a backscatter x-ray machine, but we were just scowled at. Anyway, thank you for allowing the movie night Mr. Peter, because I was given free popcorn and watched the new Karate Kid. Twas awesome.


Sunday
On Sunday, the Gap Years partook in another staple of ALA life: The Lion Park. With Ms. Laura as our intrepid guide, we saw ostriches, zebras, wildebeest, and lions eating cows’ legs. The three of us covered a whole spectrum of reactions. At one end of the scale was Julia. Julia could not have been more excited if the lions had been Disney cartoons, dancing to an Elton John soundtrack, and handing out McFlurries. She was bouncing. Then there was me. I like animals a lot (my dad is biologist), and I thought watching lions up close was fun. And lastly, Gaciru was not chuffed. She did not enjoy the sight of giant carnivores ripping apart a mangled and bloody limb, complete with hooves and hair.

After that we got to pet lion cubs, and Gaciru’s mood didn’t pick up much, especially when Julia asked her for a favour:



I took the pictures instead; baby lions are really cute, and very similar to household cats. Then Julia petted a giraffe and her heart almost gave in. She looked like a mother whose child had just won a spelling bee.

In the afternoon, we went to the mall, ate lunch, and found ice-skating! The man at the skate hire place was determined to be Gaciru’s gardener in America, and very kindly offered her his services in return for just a plane ticket and $300 a month. Strangely, she declined.

The ice reminded me of sandpaper, but it was really fun nonetheless.

Thank you so much Ms. Laura!


Monday
By Monday, Mr. Peter was pretty sure that I’d had more off campus fun than any ALA student should be allowed, but he was kind enough to drive the gap years to the mall to buy phones (I sat on my previous one). It was unexpectedly simple:

“What is the cheapest phone you sell?”
“This one.”
“Ooo, that looks Spartan and unadorned. How much?”
“259 Rand.”
“Excellent!”

My new phone is the Nokia Unsophisticator. It takes 40 minutes to charge, and has a flashlight, a battery that lasts a week, and a screen with seven pixels. It’s perfect.

At some point during the return journey, the two girls convinced Mr. Peter to take us to McDonalds. I have no idea how it happened, but it was probably juju.

I thought wildlife made Julia happy, but she was McDelusional when we arrived. Her eyes widened, her heartbeat tripled, and she began salivating like a St. Bernard. I think she needs to see the life coach for her acute case of “Americawithdrawal Syndrome”.

Luckily, McDonalds provided her with much needed medication: a double quarter pounder, fries, and coke. Julia was McDelighted.

And then there was Mr. Peter. Mr. Peter had never really been to McDonalds before, so we got him a McFlurry, with extra caramel and chocolate. Unfortunately, it turned out he was not used to that much sugar, and he started shaking. He could barely contain himself, and claimed that we tried to murder him; he was McSugar High*. It was one scary return drive to campus.


Tuesday
On Tuesday, I went swimming and then to my advisor’s house for burgers with the rest of the advisee family. All in a good day’s work.


Wednesday
On Wednesday, I stayed on campus and caught up on all the work I had left until the last minute. Now that's typically ALA.



*Ms. Chemeli was the first person to say this. Credits to her.