Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Day 4

Day 4 was a lot shorter than day 3. Erev day 4 began with dinner with my friend Anthony. We went to JBs corner at Melrose Arch and I had a cheeseburger. There are no photos because I don’t want God to see that I ate a cheeseburger – it worked really well with Adam and Eve and I am half the man that they were.

After coffee with Anthony, I went off to see Tanya. Avron picked me up and we went to visit the Greenberg household. We also got to speak to Lara in Israel.

 

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It was really awesome seeing Tanya and Natasha again and meeting the Greenberg parents. Tanya also introduced me to the cats. Their one cat named גzyק (pronunciation pending) is pretty damned fat.

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The other cat, named מאto (pronunciation “cat that looks like Garfield) is a ginger cat that is easier to pick up

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After Tanya’s house, we went off to Avron for tea and Nargila/Hubbly/Sheesha. We sat freezing our asses off in the cold. There is logic behind this, if you don’t get it you are n00b~!

 

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And it was morning

The next day I had KFC. KFC is the most wonderful thing known to man, however, in Israel it costs millions to get a meal. In South Africa you can get 5 pieces of chicken for R48 or 24 NIS. After lunch, I went with Liran for coffee to Greenstone and then to see G.I. Joe at the cinema.

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The movie was completely predictable and the acting was up to shit but the action scenes were pretty cool. I kept thinking whether it would have been worthwhile for them to drop budget on the special effects in order to employ better actors, but in the end, it was satisfactory.

We then went through to Liran’s place to say hi to his brother and dad. He has 2 yorkies and one mix, I took these photos for Tali’s mom

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Tomorrow my beautiful Tali arrives and I am very excited for her to finally be with me here. It will be amazing to share this holiday with the woman of my dreams :)

Still to come… dinner with the family pt1. and a trip to the Kruger National Park. Stay tuned.

Day 3 – Friends, family and food

Hello friendly friends. I haven’t been able to go online really for the last couple of days but today I have internets. Kari, who reeks of awesomeness, picked me up so that we could work on assignments together. Yes I am in my third month of summer break and still have 2 assignments to hand in, my college obviously fails to see the point of a summer holiday. So let’s recap the last couple of days and the events that transpired.

Darko’s place

Day 3 started on Saturday evening (yes I am going biblical on your ass). Darko, along with Ash and Chris, picked me up to go over to his place. It is amazing what alcohol does for board and card games.

The first drunken board game we played was 30 Seconds. This game requires one to play a sort of verbal charades, describing a person/object/place on a card. The description cannot include words on the card or descriptions like “sounds like" or “rhymes with”. As many correct answers equals moves on the board subtracted by the dice roll or something like that. As Justine put it “0 is good and 2 is bad, if you get 0 you go more and if you get 2 you go less”, it made more sense as the drunk got nighter.

The whole scene unfolded in a tedious photography:

Day 3 01

Day 3 02

 

The night was interrupted when Darko and Ashley transformed into Batman and Robin to drive into the night and fight crime at Ash’s house. <fiction> “You should have seen what the other guys looked like”, they told us as they limped in beaten and battered but victorious. </fiction>

After 30 seconds, we turned to a card game called Arsehole. The point of the game is to lose all your cards first. You then become the king of a nation with very low values and a failing economy. Second to fifth places become Queen, Middle-man, Arsehole 2 and Arsehole 1 respectively. In our version, Arsehole had to down a shot of Jack. when Jack ran out, we turned to pink champagne. The incident looked like this:

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Using drunk-cam© technology to enhance the description, in reality, it actually looked more like this:

 

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Tea at the Delmonts

The following morning, we got up to visit our good family friends the Delmonts. Unfortunately Simon, the youngest of the Delmonts was at work so we did not see him. Rob and Diana have been friends with my parents for centuries, and I grew up with Charlotte and Simon (who joined me for several years in a survival of the fittest contest which included events like slamming, punching and who can break the most fingers. Simon always got the sympathy vote, being half my size and all). Charlotte’s friend Kelly took Simon’s place at the gathering.

I also met the three newest members of the house hold, Rebecca, Rufus and a three-legged cat named removed by request of Warner Brothers inc.

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Tea was served and we spoke of a range of wonderful things like crazy people, parents, becoming a Sangoma (Witch-Doctor) and more. An eye-witness claims that the scene looked like this:

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Family lunch

From Rob and Diana, we went off to my Aunt and Uncle in Kensington. They live in a beautiful house that my uncle designed.

 

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On the menu for lunch were light starters, followed by a braai. My Uncle prepared and cooked the meat.

 

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After lunch we all sat around soaking up the sun and playing with the dogs. There are 3 dogs, Georgie and Rocko are border collies and Pepper is a pug. As Tali says, Pepper is “mooi van die leelikuid” (sp?) which means that Pepper is so bloody ugly that she is actually cute because of it.

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And so that brings us to the end of a long day 3. If you enjoy reading my blog, you can click on the follow me link on the right column of the page. If you find any spelling/grammatical errors, please let me know.

Hope everyone in Israel is doing well.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Day 2 of my trippy trip

Hello friends and family. Its a sunny Saturday afternoon and I am sitting in my friend Dale’s cottage. Dale’s family is like my second family and it is always amazing to see them. Dale and Kari are my brother and sister from another… never mind the details. Anyways, they look like this:

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Yesterday was a pretty cool day, I met up with another good mate, Darko and his fiancé Justine. We went off to eat pizza at a place called Mimmo’s. I ordered a chicken-tropical pizza which has chicken and pineapple on a 23cm base. Before I ate it, the pizza looked like this:

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Justine and Darko look like this:

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Justine did something I have never seen before, she put ice in her white wine. I found this to be extremely strange and documented it with a photo. The photo of the wine with ice in it looked like this:

 

Day 2 04

After lunch, I went to my old shul, it was really nice to be back there, obviously since it was Shabbat I couldn’t take any photos, but if I was able to and there was a power failure at the exact moment I had taken the photo, it would have looked like this:

 

 Day 2 04

After shul I went back to the grandparents for Friday night dinner. Gran’s homemade food is always great, we had meat stew. After dinner Kari came to pick me up.

First we went out to a club called Manhattan. Clubs in SA are much better than clubs in Israel. The dress code at Manhattan is formal, no entry without a collared shirt. There are four bars surrounding a central dance floor.

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Drinks in SA are really cheap. I bought a round of 3 drinks for a total of R56 or about 28 NIS. Here are some pictures from the bar area in the club

After Manhattan, we went of to Fontana’s chicken. We got Prego meals and I drank Iron Brew.

Iron Brew is an interesting soft drink, originally from Scotland. I am not sure what flavor it is, but it tastes good. You should try it. No really, now, go find some.

We wrapped up the night at a bar called Billy the Bum’s. Some shmuck knocked Dale’s double Jameson out of his hand and didn’t even offer to get him a new one. The place was pretty packed and there were girls dancing on the bar. The scene can be described as such:

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We headed home and I passed out for a good few hours before we went off for breakfast. I will probably go sleep a bit now and tonight I am going out with Darko and Justine.

Things I have noticed Pt. 2:

1. Drinks are cheap

2. Clubs are really high society.

3. South African houses have these interesting back doors that are split in half and I have never understood why. They look like this:

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for day 3 and more.

PS:

I almost forgot, the Amler’s have several Jack Russels. Jack Russels are the most awesome dogs ever. They look like this:

Day 2 01

Friday, August 14, 2009

Welcome to South Africa

So here I am sitting in my grandparents’ apartment in cool but sunny South Africa. Its always surreal the first few days getting used to being back in SA. So far its been really good for a few reasons which I will get into later, but first, the flight.

We took off in a half-empty plane at about 9:30 am, I sat in a window seat, the view looked like this:

Day 1 01

It was an extremely comfortable flight, probably because I had two seats to myself and the service was pretty good for El-Al. I watched Star Trek (again) and Night at the Museum as well as half of some Big Fat Greek Sequel or something. There was an Israeli guy behind me chatting up a South African woman for the duration of the flight which I found rather amusing.

When I wasn’t observing things inside the plane, I opened the screen and watched things outside the plane, the sky above the clouds looks like this:

 

Day 1 05 Actual Size

I also tried to make shadow puppets on the opposite side of the plane. I thought a shadow of a bird flying next to us would make for interesting reactions, alas, nobody paid attention and my experiment failed miserably.

Johannesburg Inter Oliver Thambo airport has gotten pretty damned big and my grandparents were on hand to meet me as I landed. They look like this:

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After a quick stop off at home, we rushed off to meet the rest of the family at Spur, a family grill house which serves decently prized meals. Food in SA is cheap, I got a 500gr. juicy steak with chips and onion rings, a soft drink and a beer. The grand total came to R130 rand or about 65 NIS. I found this amusing. Before I ate my steak, it looked like this:

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My family, who I did not eat, looked like this:Day 1 11

After dinner, we went home where I watched UFC 7 until I passed out.

This morning, we went off to a mall near my old house to have breakfast and do some shopping. My mother had tried to convince me that South Africa did not have shower gel. I took this picture of the great South African shower gel shortage:

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I also went off to buy some clothing. I bought 6 items including dress pants, and an evening jacket for a grand total of R615 or around 300 NIS. This was also amusing.

I am now sitting in the lounge writing this post while eating biltong. Biltong, for those of you who don’t know, is the most wonderful creation on this planet. It is made out of dead, dried cow and looks like this:

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So onto the things I’ve noticed…

THINGS I HAVE NOTICED:

1. South Africa is really quiet, its amazing that what they consider a noisy restaurant is practically white noise in comparison to Israel.

2. The food is rich and tasty.

3. Most things are cheap, especially if you are paying with foreign currency.

4. The people are polite.

Tonight I will be going to my old Shul and then off to party with my friends. Only 6 days until my beautiful girlfriend arrives :)

Hope you enjoyed this recap of day one.

The Adam Segal


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