3/23/2016
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
We are actually moving to Africa because I was born there. While I am sure they don't claim me, I claim membership in the Wasamba tribe who occupy the Usambara Mountains where I was born on the very northern edge of Tanzania. I have grown up with Africa in me. I am told that my placenta was probably buried in the ground so in a way, Africa contains me as well. Africans are my people as much as my genetic Viking ancestors and living relatives.
I have planned on moving to and working at a hospital in Tanzania for decades. Debi initially would break into a cold sweat when I talked about that, but after visiting the country, she now shares that goal. Unfortunately, what used to sound like a fun, exciting thing to do is becoming more real and scary to both of us.
People often ask if we are ready to go. The answer is a resounding "no." The used car we purchased from a company in Japan is somewhere in the Indian Ocean right now. We don't have housing figured out. We don't speak Swahili (more on that later). I have been reading about diseases I have never seen like malaria and all those weird parasites. However, reading about them and diagnosing malaria in a feverish person who could also haveg some other disease is another thing. We are not ready and will never really be ready. We just have to go - ready or not. We will figure it out as we go. We leave on April 19th.
3/30/2016
STUDYING SWAHILI
- I have studied Latin and Norwegian. I know how to learn a language at least if I am in a classroom with other people and a teacher. Studying by yourself in the basement with a textbook and Rosetta Stone is a different matter. First of all, Swahili is a made-up language. About half is from Bantu with borrowed words from English and other languages and a big chunk is Arabic. I don't think they picked the best of each language.
My experience so far has been with languages that have two types of nouns. Swahili has six types with the singular and plural forms being handled differently in each noun type. Adjectives have to match the noun form. Verb conjugations are the stuff nightmares are made of. First, second, and third person are indicated by prefixes as is the tense. Then if the verb is expressed as a negative, you don't use a word like "not." You indicate person and sometimes tense in a whole different way. Words borrowed from English tend to be easier. Words are spelled phonetically and end with a vowel. "Suit" becomes "suti" and "socks" become "soksi." Then for no apparent reason, "slacks" translates into "surali ndefu." There are no silent letters so you do pronounce both the n and the d as n-day-fu.
What I am told is that it all clicks after a couple of months. In the meantime, my basement floor is slippery from all the pulled-out hair.
4/22/2016
SEGOVIA AND MADRID
Madrid was great. The Royal Palace was built by a French royalty transplant into Spain so it is modeled after Versailles. It was closed for two days for a Royal Function. I checked - it wasn´t a Reception for Us. I mentioned Debi just to make sure, but it was still no. When I persisted, the guard said something in Spanish that didn´t sound like a very gracious apology, but I graciously accepted it anyhow.
There two great art museums in Madrid. The Prado has whole rooms of works by various masters. Usually there is a marauding horde in line for tickets, but we went in the afternoon and the hordes were sacking elsewhere so we got right in. Fabulous. Really, one should spend 2 whole days there, but that would result in one being assasinated by one´s wife so the afternoon was adequate. We celebrated by going next door to the Ritz and having Ritzy drinks at Euro 20 each.
The other one is the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia. This is the Picasso museo and the House that the Guernica painting made famous. This was painted in the 30´s but Picasso wouldn´t allow it to be shown in Spain until democracy was restored. This didn´t happen until Franco, who with Hitler was the source of the outrageous slaughter in the town of Guernica, died so it didn´t arrive in Spain until the 80´s. Spending time looking at photos of the work in evolution, hearing its history, and contemplating this huge painting (bigger than any wall in your house) really gave me a feeling of the horror expressed in the painting that has made it so famous without resulting in an assassination attempt. Little did anybody know that Guernica was only a minor scale portent of the atrocities to follow in WWII.
The Spanish eating schedule is shifted. Many breakfast places don´t open until 8 and lunch starts at 1. Dinner is in the 8 - 10 PM range. Due to jet lag and traveling, sleep has happened only on the confluence of sleepy and able to sleep. Our gastronomic and somniferous schedules are chaos.
We traveled on the 140 mph train to Segovia and spent the day there.. The 2 millennia old 16 Km long Roman aqueduct still stands as evidenced in the photo. No mortar, just exquisitely hewn stones. We haven´t seen a lot of European cathedrals. The Gothic/Renaissance style Segovia Cathedral was a wonder to behold and testimony to the odd Catholicism of the time.The public part was ringed with the private chapels of the aristocracy. Avoiding assasinatory time frames, we moved on to the Alcazar.prison which housed three categories of prisoners over the years - royalty when it was a palace, convicts when it was a prison, then nuns when it was a convent.
4/23/2016
RITZY DRINKS
At the Madrid Ritz after visiting the Prado museum, I ordered a house specialty drink, the Dalitini. I don´t usually drink martinis but was intrigued by the backstory so I tried it. Dali went into the Ritz Hotel for a haircut and spotted a cute woman in the hotel lounge. He went in to chat and ordered a cocktail (Reported to be the first time he had a cocktail. His work was surreal enough without alcohol.) The martini glass he received had a sharp edge on the rim whereupon he cut his finger and lost a few drops of blood into his drink. He covered for this odd situation by grabbing a cherry out of a fruit bowl and dropping the cherry into his drink. I was served a martini with a single cherry in the bottom. The waiter then produced an eye dropper and dropped in a few drops of a red liquid into my drink. I am reasonably sure that it wasn´t actually Salvador Dali blood or anybody else´s for that matter. Also, I was not required to cut myself and bleed into my drink. It was a fun experience, but doesn´t need to be repeated.
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