The next morning we got a lovely breakfast spread of bread, sheep’s milk yogurt, cold cereal, eggs, fried tomato and onions, bacon, and boerewors, and set off for the Valley of Desolation and Graaf-Reinet.

Only about half an hour away, we drove straight through the town (2010 Dorp of the Year!) and up to the national park.  The roads up the mountain were terrifying, winding, with no guardrail and an unimaginable drop, and barely enough space for two cars to squeeze by each other.  Though I’m not scared of heights particularly, I did get panicky enough for Paul to first ask me if I was alright, and once assured of that, laugh at my panic the rest of the way up the mountain.

At the first lookout we could see Graaf-Reinet from about ¾ of the way up the mountain.  Pictures just cant quite convey how freakishly high up we were.

Back in the car, we drove a few more frightening minutes up to the tippy-top of the mountain.

This is where we were going:

After a small walk, we were at the lookout, which gave us a view of the staggering Valley of Desolation – part of the Karoo Basin, which once held an inland sea which has since evaporated, and left gorgeous rock structures, a few twiggy bushes, and not much else in its wake.  The immensity of it and the expanse, the sheer amount of space and distance just cannot be captured either in words or pictures – at least not mine anyway.  But it was a breathtaking experience – and we even saw a dassie!  The weekend was complete.

This is the end of the Nieu Bethesda chronicles! Look forward to hearing about Cape Town very soon.

After our quarts of beer, a plate of lamb and barley and pickled turnips, dessert of risotto with walnuts and local honey, and a bottle of wine, we wandered/staggered/stumbled outside, back to our room.  The sky.  In the middle of nowhere, there was almost no light pollution, and a new moon to boot.  It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  Thousands more stars than I’d ever looked upon, and the milky way looking positively milky, thick with stars that were so many billions of light years away you couldn’t even tell them apart from each other.  Shooting stars, even!  Looking up at a sky like that, where the stars reach right down to the horizon, it’s easy to see how people imagined the sky as a dome, pricked with stars.  It was easy to see how the sky told a story to the Greeks, how up-there was the natural place to imagine heaven would be for the Christians.  Before electricity, before streetlights and stories-tall cities, it would have looked like this for thousands of years, an endless yet perfectly orderly and dependable arch of the stars marching across the sky every night.  I was rapt with wonder, until finally I was shaking of cold, and we retreated inside to the electric blanket and hot water bottles.

After all the excitement with the Owl House, we took a look around in hopes of locating some beer. The main intersection boasted a pub and trading post that were both closed.  We heard of a great brewery and cheesery (?) but when we tried to go, that was closed too.  There’s a café in the post office, but that was closed too.  There was another small café across the street, but it didn’t serve alcohol.  Finally we located a pub, which was a small, whitewashed one-room building with a fireplace, a bar, and a small fridge.  Spirits were clustered on the edge of the bar, along with various kinds of dried jerky.  Beer sat in boxes piled up behind the bar.  We ordered our beer and ended up with a quart each, and settled down to watch the rugby before dinner.

Woohoo!

It ended up being a real cultural experience, and we got involved in a disturbing if not eye opening conversation.  At first the men chatted about rugby in Afrikaans, and I stared into space, catching only a few words that sounded enough like Dutch, or the few that were dropped in English.  A younger friend of the bar man came in, and started to involve us in the conversation by dropping into English.  Rugby commentary turned to a grilling on the debt-ceiling situation when they found we were from the States. Then taxes in South Africa. How hardworking people have to pay an arm and a leg so “they” can sit back and collect.  There are only 46 white people, he tells us, and a few thousand blacks and coloreds (colored = a term for people of mixed racial background in South Africa) in Nieu Bethesda, according to the census six or seven years ago.  Then how “they” stole two of the men’s sheep, and when he finds out who took them, “they” will be sorry.  The other man cautioned him, “You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to be careful,” he repeats, hinting at how you can’t get away with those things these days.  The subtext was clear.  Even a tiny town like Nieu Bethesda has its own township, a mix of tiny one room brick houses and shanties, where the poor black people live clustered together a “reasonable” distance away. Even this beautiful little village nestled between the mountains of the Karoo, there was hatred, fear, divides.  It goes deeper than I can imagine as a foreigner, as someone who has only been here a few days.  Luckily it was seven, and our lamb dinner was ready, so we snuck away.

After we checked in, we headed straight for the Owl House & Camel Yard, the main draw of the town.

How to describe this terrifying, beautiful, disturbing place?  The house was owned by Helen Martins, also known as Miss Helen, who grew up in Nieu Bethesda, dreamed of leaving, escaped by marriage, and then was cheated on so returned home to care for her dying father (who she locked in a windowless room; apparently he was a jerk.)  Once she was alone, she started decorating the house – at first with colored window panes, and later by painting almost every wall and ceiling in the house and covering them with crushed glass.  I can only imagine how beautiful it looked by candlelight.

Her walls were covered with framed nudes, reproductions of the Mona Lisa, and enormous mirrors.  She enlisted the help of a local (black) man to help her make sculptures with cement, of which they made many.  She also had some gorgeous shoes, but unfortunately my picture of them didn’t turn out.

Behind her house is the Camel Yard, a garden of playful, bizarre, and sometimes disturbing sculptures.  Needless to say, the locals were weirded out by her and she had few friends. Many townspeople considered her garden an eyesore. It was certainly something to behold:

Are these people trying to turn back time or pull it forward?  The hours on the clockface are months.

Creepiest sculpture?

VS

She continued decorating and making sculptures until, with the onset of arthritis and failing vision, she took her own life.  She was born and died in the same house.

We got a combined ticket to the Owl House and Kitching Fossil Safari, so we headed over there next.  We saw some dinosaurs and a demonstration of how fossils are cleaned, which was actually kind of interesting.

The “safari” was little more than two rooms, but since we didn’t have any expectations going in, we weren’t disappointed.  Actually, it was quite interesting to read a bit about the history of the Karoo, as it is such a vast and raw expanse of land, it seems like it was lifted right out of The Land Before Time.

To be continued…

This weekend’s excursion took us to Nieu Bethesda, a (very) small village nestled up in the valley of an impressive mountain range to the north of the Eastern Cape, aka middle of effing nowhere.  It is variously an old settlement that never quite took off, a tragically tiny village without tarred roads, an artist colony, and home of the Owl House and the best sky of stars I’ve ever seen.

We rented a car and drove 4 hours north to the little town on mountain passes, twisty roads, flat roads that went straight into the horizon, and alternately dusty and soggy unpaved roads, and were crossed by a family of vervet monkeys and babies, a clan (?) of baboons, and saw an ostrich farm and innumerable sheep and cows on the way.  Occasionally we’d see a farm house with a ridiculously ornate gate, but the whole way on both sides the road was laced with fences.  Big tall electric ones that protect the game parks, and small evenly space barbed wire fences to keep in the sheep.  Fences sometimes broke away from the road and marched (pointlessly?) up the side of a small mountain, bisecting it with disturbing precision.  Other times they clung tenuously to cliffs and the steep edges where the mountainside was blasted away to level the road.  I saw a lot of fences.

While we were there, there was all of one restaurant running, where we collected the key for our room which was down the street.  There is a massive church (apparently the village was founded because it was too far to go to the church in Graaf-Reinet, 7 hours in the 1800s and about 30 minutes nowadays, so they built their own) and no streetlights.  Or traffic for that matter.

Welcome to Nieu Bethesda!

To be continued….

Being here for a month, it feels less like a vacation, less like a one-week-free-for-all and more like a protracted study abroad, with just enough time to get settled before I’ll be plopped back on a plane and drugged with jetlag until I stumble back intoNew England.  It’s been a week and a half (I had to check a calendar because I had absolutely no clue how long it had actually been) since we arrived. Nearly everything takes getting used to, and reminds me ofJapanin its other-landliness. From funny-shaped plugs to separate faucets for hot and cold water (aka, scalding and freezing as it only comes in those temperatures) everything is familiar, but not quite.  The refrigerator is tiny like in my apartment inJapan, and I like being able to place things on top of it. The shower is a precise science – you’ve all seen those pie charts, but this is worse.  Even the tiniest nudge turns the water from skin-peeling hot to arctic, and it often inches up to the former while you’re inside.  The bath is better, but the water is brownish green when it sits in the tub.  I’ve been assured it’s perfectly safe and clean, but I dream of my deep, clear ofuro instead.

The most dramatic appliance so far has been the washer.  After reaching critical laundry levels, I volunteered to was some socks, as it had been raining for days and the sun had finally shown itself over our drying line outside.  After fiddling with some buttons and dials, I heard the sound of water and it seemed to be humming happily, so I went back to my novel in the bedroom.  I popped out for a snack to find the kitchen covered in water.  Preliminary inspection revealed a geyser spouting out of the water draining tube, and after a few pathetic attempts of plugging it, I smashed buttons until the machine shut off.  I tried to mop, but as I lamented to Paul, “There isn’t even a thing to wring the mop with, so I was just pushing water around the floor!” (Later, I realized you can wring mops with your hands.  I am a terrible person and a prat.)   After unreturned phone calls and whining, people showed up to suck up the water (..it had dried 2 days ago?) and finally to fix the washer.  We hung the laundry and it dried by the next day, the only fatality my mini-Che sock that a bird had pooped on.

In all, great success….!!

More of the house:

Living room!

Kitchen!

And lemon and avocado trees live in our yard..!!

I’m happy with the extent to which me & Japan are still connected.  I work with Japanese students, I still listen to bits of Japanese music, read Japanese news, I still have friends and connections still in Japan.  But it’s not an obsession.  I don’t live in the past, or in a self-made Japan bubble, watching dramas every night over my somen noodles and edamame.  I think I’ve found a place for that part of my life in my current life.  But I still miss it, as I said – little things and big.  I hope I can go back soon.

Coming here to South Africa has reminded me so much of my time in Japan, whether by stark contrast or freaky similarity.  Even the act of (trying to be) blogging again has felt strangely like putting on an old pair of shoes you forgot you had. Trying to understand another culture, though, is apparently a pair of shoes that never get broken in, and give you terrible blisters but always in a new place.  At least there are bandaids everywhere too, also known as beer.

But enough sappiness!  Will update you soon on the wonders of Nieu Bethesda and boring stories of day-to-day life in little Grahamstown. With pictures, Mom!  Promise!

Lions! Elephants! In the wild! It’s South Africa, people!

Our first weekend excursion was to the Addo Elephant Park, a huge national park and nature reserve about 2 hours away from us. On the way to the park, we passed a number of private reserves, so by the time we arrived, we’d already seen 2 giraffes, ostriches, some buck of some sort, and a few vervet monkeys! We made a reservation for a safari with a guide at sundown, when you can get a mix of the daytime animals about to hunker down, and the nocturnal animals just waking up. While we were waiting for the tour to start, we decided to try our luck in our little rental Kia, and drove around for about 2 hours.

PUMBA!!

We saw two elephants, kudu and red hartebeest, warthogs, ostriches, a mongoose, herons, and who knows what else. While we were waiting for the tour, a monkey checked me out and hopped from one tree to another over my head.

When the tour guide took us out, we pulled up right next to an elephant! I could have reached out and touched him, he was so close. It was amazing. I’m so jeals of elephant eyelashes…

We saw a few more animals, a jackal (so cute!) and a number of animals that we’d seen earlier in the day – actually, we did pretty good for ourselves on our own! But we got a beer break on the safari.

Back to sleep!

We stayed in some traditionally built Xhosa mud and dung huts that had a (delicious) navel orange orchard in front of the huts. It had a shower and heat, so it wasn’t that traditional ;) But it was a neat experience, and we got to pick some oranges for the road.

We had planned to go back to the park the next morning but figured we’d seen most of what we could see there. Apparently there are only a small number of lion there as they’ve just introduced 2 prides and they don’t want them to eat all the kudu, so we figured we could drive around all day and still not see any. We asked the woman who ran the mud hut hotel what else there was around, and she mentioned a cheetah breeding project (I heard it as “Cheater’s beading project” – a rehabilitating the adulterous with beadwork!? I thought..) and we were off! The directions were terrible and the map was trying to take us through the townships outside of Kirkwood, and eventually a police man flagged us down and drove us in the right direction.

 At last we were there, and OOOHHH MYYY GOOOOOOD. So amazing! First they took us through to a few big pens where they were keeping cheetah that they were raising to reintroduce into the wild, and a meerkat that they had saved after someone decided they didn’t want her as a pet anymore. I had seen some big cats so I was already happy…then the guide led us into a pen where a grown female cheetah was chilling out!

She had been hand raised and so was tame, and she was purring as soon as we came over, sounding like a car engine. But it gets better! We were allowed to sit and pet her, and she was so sweet and just a little playful. I couldn’t believe how coarse her fur was, or how she reacted to ear skritchies just like my little Pumpkin at home does!

Paul took a turn too :)

We saw some lynx and servil cats in other pens, as well as a 6 month old cheetah who loves football.

 Then she took us into another pen – with two baby lions!!!

The cubs were so adorable, and they would lay on you and chew your elbow. I had a bit of a bruise on my arm as my cardigan was apparently delicious, but we had such a good time and I was melting of happiness. The cubs were super playful and surprisingly strong for their size.

Hard to imagine that in a year, they’d be out in the bush taking down kudu to nom on, and there they are playing with my scarf. Awesome.

Now I am living in America, teaching ESL to a handful of students who are recent arrivals to the States, helping them get a grasp on the insanity which is the English language, American style.  It is unendingly difficult and frustrating, but I do love my job and I have Japan to thank for that too.

One of the best parts of my job now is summer vacation. (If you remember, summer vacation in Japan meant sweating balls in the teacher’s room every day for no reason with nothing to do.)  This summer I’ve followed my partner to South Africa for a month, where he will be teaching and being all clever and genius, while I lounge around soaking in another “cultural experience.” Weekends are a variety of planned outings to the likes of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Addo Elephant park, and Oudtshoorn. The week will be me attempting so survive/not die of embarrassment on my own.  I am hoping all these things will be sprinkled with a generous helping of beer and South African wine, food, and new people.  Maybe I could even wrap my head around a teensy bit of Afrikaans?

All remains to be seen as it is my first day in the country, but I’ve decided to give the blogging a little go again, and I hope no one minds it’s been tacked on to the end of my blog about Japan.  I feel so lucky to have a chance to travel and see so much of the world – and especially here, having the time to do so much.  So I thought I’d try to share it, maybe pass on a few giggles and WTFs, and basically try to make myself somewhat useful while down here.

Please bookmark me or add my RSS feed to your reader, and let’s enjoy South Africa. Cheers! (?)

Feelings first.

I guess I finally feel comfortable writing this because the person I was in Japan feels largely severed from the person I am now.  It’s only been three weeks, but already life in Japan and the stories from when I lived abroad seem to have developed that smokey haze around the edges that stories from “back then” always do.  When at home in Pennsylvania, I could hardly imagine that it was me who had lived in another country for two.  “When I lived in Japan” — !!! It sounds so exotic and fun.  It takes a moment to remember that it wasn’t exotic – I lived in a dingy little apartment around the corner from my school in the backwaters of a prefecture no one has heard of – not because it’s one of the world’s best kept secrets, but because its famous for…not a whole lot.  And fun? Sure, but I also suffered from all kinds of depression and misery, I cried in the bathroom at school when my students were awful, I spent most of my evenings marathoning mindless American television shows.  So no, it wasn’t always exotic or fun – but the stories of shrines and floating torii gates and cat cafes and raw jellyfish and nights out in the city and all the lols I had in school are what everyone will see and get from my stories of Japan, and in that sense those things are what define my experience abroad.  So that’s why, I think, it’s hard for me to make my life there and my life here feel continuous…if it was all fun and games, how could that have been me?  It’s weird.  More on this when I have a better idea what’s going on.

And then, there’s my life.

Three weeks ago I lived in Japan, in a small apartment. I was an assistant language teacher in a middle school and elementary schools, I had a gaggle of girl friends I spent the weekends with and I lived thousands of miles from my boyfriend, I biked everywhere and ate processed foods all the time cos I couldn’t take care of myself :)

Today I live in a small town in Massachusetts, I’m going to be an ESL teacher at a local middle and high school, my friends are mostly hundreds if not thousands of miles away, I’m enjoying domestic bliss at home, and I have a zippy little VW Golf.  Yesterday I went to a farmer’s market and drove by the goats who made the milk I was drinking at that very moment.  My dinner last night was made of veggies that had been grown right around the corner.

Life is indescribably different.  It’s challenging…my partner keeps reminding me that I am in fact emigrating – it feels like I should just be coming home, since I used to live in America, but really I am moving here, as an adult, for the first time.  It’s hard to get all the paperwork in order, all the things signed and stamped and filled out in the right places, but I finally have the bulk of that figured out.  But it’s also amazing – I miraculously found a job within 3 weeks of returning home (in extreme contrast to my fears of months and months of unemployment) and it’s a job I’m really excited about doing.  I start Monday.  I have a car and it’s reliable and cute.  I have a home (with no tatami to speak of – amen!!), and I’m sharing it with my fav person in the world.  And I even have health insurance!

I know I couldn’t be luckier.  It’s hard to be here where everything is new again, but I think it’s helped with the reverse culture shock.  I think it’s also undeniable that those two years I spent made me braver, more confident, or at least better at recklessly barreling onward with my life, hoping for the best — and all those things have helped me settle into the new life that I’m starting now.  I still have a lot I want to say about what it feels like to move back here, so I think I’ll keep this blog going at least for as long as I have that kind of stuff to say.  So look forward to that :)