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:

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:

 

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:

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:

 

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

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:

 

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:

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