This and That

Sorry for the lack of postings lately but things have quieted down quite a bit from our crazy busy April/May holiday season and there just hasn't been as much to chat about... The last month has mostly been busy with the World Cup and the hunt for a new apartment here in Joburg. I'm sure there isn't much I can say about the world cup to keep anyone's interest but it has been nice having it occur in the same time zone, I'm still having flashbacks to the Korea World Cup and a number of sleep deprived nights watching the finals (on the up side breakfast became a much more eventful meal!). The apartment search has been a unique experience though. After weeks of looking for a nice furnished apartment I finally found one that didn't provoke feelings of unease and queasiness and signed a lease, picked up the keys and prepared to move only to find out the night before the move that the apartment had been rented to someone else and that the owner would be needing the keys back... I'm pretty sure that this can only occur here in Africa! But luckily Terry's parents have a nice big house so we have temporarily nestled in there until we can work out another plan. And I must admit that the views from the Angelos house are quite a step up from our previous location! It's just a shame that it is winter now, in a few more months the Jacaranda trees will be in bloom and the view from the house will be studded with purple everywhere.

But all in all I really can't complain about Joburg winters, the evenings get pretty nippy (flirting with freezing point) but most days warm up nicely so that all you need is a sweater and the weather has been nothing but big beautiful blue skies and sun. The only real issue in Joburg in the winter are the fires. Because of the crystal clear weather the grass (felt) dries up nicely and burns at the drop of a hat. God only knows how all the fires start but start they do. Actually, it's probably a mix of genuine accident and the campfires used by the homeless, people tend to camp for the evening in open fields. But I've never seen anything like it before. Granted, we do have our fair share of raging wild fires every year in the US, but at least people are busy trying to put them out! Here the fires just spark up and people will let them burn themselves out. I can usually count at least 3 or 4 new fires a day!

Enough though of my rambling about wild fires... Terry's sister Tina was in town last weekend with her husband Jonny, and despite the fact that the weekend seemed to slip right by it was great to have a chance to catch up with them for a few days. I went out with the boys that weeked to the outdor expo that was held here and I probably should have known that it was going to be a testosterone fueled event but I guess you win some and loose some. Any way, after far too much time standing in front of quad bikes, camper trailers, kayaks, and various other boy toys we stumbled onto a very Genevieve friendly thing. There was a non-profit group there thaht rehabilitated wild animals and they had brought some of their monkeys and a baby lion along to the show. I wish I had a camera with me to prove it but the baby lion (which they had received as a 3 week old cub) had been nursed and raised by a pair of daschunds and while we were there the lion was busy wrestling with one of them, it was really one of the funiest things I've seen in a while.

Oh yea, the one big-ish adventure I've embarked on in the last few weeks was a weekend trip withTerry's family to Sun City (South Africa's largest casino) to see my first big Greek concert, Antonis Remos, I must say it was a very nice although unique event, and even though I didn't understand the songs it was a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure that Sun City sold more Whisky and had more tables broken by dancing fans than any time in recent memory, putting a thousand Greeks into a room with music and alcohol is a pretty solid recipe for trouble! While we were at Sun City we decided to take advantge of the Pilanesburg Game Park and went on a drive one afternoon, it was definitely not the usual overwhelming Simbabili exerience but we did get to watch a beautiful herd of Giraffe.