As I’d hoped, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with the people I’m meeting during my South African odyssey. Some things I’ve heard and seen: (more…)

For the last few years I’ve lived a sedentary life, mostly exercising my mouse clicking finger and little more, so I packed a full supply of Advil in anticipation of the inevitable aches and pains of throwing my flaccid body into the tumbling waves. Well, my first dousing was a simulated one, but no less painful for it.

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They say that our smell remembers the best. Perhaps that’s why elephants don’t forget anything, why, with that big ol’ snout of theirs. Then again, I’ve never really believed that in any case. Remembering migratory paths isn’t exactly remembering everything. How could we really know whether elephants can remember any better than bees, lemurs, or the likes of us? But regardless, I’m always amazed at how precisely I remember a smell, and returning to a place that’s brimming with nostalgia and ancient memories occasions many remembrances. Every place has its smell, whether it be Colorado’s wonderfully aromatic crisp air or Los Angeles’ warm, smoggy, muggy cocktail. After arriving at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport I passed by a bakery and instantly its unique and unmistakeable scent took me back to the mornings my mom would take me to the bakery at Florida Center in Johanessburg when she was preparing a talk. It’s amazing to me the lucidity of this smell so many years on, and how it is so tightly bound to the memories of that place. Another wonderful and distinctive South African smell, believe it or not, is the smell of burning fields. South Africans regularly burn the fields to prevent fires from getting out of control and this scent in the air is wonderful. It’s something akin, I’d say, to the first whiffs of cut grass in the Spring in Colorado. (more…)

After working virtually all day, every day for as long as I can remember, I’m taking (count it) a full month of vacation to colorful South Africa. It seems an opportune time to blog about my misadventures there. It promises to be a tad more interesting than my normal goings on… “I just applied my 30th hard light filter in Photoshop”, or, “I just wrote a wicked CSS file”. (more…)