August 2 2010

My second full day in Johannesburg, South Africa. The internet is not working on my laptop at the moment, so I'm writing this offline for the time being.
My flight was alright, I love flying but I hate the change of air pressure. A funny thing was when we were getting ready to land... I was waiting for the altitude metre to hit '0', and I was worried the plane wasn't flying fast enough. Then we landed, at 1600-something metres. I felt very, very Dutch at that moment – of course Jozi is up just a bit higher than our own below-sea-level country!

So far I've taken a walk in the Johannesburg Botanical gardens and went to a birthday party for two of my cousin's cousins (twins). It's funny how many people are surprised I speak English at all, but I did have some good experiences already. A friend of my cousin (about 14 years old) asked me where my accent was from (probably thinking "Well it's not South African, or American or..." he just wasn't sure.) but overall it's easy enough to understand the South Africans.
Some things that are different: Traffic lights are called 'robots' here (which sounds incredibly silly to my ears.) and they pronounce 'years' kind of funny (more like yurs/yus).

This morning I went to Yeshiva college with my cousin, unfortunately the headmaster wasn't in so we couldn't ask about being a teaching assistant there, but we'll go back and try again tomorrow. It's a wonderful school – not too big, very nice. It's Jewish, but that only adds to the atmosphere – it's so different from what I'm used to so I'm sure it'll be a wonderful experience.

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We tried again the next day, and he told us to try at the high school part of the school. There the people were quite rude to us, we phoned them and they told us "No we don't have the resources" and they hung up on us! Luckily Japari (Doron's school) was much nicer and I'll be working there on Mondays and Wednesdays!
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Words:
Robot -> Traffic light
Milie -> corn (Mielie pap)
Bami/Ba(r?)ti -> Bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah
Howzit -> Hey there/how is it?