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here's the backyard. on a nice day i sit in the back and read and eat. my bachelor flat is the tiny unit closest in the picture. it's very very small.

here's the inside of my place. modern decor no?

the view from the kitchen. that's the shower off in the distance. i would put a dime in the picture to show scale but it wouldn't fit.

this is my place from inside the shower. this picture gives you a sense of the entire length and width of the place. that carpet/rug needs to go

my cooking amenities. pasta and rice... bread and cheese. wine and beer. takeout and dine in.

geckos like to come in through that vent.

i call this the bathroom hallway.

that's the shower. by the way, every window in this country has burglar bars over it. if you don't have them over the windows, you have to have to have gates inside the house to partition the house. you're basically allowing access to the television but not the bedroom where you keep the important stuff (your life).

“germ PROTECTING” ?!

in the backyard are a couple trees. apart from the ibis, there are plenty of other animals that wander around here despite the neighborhood being mostly rural. in this picture there's a lizard that is about 10-12 inches long with a bright blue head.

here's what a “normal” thunderstorm looks like. of course this barely captures the rain, the wind and the noise.

the family i'm staying with have a kid who's like 8 or something. he entered a children's cricket tournament and i asked if i could come along. richard, the father, thought i was crazy for wanting to go. turns out he was right. this picture is a cereal mascot (i think) holding up richard and priscilla's newborn baby girl.

there were about 30 teams of 8 or 9 kids each. the chaos began when they tried to get the kids organized by teams. team names included, “savages”, “jelly tots”, “dolphins”, and “dolphinettes”

beautiful maritzburg summer weather. this is the KwaZuluNatal University cricket pitch. they fit 8 games of childrens cricket at a time on one pitch.

if you're familiar with the rules of cricket... it's kind of like baseball, except you don't have to run when you hit it. and when you do run, you have a teammate standing opposite you who runs to your wicket while you run to his. if you're close to being thrown out you can dive headfirst across the line. what you're seeing above is angello's partner not diving (the ball is being chased by the other team still). it's a good action shot that sums up the cricket played by the kids.

i don't think this picture really needs a caption

this is around hour 2 of our road trip to carry out a site inspection. bruce pulled over at the mkomazi bridge for two reasons: one is that it was a single lane bridge (more like a 0.75 lane bridge) that was widened by bcp years ago. it's also in a flood plain that once several decades ago flooded to such an extent that structures hundreds of meters from the river had water over their roofs. the second was “to take the pressure off”.

that's bruce. in the lower right of the shot is some bloke sitting by a fire fishing for his supper.

this picture captures a typical south african township landscape. there's no major/white city around for a hundred km. you'll also notice that this road, which winds around to the right lower down, doesn't have any paved roads branching off. all the houses below, which are the size of an american garage, have no garages and no car access. if anyone needs to get somewhere they can wait on the side of the road for a 'taxi' which is a ten or so seater vanagan-type vehicle which you rarely see without 16 to 25 passengers. or you can walk like the two in the picture are doing.

here's another good example of the landscape you see between cities. corrugated metal roofing oftentimes held down with bricks. electricity but no plumbing. some of the houses have gardens growing maize but despite what you'd expect, it's a very small percentage that try to grow food. the entrepeunerial spirit is rare in the townships. credit the welfare programs?

all that soil washed away one night. luckily police were driving by right as the road started turning to jelly and they stopped traffic so nobody died.

this is one of the things that keeps blowing my mind: the crazy part about construction in africa is that you're building stuff through african terrain. huge bamboo chutes everywhere. and just meters away are jungle and vines where tarzan could wrestle a crocodile in a few minutes.

that's bruce and james. bruce and i have been reviewing james' company (v&v) design of this culvert. the original (built years ago before they had to be designed by engineers) washed out some months back. the d.o.t. saw a few flags go up when reviewing the drawings of the new design and called bruce. sure enough we've found quite a few problems. james wasn't in charge of the design that we're scrutinizing (he's just the site supervisor in charge of wearing short shorts), but the head engineer is clearly embarassed that his design is so ass-backwards and layed out for all to see now.

job site: one side = sugar cane fields. other side = sleepy hollow.

on the way back, bruce stopped at a beach that i think is in 'scottsburgh'. rain and strong winds can keep people out of the water. after all it's still warm out when it's raining. there's a big set of waterslides (barely pictured to the right). 10 days ago, mid march, the stars and planets all aligned in a 1:1000 formation creating insane tidal forces that wiped out a large amount of the coast and the waves are still behaving oddly because of it.

white families frolick.

so i decided to record a little south african television (it's pure coincidence that the huge muscular tattooed bloke is named “jonah”). the previous scene had a man dressed as a woman talking about how she likes to buy stuff on ebay. it basically was lampooning american consumerism. as she walked off she sang the american national anthem.

after soccer today, virgilio and cracked open some beers and watched the maritzburg united team practice at the university. maritzburg united is the local professional team. problem is that they rarely win. everybody seems to prefer a few teams (the kaiser chiefs and the bloemfontain celtics) regardless of where they're from. this isn't spring training. this is how these professional teams practice. we were kicking around on the field right above where the pros practice. no shortage of available pitches around here.

the butterfly affection

this is the veranda of the lodge at the nottingham brewery. the only “microbrewery” i've found so far. who wouldn't want to spend a night at this lodge and just realx on the lake? the pub even showed the chelsea match (once the kzn sharks finished playing their rugby match) (and until the s.a. cricket match came on).

that cow in the background is hunting a bird. we are lost and getting rained on. just an hour ago it was blue skies.

this is the 'groundcover leather company' run by tristan's friends. i figured i'd stop by. on the way there along a slippery dirt road i passed a big truck stuck headfirst in a ditch. i wasn't about to stop. about 100 meters later there was a cow just wandering around. the prices would blow your mind here as well as the level of quality. i

when i went to pick up my work visa documents, i waited in a queue for some time, dropped off my passport and they said, come back in about an hour. i was damned if i was gonna stay in that refugee camp for an hour so i went looking for the botanical garden i found when i was lost the previous day. i had my camera on me too. anyhoo, the overcast weather fucked with the lighting but this tree looks like something out of a gaugin painting.

this place is a must see for anyone that ever visits s.a.

unlike the orchid house in kew gardens in london, the orchid house here (though smaller) is mostly open to the weather. south africa has orchids that just grow here in the wild. i think s.a. has the largest variety of naturally occuring orchids in the world.

those oversaturated purple orchids were photographed at kew gardens. they're so colorful they mess the exposure of the camera up if you're not careful. this place made me think of my favorite old time radio show “nero wolfe” (starring sydney greenstreet). the chairborne detective, wolfe, spends all his money on orchids and beer. what a life.

any thoughts?

i keep referring to s.a. being in the mezazoic era. this tree just looks prehistoric to me. look how those huge limbs come off there. they just keep heading straight out. there's no sense of scale in this one but look at the next pic and then look at this one again.