Rules of the Road

Greetings, gentle readers.
First of all, big props to the New Zealand All-Whites, the non-dairy creamer in this year's World Cup™ coffee. After drawing both Slovakia and Italy and scoring in both matches, the Super Kiwis have set up a scenario where any one of the four teams in what was widely assessed to be the easiest and most straightforward group can quite conceivably progress to the next round.  The drama is palpable.  Now to see if Côte d'Ivoire can continue the trend of ridiculous upsets and turn over Brazil's apple cart.
Meanwhile, a few words about driving a vehicle in South Africa.  The gutless little Toyota that we hired has a weird digital system of gauges and meters.  The fuel gauge, for example, has two different digital things next to the little petrol-pump icon and the letters "E" and"F."  One is a stack of 9 identical rectangles.  Next to that is a vertical bar with a little horizontal tab attached to it.  We were driving out of Port Elizabeth when we noticed that the number of bricks was full, but the little vertical thingy was at about three-quarters of the way to the top.  We'd had the car for two days, and hadn't really kept track of how much fuel we'd used.  We ended up filling up at Grahamstown, just in case.  Turns out that we'd used slightly more than a litre.  I reckon we'd driven almost a hundred kilometres at that point, so while the vehicle may be thoroughly gutless, it apparently is as efficient as all-git-out.
Other fun facts about motoring in South Africa involve communication.  Most of the communication between vehicles is done using the indicator lights.  A vehicle that wants you to pass them will glide onto the shoulder and hit its right indicators briefly.  Once you have overtaken the vehicle, it is good manners to hit your four-way hazard flashes briefly to say thank you.  Waves and other forms of manual gesticulation are also suggested, but the conventions are generally to use illuminatory means.

Went back to visit my grandparents' old shop/home on French Street.  The tree that my father planted when he was fourteen years old has now dwarfed all of the other trees on the street.  The area that used to be the store is now predominantly being used for storage, except for the front room, which is now being used by an automobile accident investigator (mva.investigators@yahoo.co.uk) named Nic, who is a terribly nice and affable fellow.  He's a former police officer with some very interesting analyses of the justice system in South Africa, and its evolution over the past 20 years.

In any event, we then paid a visit to the last local regular customer from my grandparents' day — the only resident of the area that used to regularly get all of her groceries from the Chan Bros. store.  Her name is Mrs. Miles, and she's 91 years young.  She used to teach at a school for the mentally handicapped, and is now living in the same house that she's inhabited for almost a century with her daughter.
The neighbourhood has changed significantly since the days when my father was just a boy... milk and bread deliveries in the morning can't just be left at kerbside for pickup any more.  Gone are the days with constant police van presence on the streets, and so too has a whole way of living, and a system of conduct that was at once safe, and yet morally immature.  I talked with a couple of the local lads, and was pleasantly surprised.  One is working as a quantity surveyor, though his greasy, baggy pants and unkempt beard makes him look like he's been guzzling Woolite down at the rubbish tip.

It's great to see South Africa evolving into a completely plural society.  If one really concentrates, one can see the increasing number of mixed marriages, racially ambiguous children, decreased barriers and tension between south asians, orientals, arabic, caucasian, black, and other ostensibly individual and definitive groups.  I think that the two pictures that I took down by the East Beach pretty much sum up the future of this fantastic country.
In any event, I have to be up screamingly early again in the morning so that we can dash back to P.E. and catch the Swiss v. the Chileans.
Cheers,

—mARKUS