Ohh South Africa, How I Love Thee, Let Me Count The Ways...

So I went to South Africa. Last week I made the half hour trip to Ladybrand just west of Maseru across the SA-Lesotho border. While it is no bigger than Belleville, IL and has far less amenities and attractions that Belleville has (yes, I never thought I would say that either). It was sheer bliss. I had not seen tortillas or bagels or cream cheese or any of those other wonderful things 6 months prior, so it was like another world, not to mention all the white people that were there, it was like Belleville!
I’ll briefly take you through my trip there and try to explain while it was wonderful it was also a bit intense and overwhelming. Having been in village and my only exposure to anything like back home has been Maseru, you get kind of used to not making decisions because there are rarely options. If you want cereal you get cornflakes, because that’s all they have. If you want bread you get either white or brown bread that’s all the choices you have. If you want jam you get either apricot or strawberry. That’s it. Well not in Ladybrand.
The first stop we made in Ladybrand was to get lunch at a legit coffee shoppe. So far in Maseru and other places in Lesotho, a café is actually a bar so if you want to get coffee you go to either a restaurant or internet café where they may or may not have coffee. And when you get coffee you have four options, cappuccino (which are actually pretty good and way worth the R10), filter coffee (if available), instant coffee (which sucks), or tea. Not in Ladybrand, they had a whole page of the menu littered with coffee options. Frozen coffee drinks, hot coffee drinks, iced drinks, all in varying flavors and coffee to cream ratios (and sometimes that cream was ice cream). I broke down, I couldn’t decide from among the plethora of choices so I went with my favorite standby, a latte, but this time I got it with whipped cream. It was so nice. After tackling the drink issue I had to choose a lunch item. With the exception of a few restaurants in Maseru and the scattered pizza places and hotels in Lesotho, when eating out you usually have a limited amount of options. Generally your choices are papa (a thick corn meal mash type thing) or rice and then you just get the cabbage/swiss chard greens and then you choose from beef or chicken stewed, sometimes it is with curry spice, sometimes it is not. Anyways, it took me a solid half hour to decide, so I went with the salmon, cream cheese and cucumber bagel and had to split it with another volunteer who shared her spicy chicken wrap. It was quite the gourmet afternoon. Then we went to a stationery shop, where (and miss Kate Shilling I thought of you) they had so many pens to choose from including G2 pens. On top of that they had art supplies, of which Lesotho is void of. After this we went to yet another stationery store, they had two, in Maseru they only have one of each kind of shop but here they had two! But this doesn’t even compare to the sole reason I went to Ladybrand, Spar. Spar is a grocery store where when you walk in it is like an American grocery store. The relaxing music playing (actually I think they were playing an instrumental version of Cats because I distinctly remember thinking of the words to “Memory”) and a section of gourmet cheeses and a deli and a bakery, oh it was amazing!!! I will recount to you what I bought because I think it will emphasize what I’m missing from home. I got bagels, low fat cream cheese, a diet 7 Up (which I really wish I had one right now), hairspray (but for white people, they have hair spray in Maseru, but it is fo’ yo’ fro’), black current jam, sliced whole grain bread (like the legit health nut kind at home), pita chips, and I would have gotten some coffee but I have a stash still of what people have sent me from America (hey hey dunkin’ donuts!) and I also would have gotten tortilla wraps and lunchmeat, but I did need to limit myself. I should mention it took me an hour wandering (by this I mean sprinting from aisle to aisle in a crazed ecstasy) around Spar to thoroughly think and pick these items out. We then had to haul-ass home before the storm so I was forced out of the store, which is a good thing because I think I could have stayed all day.
Speaking of rain, and this topic has nothing to do with South Africa, but needs to be mentioned. It has rained (and my rained I mean a decent storm) everyday for the past week. Which is great because the dust was getting so bad I thought it would consume little ole Lesotho. But the rain has saved the day. However there are a few things which I have noticed to become more apparent with the onset of the rain. Mainly I am speaking of the outrageous bugs I have been seeing. So today I was running and, just as an example, I saw a bright pink and neon green grasshopper. Not only were the colors stunning but the size of the thing was jaw dropping. It was the size of a medium rat. I kid you not. It was one huge bug. It was kind of funny because it was so big it couldn’t really hop like a grasshopper is supposed to, it did the fat man’s hop: I leapt about 2 inches then swaggered then attempted it again, but couldn’t. About a quarter mile down the road from this spectacle was an equally astounding insect. We have millipedes at home and they really aren’t large, at all. Well I came upon a millipede probably ½ inch in width and six to seven inches in length. I stopped just so I could eyeball its size. I’m going to have to start running with my camera so you all can witness these things and not just think I am making this up or telling tall tales. It’s a pretty legitimate estimate.
Well I will leave you with that. This is preemptive, but have a Happy Thanksgiving in case you don’t read next week’s posting where I will say Happy Thanksgiving again. Have a great day/week, feel free to email, write, send ridiculously large and stuffed packages, or all of the above. Salang Hantle