Back from southern climes

We’re back. The clichéd “doesn’t feel like we’ve been gone” feeling is settling in just days after the six-week southern African jaunt. Family, friends, a warm winter, a safari, and a dusty ride through some of the planet’s most desolately-beautiful landscapes took our minds off the renovation struggle for a while, but here we are once again, back in it.

It was a nervous return, given the lack of accommodation that awaited us. But once again, thanks to our lifesaver Ornella, we’re back in the farmhouse until our house gets finished. Turns out Paolo the builder worked through most of August (unlike his compatriots), and we were greeted with a nice surprise when we first visited our house. But more of that in another entry.

So what to write of la dolce vita when we weren’t here for six weeks? Perhaps a few thoughts on the similarities and differences between Italy on one hand, and South Africa and Namibia on the other.

Similarities? Strangely, yes. The chaos and indolence of Italy has an unlikely mirror in the “inaccuracy”, should we say, that one finds in Africa.

Take our attempts at buying a cooler and freezer blocks. The store assistant at Pick ’n Pay (in Johannesburg) said they didn’t have any, so we walked through the mall to the house ’n hardware store where we bought a decent cooler. But no freezer blocks. Where are they? At Pick ’n Pay, of course. Back to Pick ’n Pay, where we find the freezer blocks next to … would you believe it … a cooler. At half the price. So back goes Maria to the house ’n hardware where she gets a refund, but back at Pick ’n Pay things aren’t going so well. There’s no bar code on the cooler, which means we can’t check it out, even though it clearly shows a price of R89 (around $12). So over we go to the customer service desk for a series of prolonged discussions, summonsing of different people (including the guy who told us they didn’t have coolers, just to instill a little confidence), all the while glancing anxiously at our watches which are creeping closer and closer to the arrival time of our guests back at my sister’s landlord’s house. Eventually, some 25 minutes later after a few saunters here and there – African store assistants are physically incapable at moving anything faster than an amble – the store manager gives it to us for R58. I think it was simply the number that came into her head at that very moment.

But for the language and the race (and perhaps the final price), this could have been an episode out of an Italian store. We encountered it again and again.

For the rest, however, the differences were stark.

• Johannesburg’s fortress existence, living behind high walls and barbed wire, where everyone has a personal “close-shave” story to tell. A lasting image one late night on the way home – a man and his bloody, cut-up pursuer almost ran straight into our car.
• Car theft – it’s standard practice to pay a car guard every time you park your car, such is the risk of it not being there when you come back. The guards are not armed, and there are stories of bribes by organized thieves, but it gives everyone (a false) peace of mind.
• Pestering art and craft salesmen, desperate to get just a tiny piece of the obvious (relative) wealth borne by European visitors, a far cry from the Italian whose apparent lack of interest in the sale renders a very different frustration for the buyer
• Waves (the marine kind)
• Wildlife, in and around the urban areas as well as out in the bush, and in numbers that you just don’t find in Europe
• In Namibia, endless vistas of dust and stone and straight, deserted roads, and a peaceful, liberating feeling that you could be the only people on the planet

So as hard as it was to leave my family and my friends and my homeland to return to our new home, it is nice to be able to run inside to get something I’ve forgotten … without having to lock the car every time. It’s nice to be able to stroll through the streets at night … without having to look cautiously over my shoulder at every stranger approaching out of the shadows. It’s nice to be able to sit outside of an evening and admire the view … without a wall and a fence and barbed wire separating me from the view and the rest of the world.

It was also interesting, exciting even, way out in the desert country of Namibia, to hear the Italian staccato that we’ve become used to in the past year. This is a new development – the Germans have always gone there in large numbers (there’s a daily Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Windhoek), but in my previous 6 visits I’ve never encountered Italians before. To the persistent embarrassment of HRH the boy king, we struck up conversations every chance we could, exercising our rusty Italian to their pleasant surprise. Somehow it brought the two places a little closer together for me, and the possibility that perhaps you can have two homes after all, even if you don’t live in one of them.