the real africa

jeez its been ages, so long in fact it took me a while to figure out how to write a post let alone post it! and now i have about 3 posts swirling around in my brain!

so, in the last week or so there has been this story on the paper about the british tourists, one of whom was murdered. the husband was quoted as saying that he and his new bride wanted to see the real africa.

WTF is the real africa? who are the real africa's people? the first thing that is important to note is that africa is a continent people. not a country.

lets start there. a continent, made up of between 47 & 54 countries depending on if you are counting islands etc. so lets settle for the 47, still a huge number, see the map here. so 47 countries, most of africa we know has a fairly violent history of fights between tribes etc. just in south africa we have 11 official languages so at least 11 tribes, who is to say one is more african than the next - i'd like to see that tell a zulu they are less african than a xhosa or vice versa, it may be what got anni dewani killed, that or her life insurance policy that her husband desarately needed.

the long winding road to my point is this, there is no epitome of the real africa - everything about africa precludes that there cant be one thing that defines the people who live on this continent. we are all residents of different countries. we speak a huge variety of languages from european languages, french, protugese & german to african languages zulu, xhosa, sotho. the geography of the continent from top to bottom is vastly different, please tell an egyptian that the desert they live in is not the real africa but the fynbos of the cape is. the tribes, that lived on the rolling planes of africa before the evil colonialists came in to conquer them, have traditions that differ from one another.

there is no epitome of the real africa - yes i said it agian - not in the same way as the french all wear stripey shirts, tie bandannas around there necks smoke gitanes and eat only french loaves, or the germans all wear ledehosen and drink beer.

it really annoys me when the tourists get into their airconditioned buses to go and look at township life as though the people that live hard lives there are animals in cages to be stared at. no more so than when they buldoze their way in as though they were bullet proof. surely common sense dictates that when you are in a foreign city you make a point of know where not to go late at night, new york, london, vegas, los angeles, all these cities are have places most people want to stay away from and yet when tourists actively go and look for trouble in a country they dont know (and in and area thats actually not so bad depending on the time of day) and then have their media shove in our faces they were looking for the real africa, which is apprently a war torn country falling apart at the seams. please, for the love of all that is holy piss off. dont think for one second that anyone with half a brain living in sa doesnt think there is more to the story.

a man in a huge amount of debt marries a woman with a great life insurance policy, he takes her to a country renowned for being a dangerous place and doesnt leave anything to chance he then escourts her into a township in the middle of the night so he can cry hijacking. well heres the thing, why did they leave you behind? hands up any south african who knows of a hijacking where they let one party, who has seen their faces go? how cold blooded and calculating are you that you marry someone only for the purpose of having them killed?

it's the simple things

on friday i again sat down with a tirade all planned out in my head. i was amazed at how easy it is for me to go off at some perceived annoyance while just thinking, then once sitting down thoughts seem to flit about, impossible to catch and string together coherently.

this got me thinking about the kind of thoughts i want to put out into the universe, i don't want my blog to be a series of moans about any old thing, i want them to make people think about their own behaviour and even perhaps change it. unfortunately that means i will be using many many disgusting cliches about fellow man. hopefully if presented correctly the cliche won't be so obvious and will actually help people to think.

on saturday morning i did an airport lift. on my way home on the highway one of the cars driving next to me held 2 guys eating soft serve and listening to music, they could have been brothers or friends, have been on their way home from a big night out or on a cross country road trip. whatever and where ever they were going seeing that glimpse of happiness being shared cheered me up for the rest of the day.

i got me thinking about life love and everything else (apparently i do a lot of thinking along these lines) life is hard and it sucks, for the most part that is. in the next paragraph i will be sounding mildly pompous, so feel free to skip it!

i believe that happiness is a choice and not always an easy one. when you feel like the sky is falling it's almost impossible to see any benefits to the situation. what you need to do is train yourself to identify benefits in the awful situations. and they are there just waiting to be found.

moments like that of those two boys sharing an ice cream happen every day, sometimes they happen to you and sometimes you witness them, what we need is more of those moments, only we can make ourselves happy. i read in a book recently about a couple who challenged each other to do one random act of kindness a day. on saturday i decided to make it my daily challenge too. it has been two days and already i am finding it hard, especially because i keep remembering to do something nice when i am annoyed. of course that means that i feel that much more smug about what i have done and my mood evaporates.

i am also going to keep my eye out for the simple things around me, instead of looking for the things that piss me off, the big ones will always be there and i will blog about them, i am going to look for the nice things that we do for each other.

so as an online act of kindness i am going to leave you with this youtube video that cracks me up every time i see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-QNAwUdHUQ (in case it doesn't work, search 'the front fell off' on youtube)

happy monday!

right, lets talk traffic

"the best a man can get" the old gillette adage sticks in my mind this morning, we all want the best, the best we can get. of course the best is all relative to our individual circumstance and plans can be made to achieve what we perceive the best to be. but i digress, this morning i meant to have a little moan about the traffic.

traffic sucks. there are measures that can be taken to alleviate the suckyness and still the traffic sucks. recently i read this article on health24 about a link between traffic noise and an increase in blood pressure, here you can read about the effects of traffic fumes on the brain. so not only does traffic suck it is bad for you, something i am sure we all knew and now have a study to prove it.

for years drivers have moaned about the taxi's yet somehow we have all morphed into taxi drivers ourselves. of course the road works we all have to face on a daily basis to work, shops, the gym and all other little errands that require us to be in our cars, doesn't help lower the blood pressure or stress level. for me there are several things that actually make it worse.

there is that idiot who comes racing down the emergency lane and expects to be let back into the flow of traffic. of course this causes an interruption into the flow of traffic which means that i, having crawled slowly along in my place in the queue have to wait another minute while you (the idiot in the emergency lane) squeeze yourself into a gap to small for your car. now if i am lucky its only the one idiot and then my wait is short but if i am unlucky then there is more than one idiot and my wait gets longer.

when 2 lanes are merging into one the flow of traffic dictates that cars go one at a time, you are not so important that you as the second car can zip in front of me, how much quicker exactly is it for you to be 1 car, 1 car, in front of where you would have been if you had waited your turn.

when travelling at rush hour sections of the road get full, the next traffic light has gone red but the one in front of you is still green. there is no space for your car on the other side of the intersection but you go anyway, then the car behind you goes. now the intersection is blocked and cars cannot cross it. this is not ok, wait behind your line for the next robot, its going to take an extra 2 mins at the most and will ensure you don't end up in hospital having been bashed over the head by some maniac with road rage.

aside from emergency vehicles (rescuing the idiot who took a chance) no one in the traffic is more important than anyone else, from a banged up jalopy to a bmw. so read this article take a deep breath and remember the only way to have the best - getting to where one is going in the fastest possible time - is if we all give just a little, wait your turn in traffic, when they guy in the next lane has made a mstake let him into your lane graciously, don't go across an intersection uless there is space for you to do so. there will always be traffic, nothing can ever change that, but the faster it flows the easier it is to get to where we are going.

ps just spotted this article, traffic costs sa r15million!

so it's the first one

upon finally sitting down to start the blog i have been planning for many months, esp in a moment when some idiot has annoyed me, i am beginning to realize how difficult it actually is to coherently string together the thoughts that so naturally follow on from each other when racing through the mind!

as a small and faintly insignificant tribute to the blogger who has for many weeks amused me and in fact inspired the creation of a space to air my views i have adopted her 'no capitals' policy. so while the theme of my blog will be lamenting the way we as a society behave and generally criticising said behaviour i will acknowledge that i will be flouting a basic rule of grammar.

my job requires working with the people, the more i interact with people the more i realise that the public as a collective are idiots. my thoughts by no means are ultimately correct however i do hope to make anyone who come across my blog take a step back and think about some of the situations that we find ourselves in. i will by no means enter into arguments with people whose opinions differ from mine.

so my little ocelots because i know that no one wants or has time to read pages and pages of drivel for today i will leave it at that, look forward to notes on police stations, how you personally can stop the traffic jam and other such gems as these are some ideas i have for future blogs!