More travel, less footy.

Greetings, gentle readers.

Well, after another 10-hour bus ride from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth, the term "jet lag" is no longer sufficient to express the strange feeling of utter exhaustion that leaps up to throttle myself and my father approximately every four hours. I reckon that our bodies have just gotten used to nodding off in planes, trains, and automobiles at any old time, so whenever there isn't some form of imminent physical danger, we just crash out into unconsciousness.

The place is also bloody cold. I thought that we might escape the sub-zero temperatures and freezing rain that Italy and Paraguay somehow endured if we busted a move across 800 km of the country, through a mountain range, across plateaus, around fjords, inlets, and salt flats, etc., but the weather followed us. Suddenly, the Eastern Cape is getting snow for the first time in 35 years, and what were predicted to be drought conditions all year have suddenly reversed, as my father and I apparently brought enough rain to irrigate the entire province. Considering that no houses here have any sort of central heating, the concept of room temperature has become a strange and foreign one.

Also, the xenophobes that reckon that South Africa is some sort of cesspool of violence and crime can tell their media sources of misinformation to do something physiologically improbable to themselves. Not only have I seen people accidentally drop money, and perfect strangers pick it up and run it to them, but I've actually left a digital camera on a bus, and had it found and reported to me, untouched. Where Canada has "squeegee kids" that hang out at street corners and ambush traffic with unsolicited windshield washes for money, Cape Town has rubbish pickers that stand outside in the wind and the rain to collect rubbish from your car (along with a modest tip). The itinerant get a bit of income, drivers pay for the convenience of waste disposal, and the city stays clean. Everybody wins. In Port Elizabeth, people at busy intersections are either pretty girls distributing advertising flyers, or vendors selling sports paraphernalia like flags. More than half the cars in the country are flying flags. They're predominantly South African, but I've seen Dutch, Brazilian, American, and South Korean flags flying proudly and flapping wildly on the roadways. Not only are none of these tokens of nationalist fervour vandalized or stolen, but the visual infection of vehicles has expanded from there to include "sock" coverings of side-view mirrors and bonnets of cars with flags and symbols.

My plan includes dashing off down to the mall again tomorrow, as I've got a line on a tasty and inexpensive netbook that should expand my ability to keep better notes and post more extensive blog entries. I'll just have to keep a closer eye on it than I did with my camera.

Before I go, just a few South African World Cup 2010 key words:

• Vuvuzela — the honking, long neck bugle-things that drone throughout matches.
• Zakumi — the green-haired leopard mascot for the games http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/organisation/mascot/index.html.
• Jabulani — the funky, slightly more plasticized, anti-Robert Green ball with 11 panels to symbolize the eleven players each team has on the pitch, as well as the 11 June start and 11 July finish to the tournament.
• Bafana Bafana — literally "the boys, the boys." Nickname of the South African National Team.

And with that, I take my leave, since I need to get back to being sociable.

Cheers,

—mARKUS