Retrospectives and Recriminations

Greetings, gentle readers.
Well, I am now safely back in Edmonton and once more ensconced in my drab and pedestrian existence. Thanks to input from one of my senior colleagues, I now have a scheme afoot to make work a more tolerable activity, but other than that, nothing significant has changed around my office during my absence.  The employee turnover seems overly high, training procedures seem spotty, and cliques in fiefdoms snipe at one another instead of cooperating.  Looks like I'll have to do something, or else start farming out the resumé.
Thinking back on the trip to South Africa, and anticipating any questions, the best part of the trip had to be watching Germany dismantle Argentina in the quarter-finals in Green Point Stadium, Cape Town.  The raucous singing of the German fans, and the torrents of quasi-intelligible shouting and raving by the Argentinian fans made for a lovely auditory as well as sporting experience.
A close second would be hanging out with the predatory wildlife, whether that be the sharks of Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, or the cheetahs and birds of prey at the Spier Estate, near Stellenbosch, Western Cape.  The non-predatory wildlife, like the elephants of Addo National Park were also interesting, but not quite as fun.
Third place was an evening that constituted an aggregation of things.
A lot of people have asked me about the different laws and regulations in South Africa, and one of the things that hey are astonished to hear is that people are allowed to smoke cigarettes inside pubs, clubs, and bars.  Granted, in the Chrome nightclub in Cape Town, there was a separate smoking area, away from the dance floor, but that was probably more because it got very hot and sticky on the dance floor, and mixing that with stale smoke would have been aesthetically disgusting, not hygienically so.
All that aside, I quite liked the local pub just down the street from my cousin Liesl's flat in Kenilworth.  It wasn't too loud, the television was adequate for watching footy, it was large and airy, and the locals that I met were a solid bunch of terribly good blokes and ladies.  Somehow, it also always managed to be the right temperature.  Cape Town got cold often, and despite the doors being open to let air in, the warmth from the kitchen was always just enough to strike a comfortable equilibrium.
So it was that I found myself down at the local on the evening of the Deutschland-Uruguay match.  It was being played in Durban, and there was a frog's chance at a snake symposium of getting a ticket, getting there, and as I later discovered, getting off your plane.  A pack of private jets had blocked the runways, and a couple of thousand fans couldn't get to the game as their flights were diverted.
As usual, I found a couple of the local lads, and managed to shoehorn myself into the crowd at the bar.  There were two people with vuvuzelas — one was a huge, burly, barrel-chested Springbok fan about two people to my left.  The other was a woman in the darkened corner toward the exit.  The two of them started honking/buzzing at one another, and the spirit of fun (and annoying noise) hung over the crowd like the ghost of Christmas Present.  Everyone was getting into the spirit of thumping Uruguay, who were about as popular as the Totenkopfverbände at a Bar Mitzvah.
Uruguay had beaten South Africa 3-0 in the opening round of the World Cup, thus ensuring that even though Bafana Bafana thumped the French, they were still doomed to be the first host nation of the Cup to be dumped out at the first hurdle.  Strike one.  Then, after all of the other African teams had been dumped out of the competition, the last Africans standing (Ghana) were knocked out on penalties. By Uruguay.  Strike two.  How did that game go to penalties?  Luis Suarez prevented a goal with his self confessed "save of the tournament."  Problem:  he's not a goalkeeper, and anyone else using his/her hands to manoeuvre the ball is committing a foul.  It was cynical, and he was punished for it, but it denied Ghana the chance to be the first African nation to ever make the semi-finals.  Strike three.  TV commentators were remarking on the police escorts for the team as they went toward the stadium in Durban.
Not only were the phasers in the pub set to "party," the place was jumping, and the Germans were obliging the Africans with their clinical and exciting play.  Around half-time, I managed to tear my eyes away from the gripping spectacle above me to glance around the pub.
There were cigarette girls.  Honestly.  They had the strap-around-the-back-of-the-neck deals, and the trays in front of them, with rows of cigarette packs.  It was one thing that people were smoking in the bar, but this was something new.  Or rather, something old.  This was something I'd expect to see in "Carry on Spying" or some sort of French cabaret period-piece film.  They moved around the bar, seeming to hover together like a trio of ladybugs, which didn't seem to make much sense to me if the idea was to vend their wares to as many customers as possible.
Eventually, they settled at the blank spot at the bar which had been vacated by my friend, who had run off to answer the call of nature.  Coincidentally, next to me.
"Hey there," I said to the nearest (and shortest) of the three.  "How much are you charging for those cigarettes?
It was about that time that I noticed that the cigarette packs in the tray were about half of the size of a normal cigarette pack. And what looked like the sample cigarettes had about half of the diameter of the cigarette dangling from the girl's hand.  I looked from one to the other.
"Wait, you're selling these things, but you smoke a different brand..."
"Oh yes," she replied airily. "I smoke Camels.  I don't really care for these ones."
That threw me for a bit of a loop.  Some marketing genius was going to get lynched for this.
"So... if you don't like smoking them, how could you sell them to other people with any conviction?"
"We're not allowed to actually sell them," she said. "We are only allowed by law to be around and wait for people to approach us."
"That's easy," I said glibly. "You're very pretty.  People must approach you all night, non-stop."
She blushed and glanced over at her two comrades, who were busy doing something else.
"No, really... it's not like..."
"Well, here," I offered, reaching in my pocket for some cash. "How much for one of those packs?"
"They're 27 rand," she began, before running through what I assumed was a rehearsed speech.  She drew in a breath of air, not cigarette smoke and began. "We are prohibited from actually selling you cigarettes.  What you can do is hand the money to the bar, the bar will give you a pack from their supply, and then they will change inventory with my friend here."  She gestured toward the taller blonde behind her.
I'm sure that I had some sort of quizzical look on my face as I held out 30 rand, the barman took it, made change, gave some money to the blonde cigarette girl, then gave me my change and a 1×1×3 rectangular prism.  Presumably filled with cigarettes.
I opened the package, and the brunette with the cigarette tray watched me closely. I suspiciously pulled out a needle-thin smoke, and look at her suspiciously.
"If I smoke this, won't people think that I'm a homosexual?"
She giggled slightly.
"I wouldn't worry about that," she said.
"Well, why do other people buy these things?" I asked.  "Do they taste better?  They don't look more efficient..."
"I don't like them," she replied. "They don't have enough in them, and you really have to suck to get anything out of them."
I looked coolly at her as I imagine James Bond would have.
"You mean, I ought to be paying you 27 rand for the privilege of watching you smoke one."
"Oh, you... you're making me blush."  At that, she was off to the other end of the bar, her taller, blonder associates belatedly in tow.
In short, Germany was the good guy, I was some sort of quick-talking Lothario, and the world seemed like a better, brighter place the next day than it had the day before.  Not a bad third-place finish, as near as I can tell.

Cheers, and farewell England and the Colonies.

—mARKUS