Visiting South Africa a few months after the widely successful World Cup is like stumbling into a venue a few days after a major party or event. Instead of seeing empty champagne bottles strewn across the floor, bits of unfinished cake and sad balloons hovering under empty tables and chairs, I see soccer ball shaped lights, soccer themed adverts and more flags than I believed China could have produced for such an event. I was thankful to at least get a bit of the after taste of the biggest international event my country ever hosted and all together happy to find a South African flag wherever I look, in your face reminders that you are here. Lekker
Three weeks sounded like a lifetime of relaxation, social and all over refill of Africaness. This was not the case, reality in all its cruelness does allow time to fly when you are having fun. Three weeks was all I got though and I had to make it work. Can you say time management? Well I have never been good at that but I did somehow manage to hug some friends, sort out my banking, stare off into an African sunset with a Savannah dry, annoy my mother (the way she likes it), climb a mountain (range) and hang out with lions, rhinos and zebras ( Of course).
What surprised me the most is how normal everything felt, as if I never left Joburg. The experience of a year in Vietnam simply would not fit into the before and after of being home. I don’t know what I expected.
The benefit of visiting your own country is that you can go wild and act like a tourist while understanding the language and knowing about all those ‘not in the lonely planet’ places. That pretty much sums up my three-week experience actually. Between shopping in tacky touristy shops for beaded giraffe key chains, going to my favourite old coffee shops, and driving on the back roads to get there.
I love South Africa, I am confident that anybody that knows me beyond a hello can confirm this. There is so much I appreciate about the different cultures, there is so much to learn from the complex history, so much to experience and see and taste, there is so much on offer within my own unique Afrikaans culture. I miss it of course, yet there is a great peace within my heart to be away without any certain return date. Take it as it comes then…
Now I’m back in Hanoi, keeping on with keeping on. I missed the coffee and the traffic (yes the traffic she says with only a bit of sarcasm), missed my students and all these special people have somehow found while “getting ‘this’ out of my system”. I have the 1000 year Thang Long Hanoi celebrations to look forward to, in fact celebrating as I type this… great for photos, horrible for traffic. 1000 years! Now that is a long time, my own language (Afrikaans) is hardly 300 years old and my hometown (Johannesburg) is hardly 140 years old! (Don’t quote me on these numbers).
*** The big five: LION, RHINO, LEOPARD, ELEPHANT AND BUFFALO ... and side note on the side note I did manage to spot them all in one day at the Kruger National Park
