Baby's First Braai

 One of the blessed bonuses of being somewhere that language barriers aren't an issue is the ability to make friends easily, particularly around my D&D hobby (which I tragically can't pursue while out and about, being strongly averse to online play).  As such, I've found myself with friends here that I'm hanging out with beyond just the basic-level activity.  I gave them this link so I need to make sure I say nice things about them.  Which is easy, because they're lovely people.  Case in point, they were all too eager to be the first to introduce me to a braai.

 A braai is a South African tradition combining a bbq and a potluck.  It's a common and important enough event that many middle-class-and-up houses have an entire space dedicated to it - this is the bedroom, this is the lounge (living room), and this is the braai room.  Attendees typically bring the meat or similar things that they want to have, everything gets grilled up, and you eat until you feel a little unwell.  Or at least I did.

And how could I not?  I'm a carnivore at heart, which is tricky because said heart would probably stop if I ate like it wanted me to.  And a braai is so much meat.  Potato salad is also a common side, though we didn't have any at this particular one.  The sandwich things on the left there are braai broodjie.  There was also lamb chops, ostrich sausage, kudu (a kind of antelope), beef, and probably other things that I forgot to take notes on.  One of the more interesting creations were oopsies, bacon-wrapped glazed cherries on little skewers.  Then for dessert, milk tart (served in slices like pie) and malva pudding with custard.  Somewhat like bread pudding from the UK, I find myself encountering what is called pudding but is almost entirely unrecognizable for what Americans call it.  Ask a typical American which part of that last picture is the pudding and they might say the yellow creamy semiliquid goop.  Somehow the US drifted in definition away from the baked kind of thing.  Maybe one day I'll research how and why.  Maybe.

My new friends also presented me with a giant overflowing treasure box of South African snacks, candies, etc.  Of particular note are Fizzers, a kind of taffy-coated Pop Rocks; tomato-flavoured maize chips (softer than corn chips, e.g. Fritos, but similar base); Pin Pops, essentially Blow Pops; bacon flavored cheddar crackers; and creme soda flavored milk (yes, really).  I haven't tried all of it yet but so far it's mostly been quite nice.

These friends didn't introduce me to the other South African food I discovered this past week; I found a Gatsby all by myself.  I was ordering UberEats and the picture on the restaurant's page looked roughly like a sub sandwich.  I already had gotten a chicken sandwich and fries (chips, locally), so I thought, better just do a half.

Apparently this is a half gatsby from that particular restaurant.  As long as my head and 2/3 as wide, layered with sauce and thick-cut chips, and this variety having a hearty hot dog-style roll in the middle.  This would probably be enough food for an entire day.  It was great, don't get me wrong, I'll probably get another one someday...but certainly not along with anything else.

As a closing, this is not food but just a family that visited the pole studio I'm training at.  They were cautiously curious, but I don't think they'll come back for classes. 

"Check your privilege"

 This is going to be a very different kind of post than most of mine.  If you're here for the travel stories and the pictures and the sights, or even the surface-level observations about the world around me, maybe go ahead and skip this one.

This one is going to talk more about my personal life, my experience in starting to look at dating while out here, and the particular things I'm finding...and what they're showing me.  It's going to be political, even if I try to find a somewhat moderate way to express it.

So, for context:  South Africa is in a pretty rough place.  It's advanced, Westernized, capitalist, all of that, and as of the mid '80s or so, the legal systems in place that enforced racial discrimination have been removed.  Anyone in the US knows that's not a magic bullet to fix racism, nor does it solve the issues that arise from a particular group being disadvantaged for centuries.  The government is currently headed by a black South African, and a major push that they have on a policy level is to even the playing field through what are called BEE laws, similar to the US's Affirmative Action and similar things.  Essentially the demographics of an area determine the ethnic hiring balance of those companies; if the area is 70% black, then 70% of the employees have to be black.  I can't speak to the exact wording or policies, as I haven't researched them myself, but this is the description I've gotten from multiple people here.

The thing is, there are plenty of loopholes in that as written.  So it's easy for a company to hire only white people for management and corporate positions as long as they have (or create) enough positions at other levels.  There is a minimum wage here that equates to about ~$1.70 US per hour.  At least in the area I'm in, the cost of food/groceries is lower than what I left in the US, but not substantially.  Housing is much less expensive, relatively, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily affordable.  All that to say, even with higher position creation at many companies, the jobs themselves don't pay all that much.

And that's if you can get a job.  The current unemployment rate, according to a quick Google, is about 35% in PE.  Compare that to Colorado's approximate 4%.

My point, in case it's eluding anyone, is that economically, South Africa is not in a great place.  And because there's a very well-studied, direct correlation between poverty and crime, it makes sense that SA is pretty well-known as a high crime country.  It's so normalized here that almost everyone I talk to comments on it, and many people even joke about it.  Whistling in the dark.

All of that is just context.  So put that somewhere in the middle of your mind.

I haven't dated since roughly 2022, 2023.  I decided to pursue this nomad life around that time, and began living in a sort of limbo.  I knew that I would be moving any day now(tm) so forming a serious connection with a non-nomad just seemed doomed to either fail, or tie me down and deny me my goals.  The latter wasn't an option to me (and still isn't), so I just decided to forego it entirely.
In Bulgaria and Georgia, I lacked any functional language ability, and thus didn't pursue dating either.
Now I'm in South Africa where the language is once again shared.  While I'm still nomadic and still quite dedicated to that choice, I determined that I should also take advantage of the lack of language barrier and maybe see what's out there, being very upfront about my life situation and all that.

I got very few responses.  Which is not surprising.  If I found someone on a dating site or similar who was saying they'd be around a paltry couple months, I probably wouldn't invest much either.  Everyone in digital nomad circles knows how lonely this life can be since your mobility usually comes at the cost of serious ties and long-term relationships. 

But I digress.
Of the three responses I've gotten so far, two are unemployed.  One has been a good conversational partner, and we're planning an in-person meeting for later this week.  I may or may not report back on that, but it's not really important.  What IS important, to me at least, is the journey it's been learning about them, their lives, and looking in the mirror along the way.

There's a phrase in more liberal circles: "Check your privilege."  It refers to the way that one's upbringing can shape their view of the world to such a deep, almost subconscious level that they don't recognize that the world works totally differently for other people.  This has mostly come up in reference to systemic racism, especially police profiling and violence against Black people in America.  "Check your privilege" means to acknowledge that as a white person, especially a middle-class white person, something like being pulled over for speeding may be a casual, harmless interaction for you as they run your license plate, check for warrants, and send you on your way; for a Black person, it may mean a search of the vehicle on the assumption that there are drugs, detainment for crimes that might be overlooked, and so on.  It changes the entire experience.

In stepping out and putting myself in a place to talk to people I wouldn't just "stumble across" in day to day life or in pursuit of my (white middle class) hobbies, I'm encountering lives and experiences that remind me of my privilege.  
Someone works in a bakery, and it occurs to me that my normal follow-up question of "do you like it" is silly because whether they like it or not, they have to hold onto it because finding another job may just not be possible.  Meanwhile, I come from a world where if I don't like my job, I could probably find another one.  I may not like it either, but I undeniably have options.
Someone messages me and I ask what they do in their free time.  They say that they mostly just sit around.  While I don't think this is literally accurate, sit and stare at the walls and do nothing, it's expressive enough that I kind of understand.  After all, if they're unemployed, what holds their day together?  And if they're unemployed, what hobbies can they have that don't require some kind of investment?  You can't knit without buying yarn.  You can't read without having books (including a way to get to the library to borrow them).  You can't learn an instrument without buying one.  And so on.

I should be clear on something: I don't feel guilty or ashamed of my place in the world.  I don't resent my job, my freedom, my opportunities because some people don't have them.  The point of "check your privilege" is not to make you feel bad about yourself; it's to remind you that not everyone has the same experience.  It's to encourage you to step outside yourself, see the world through different eyes.  In the process of intentionally meeting people I wouldn't normally and thinking critically about how I'm interacting with them, their experiences, their perspectives, I'm learning about myself and the ways that I think without thinking.

And hopefully not making an ass of myself in the process 🤣🤣 

This Port in a Storm

 So the title may be a bit misleading.  Kind of sounds like I've been through this terrible circumstance and was desperate for anything that would shelter me, as the "Any port in a storm" saying describes.

This hasn't been that.  As I've likely described, I chose South Africa as a kind of respite from being as complete a foreigner as I am in many places, with neither the language skills nor the social skills to form and sustain interactions with the people around me.  But that doesn't mean South Africa felt like my only choice, or that I felt that if I didn't find an English-speaking country or region quickly I'd be in some dangerous dark place or something.  South Africa has been a point of interest to me since learning about apartheid in middle school, and climbed the list after meeting a remarkably diverse set of people while teaching in China.  One country contained multitudes, and I've been curious to explore that further, particularly as someone from a country that used to proudly title itself "the melting pot."

Used to.  *ahem*

 In my typical somewhat lackadaisical approach to choosing new places, though, I'd done little advance research on the actual culture of this country, the history beyond just the '80s, and so on.  What I didn't know or expect was that I'd find what has been by far the friendliest people I've encountered.

Now, I should define that further.  Many people in America are friendly.  I often felt at least tentatively accepted and appreciated by the local teachers in China.  I wouldn't even go so far as to characterize Bulgaria or even Georgia as unfriendly, just...more selective.  But from almost the moment I landed, I felt the difference here, and the more I've gotten out and talked to people, the more that's been confirmed.  Basically all the South Africans I've met, which has admittedly and unfortunately been almost exclusively the white South Africans, have been genuinely interested, open, welcoming, and helpful, often proactively so.  Offering rides, suggesting things to see and do, asking more probing questions and interacting meaningfully with the answers.  For a country as beset by crime as this one is, it hasn't seemed to jade the people that much, and that's just remarkable to me.

As an example of this, my AirBnB hosts volunteered (almost pushed, honestly) to take me out to the shoreline nearby, specifically the area near the Sacramento trail.  As I've done before, I've lumped all this into a single photo album for free perusal (or not).  I would like to highlight how crazy dense the coastline/"beach" was with shells, including some that got fairly large.  This section of the coast is very rocky, but with formations and erosion patterns that made me wish I'd studied more geology so I could understand how they formed.  I mean, look at this.  It's so vastly different to anything I've seen in the US, even along the coasts.  Parts of South Africa are also popular surfing destinations, and with these waves I could see why, though the Sacramento trail area is far too dangerous (obviously).

Beyond that, I've been making a pretty dedicated effort to find D&D players and games.  It's something that was a primary hobby back in the US, and for a slew of reasons that aren't important, playing online just isn't something I can get into and enjoy.  So while I'm back where English is dominant, it seemed like a good idea to enjoy that some more.  I've returned to pole classes after over a month off for the cyst removal, and found that I lost some strength and conditioning over the gap that's coming back pretty quickly.   I'm likely to be taking four classes a week by the time I'm ready to leave here.  
Well, rephrase: by the time I have to leave because my visa has run out.  I'm getting a sense that I won't be *ready to leave* at that point.

At the moment, I don't know that I have much more to say.  Got another picture of the cursed Ibises that are loud and obnoxious, a picture of a couple little lizard friends, and a mediocre picture of the red moon that resulted from the lunar eclipse that occurred here.  There's also this very bold store claim.

Now for a sight on what's coming next.
I'd initially leaned towards Nairobi, Kenya as my next destination.  Relatively close, a place of interest for some time, and with fairly common English, it seemed like a good transition of sorts.  However, in looking at Kenyan visa processes, I found that like many countries, I need to have onward travel booked in order to apply for the visa.  This meant figuring out before I left where I'd be going afterwards.  Given I'm still sort of stumbling around out here, this level of planning was somewhat new.  Sure, I'd had my whole path laid out and planned, but that was all in service of a particular goal or process; this is just living.

So off I set to figure out where I'd go next.  It was in that process that I realized that of the southeast Asian countries, Vietnam is among the only ones where there's any time of the year I'd actually enjoy it, and even that's only northern Vietnam and only during the winter.  If I stayed in Kenya for a month or two, I'd be leaving in December or January.  Having been to Vietnam before, I'm fairly confident I'd be content there for a longer stay (tourist visa caps at 90 days there); I also need to work on more stable, consistent travel because each relocation costs nearly a week of productivity and that is crippling if you move once a month or so.  
That put me in Vietnam from January to March, maybe early April...by which time it's already getting back towards the high 70s, 80s.  However, I realized that if I went to Vietnam *first*, I'd be there during the thick of winter when the temperatures would be most amenable to me.  So that's next.

Vietnam also has an onward travel requirement, though, so I had to look at what came after that.  Nairobi is entering one of their hotter times of the year in March/April, but cools down a bit by June/July; so I needed to find something more winter/spring until then.  I was first drawn to Eastern Europe, then specifically to Riga, Latvia.  So that'll follow Vietnam, then Nairobi, and honestly after that I expect to return here to Gqeberha, South Africa.  It's early yet, of course, having only been three weeks, but a large part of me could see making this a regular part of my rotation even as far away from everything as it is.

So that's the next year sketched out.  At the very least, Vietnam > Latvia is semi-solid (though not booked yet, waiting on a couple of larger jobs to pay out).  I wouldn't want to return to South Africa until May or so to avoid their summer, but Nairobi fits nicely in there both climate-wise and geographically.

 It's all quite the adventure.