collection & recollections

I hope that some day I will have this feeling where when I do something for myself, it is no longer just for the betterment of me, but for me and someone else. Though, I have an inkling I won't achieve this for a while. (Is it an achievement? Maybe I should just say that it won't happen for a while.)

Visited my friend L in San Francisco at her law school dorm. Her room is probably 3 times the size of the one my roommate and I share at Harvard. Sigh.

It seems sacrilegious to comment after a polaroid but... polaroid app ftw.

Though it doesn't beat the real thing.

The next day I was up early and we wandered about town eating, praying (aka taking deep breaths after feeling nauseated from too much food), and talking about love.

Eat

Pray

Love

At home today -- I felt like drawing. (This is what happens after life changing events to me, I suppose) So I drew for the first time in ages. When I was little (aka in high school) I created "original characters" which are like imaginary friends on paper. This one's Kattachu. Say hi!

I tend to draw the expression that I have.

Or do I test the expression I'm drawing out on my face?

Anyway, to round out this random collection of drawings & photos. I arrived back to California and mother took me to a Japanese noodle place. Omnomnom. I still can't believe you don't have to wait for an hour and a half for food to arrive at your table. In any case, took this awesome photo in a noodle bowl. I think that it sums up my sentiments, good times and bad in multiple ways. I didn't think of this at the time of taking the photo. When I took it I only thought of sending it to someone near and dear to me. I never did send it and now I'm posting it here as one last gesture of memory, for the inside jokes, the arguments, the anticipation, the excitement et al. I present to you:

fin

Mefloquine induced dreams

My anti-malarial medication states that I will experience dizziness (check), headache (check), insomnia (sometimes check), and vivid dreams (check). Here I'll just delve into my experiences with the last of the lovely quadruplet.

An average night in Tofo looked a little something like this:

Fall asleep exhausted at 10 pm.
Dream one: I'm walking around a labyrinth like structure looking for my classrooms when I run into my APUSH teacher, Phipps. He takes me into a class with windowed walls where Tsuna in "reborn" form (from hitman reborn.. if you don't get it, don't worry), a gundam, and a fat girl in cosplay are doing bicycle crunches on a hardwood floor.
Dream two: Michael Jackson is young and dapper and deathly skinny, dancing around and showing me how to moon walk while the light bounces off his glittering pants and suit.
I wake up at some random hour, battling with my mosquito netting and see that it is still dark outside. Readjust, fall asleep again.
Dream three: I was the hero. There were people after me. As I was holding a meeting atop a sky scraper someone detonated a bomb that caused the entire building to collapse (conveniently in slow motion). I rebounded off nearby buildings to save myself and saved an old man in the process. Once on the ground I transformed into a female version of myself (was I male before?) and someone else transformed into the male version of me to try to trick those who wanted me dead.
Dream four: My high school friend R had filled the bottom of a warehouse with treats and goodies for his crush, D's birthday. There were crackers with jam, lots of savory goodies, and all in costco style, stacked up and in units of 1000. D came in and was not impressed. Meanwhile, starving African people walked through while grocery shopping. We tried telling the cashiers not to let these people take what R had stockpiled but by then it was too late. R looked around the empty room and lamented that he had spent 60,000 USD on the whole affair! At this point D started to feel a bit guilty and so we turned on music and started a cypher. D did a few awkward ccs and another friend from HS, T, egged me on to participate. I top rocked a bit and woke up at
6 am. Just in time to see the sun rise

Tofo

Mozambique is...

Really early mornings

Acrobatic yoga

& Lots of seafood

3 am on the Mozambican border

There are free drinks on Air Namibia and I requested Kosher food (a good tip for anyone planning on flying Air Namibia -- go for the Kosher food -- they bring it to you to personally open and the food is 50x better than the regular stuff. Or try the Hindu one and let me know how it is.

To put it gently, by the time A and I arrived at the Intercape bus station at 10 pm in Johannesburg we were in no condition to deal with the shitshow that was about to hit us.

Though all our friends had been allowed to receive their visas at the Mozambican border for some reason the bus conductor this time was adamant about not letting us on without our visas. We yelled, we cried, we were generally drunk. Somehow I ended up being good cop and paid the people for a ride to the border while A cussed them all out in Spanish (which the entire bus understood because they all spoke Portuguese). Once on the bus the driver returned my money to me saying "look, I want to work with you on this one ok. If you run to the border and get your visa before the bus goes through we'll take you through". Appeased, I fell asleep.

At 3 am we awoke to run through to the border. After waiting for a measly 10 minutes I was issued my visa and ready to head back to the bus to continue my nap. Too bad it's never so easy.

In a border - where their only job is to stamp passports and print visas at 3 am they had run out of toner. They couldn't print A's visa. There were no replacements -- the next replacement for toner would come around 2 pm that day. We were going to be stranded on the border of South Africa and Mozambique at 3 am.

To make a long story short -- after much protest the border finally wrote A a handwritten visa and promised to send a real copy to the bus station in the capital for us to pick up later that afternoon. However, before we arrived we received news that they had lost her photo and fingerprint information and had to take another bus back to the border and then take the local transit (jampacked with people carrying bags of flour, chickens, who knows whatelse) to the capital city ourselves.

Just writing this entry has tired me out. whew.

Why did the Springbok cross the road?

... to give us a good reason to get compensation from the car hire company.

But to begin from the beginning. After nearly missing our flight to Namibia, A and I were finally situated safely in our seats looking out over the Namibian landscape.

To give you an idea, it looked a little something like this literally less than a minute before we touched down.

After renting a car and driving on a nice, normal, paved road for 30 minutes we hit dirt road. After 2 years of not touching a steering wheel, driving along a cliff on a road full of loose gravel was not my ideal way to get back into the swing of things, but I suppose we can't all choose our roads. Particularly not in Namibia (where you have like only 5 choices).

When mother came to Cape Town I paid nearly 200 USD to go on a safari where the animals were essentially like animals on a farm demarcated to particular watering holes that you could 'observe' in their natural habitat. Driving down the C28 in Namibia I saw all those animals and more crossing my path.

When there were no animals in sight the world was a desolate place full of sand, rocks, and a tree or two.

Finally, as A took the wheel, there were only 15 km between us and Swakopmund: a real city, with people, buildings, and a paved road. But things were not to go so smoothly for us, the first day in Namibia.

Perhaps due to fatigue, perhaps due to her nearsightedness, we came up to a T intersection racing down a gravel road at 120 km/hr, nearly twice the speed limit on gravel.

Soon the sign "<- Walvis Bay/Swakopmund ->" was right in front of our faces and a collision seemed unavoidable. "TURN!!" I remember yelling and the steering wheel was jerked to the right. From there all I remember was the skidding sensation, we were slipping, slipping and there was nothing either of us could do to stop it. Did I have my eyes open or shut? I can't remember, but the next moment our car was tilting, and we were rolling. Everything was happening slowly yet completely, and in an instant we were upside down as I watched the windshield crunch, creating the weblike pattern it does so well.

A breath. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah"

"I think we should get out"

"Yeah"

Carefully, I undid my seatbelt and landed on the roof of the car, disorienting. Slowly pushed the door open and stumbled out into the sand and rock, surveying the damage.

My camera lens didn't open all the way for a while after the tumble - but of course I didn't realize this at the time.

Luckily Namibians are a nice bunch of people and helped us out with turning our car right side up and letting us sit in their car while we waited (for nearly an hour an a half) for the 'emergency fleet' of the car hire company to send someone over to tow our car. Doubly as luckily, our accident happened to close to Swakopmund and not somewhere in the 6 hour ride between Swakopmund and Windhoek where we passed perhaps one car every 2 hours. Yet infinitely as luckily (I know, I'm pushing it), neither A nor I were hurt in the accident except for a rather persistent cut on my pinky toe.

At the time of the accident somewhere in between being right side up and landing up side down all I remember thinking to myself was "aw shit, now we won't have a car to get around in."

It wasn't until a day or two after that I thought to myself "I'm truly lucky to be alive".

And so, ladies and gentlemen, set against such a background, the battle across Africa began. Though there were many hardships still to be endured, after the car accident they were all things I could look back on and laugh at or at least shake my head at with a wry grin. With the car accident though I laughed at the time (the body copes in wondrous ways), now I can only cringe and think to myself "lucky, damn lucky".

Battling in Africa: The Preface

Vacationing in Africa is somewhat like a long sustained battle. A battle where any respite feels like a victory. Wandering out of the lovely cocoon that is Cape Town, South Africa I realized that 'Africa' is anything but Cape Town.

These past two weeks have worn me out for sure, but in return I saw worlds untouched by anything but a single dirt path. Since there's a lot of ground to cover (like the 6 hour drive from the capital of Namibia to the next town with something more than one family and goats, Swakopmund) I'll try my best to divide up the next few posts and keep them focused.