lohan.me » South Africa

Visiting Kimberleystraat 3

Lohan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:05:15 +0000

“Hallo!” I shout, loud enough to hear myself through the helmet, in-ear earphones and the bike’s rumbling. “Is julle Kimberleystraat 3?” I shout knowing that if I can hear myself, the couple sitting on the red steps of a free-standing house will definitely do so too.

“Ja, ons is!” skree die vrou terug, “wie is jy?” which is a polite Westrand way of saying “Wat soek jy hierso?!” now that I think about it. “Ek is Lohan en my oupa en ouma het jarre terug hier gebly.” I switch the bike off and put it on its stand so we can talk like normal people. The oom says something but I interrupt him — “Sorrie oom, ek kan niks hoor nie!” — while taking the helmet off my head and the ipod out of my ears. Now we meet at the hekkie. “I’m on my way to a braai in the area and stumbled on this part of the dorp”, I continue in Afrikaans. “My grandparents lived here and I last seen this place when I was about 10, maybe even younger.” The oom and tannie’s faces lights up. Its Friday afternoon and they’re enjoying the outside air while Night is slowly dropping her karos on the highveld. The jasmine bush is in full bloom, as they are at the start of summer, and a cool, sweet scent can be enjoyed all over this part of town. I re-introduce myself and we get down to the business of finding out what’s been happening the past 20 years to this little house. There’s somethng not right with the oom — he’s in his 50s but is slow of speech and it seems that his head is not allowing him to be as sociable as his heart wants to, but the tannie, also about 50-something, is friendly and doesnt’ stop talking and laughing. I later learnt that he’s been working underground in a Westonarea mine for over 30 years, when an underground train hit him, almost killing him and putting him on early pension. The tannie shows me around while I tell her how big everything looked when I was last in the yard as a laaite, how the apricots were always dropping fruit and how ouma made jam, juice concentrate, dried apricots, biscuits and who knows what else with the appelkoosmoes — apricot pulp — no wonder they decided to take the trees out, the stink alone was enough to drive one to the back in late-summer.

The single garage is as I remember it next to the brown facebrick wall that we did our balancing tricks on. Next to the garage there was an Andy Capp painted but this is long gone with a few brown layers of paint now gentrifying the corner wall where the compost heap was. The tannie now opens the gate to the back yard, and I can’t believe how not-big the yard is! I remember that when I was small I didn’t even want to go to the back of the yard. The grapevine is still there, as is the original vine that is now a spreading canopy over the silver-painted wire and steel structure under which we often braaied and spent time playing with Dassie and Liesl. The steps which Dassie so liked to bake in the sun on is all of 11 steps, I remember it as a friggin staircase that started waay up there and ended a breakneck mile below! Turned out to be less than 2 meters of climb, how disappointing. The house itself is repainted and still has a tin roof with pressed ceilings inside. The inside of the house is covered in carpet — the original wooden floors are still under it but looks bad, so the tannie says. The dining room is now also part of the kitchen, or rather, it is the kitchen, which makes sense as Ouma didn’t really have too much by way of a kitchen as I remembered it. Oupa seemed to have spent most of his time in this room watching TV, smoking Gold Dollar (when he still smoked, there was a Dick Tracy-like vibe in this room with sunrays beaming through horizontal blinds into the blue smoke), but mostly I remember him doing crosswords — he was the king of crosswords! — and listening to Radio Suid Afrika. Oupa Daan had a degenerative bone disease which calsified his spine, so he lost use of his arms for most part of my life that I can remember. In fact, I can’t remember him ever hugging me so it must have been very long. The single bathroom is pretty with the pressed celing intact, but the basin, toilet and bath were replaced at some stage, and I guess it was high time too as I remember the bath being rough to the touch even as a kid. The master bedroom is still the same room, and the other bedroom was turned into a second lounge. The second spare room is a spare bedroom/linen room and the tannie also confessed to not ever throwing magazines away when I told her how this room was a veritable treasure trove for us kids to get lost in when it came to exploring and discovering stuff. My grandparents never seemed to have thrown anything away and it ended up mostly here. There was even a pram of 19-voertsek with a spring suspension, holding a stack of Huisgenote of the sixties or seventies in it.

We’re now back in the hallway after I told her how upset my Mom was when I ran up and down the passge and caused the sideboard’s glass panes to break with my stomping. In the hallway there’s trophy cabinets stacked with, of all things, pigeon competition trophies. The oom was an avid aviary enthusiast, tumblers being his speciality (these are pidgeons that literally tumbles in flight, probably to dodge bullets or eagles, who knows). And the golden watch from the mine for 28 years of service. The lounge, where the oom is now sitting, is much the same with thick wooden doorposts and the round porthole — where another Andy Capp figure featured a long time ago — is still there.

I had to leave and thanked the oom and tannie for their time. They have children in Cambridge, too, when I told them of my sister in London. Its a pity I couldn’t take pictures — my phone was out of memory, again — but it was a lovely detour down memory lane on my way to an otherwise forgettable weekend. The oom doesn’t stop asking questions about my bike and for a second I contemplate taking him for a spin — knowing that he’ll be excited like a little kid if I do, I make an inner commitment to drop by again when its still light with a spare helmet packed. I was all smiles, and a bit nostalgic as I rode off glad that my free hour or two in the West went off like it did (even though tannie Ina and Ansie weren’t home when I was giving out hugs, dalk volgende keer, hoor!). Hope it brought some memories back to the Van Rensburgs, Schroeders and Johnsons out there (and who knows what other surnames my cousins all have by now, I’m too lazy to look it up!) What can you remember of Oupa and Ouma’s house?

Bangkok Wok freaks out patron; drives her to suicide?

Lohan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:40:10 +0000

This HelloPeter complaint doesn’t make sense: Bangkok Wok – U ALMOST KILLED ME! – Complaint

I can’t believe it – SA’s boozing through the roof

Lohan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:39:25 +0000

… if you’re lying upside down on the bar counter getting body shots, that is… it’s all a matter of perspective, really.

No more online City of Joburg Accounts

Lohan — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:17:58 +0000

Joburg’s eservices site isn’t dishing out accounts online any more. A message reads on the account-by-email page:

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO CUSTOMERS WHO RECEIVE THEIR ACCOUNT BY EMAIL: We are in the process of enhancing the viewing of accounts online. Please note that your online account from March 2008 until further notice will not be available online to view. This however will not affect the monthly email distribution of accounts. If you stopped receiving your account by email, contact our Statement Distribution Department: statements@joburg.org.za

I do get my account emailed in PDF format though, so to conveniently pay my account by mail, I:-

log into Gmail with my Gmail client on my phone. My client’s firewall blocks Gmail (and proxies. Behave!).
Oops, phone’s connection is broken. Reboot phone.
Keep clicking “Yes, I want to continue my internet banking session” pop-up while I wait for it to come to its senses.
Use Pocket Internet Explorer to go to gmail.com, should be the quickest, yes? Search for account, try to download. Can’t download PDF. In fact, couldn’t download anything of mobile Gmail since its inception.
Fire up Esmertec Java and load Gmail client again.
Find email and click on PDF link.
Gmail client dishes up plain-text PDF which is spectacularly useless. And I still cannot download the PDF.
I have one last shot at this. Fire up Opera Mini, and go to Gmail.com. Login, find email, download PDF, open in Acrobat Reader LE, see amount of R1470.98, pay.

Total time wasted by blind corporate proxy? 40 minutes. Of course, I could just tether my cellphone and use its Internet Sharing but that’s not allowed either. Sometimes the most basic tasks make you feel like a complete clown.

Garfield strip created here (via The Generator Blog: January 2006)

Truck wrecks car, driver walks away: ‘Jesus saved me’

Lohan — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:22:30 +0000

Last night I left Randburg at about 8pm and when I came up the hill on the N1 North after the Bowling Road bridge, there was an accident scene ahead and a backup of cars in either direction. Strange, I thought. Firstly, the new display boards tells us that NO INCIDENTS N1 N BETWEEN BUCCL AND ALLANDALE in friendly yellow on black. Thanks for that one, I thought, news we can use while we’re stuck on INCIDENT N1 N BETWEEN RIVONIA RD AND BUCCL. Secondly, we passed an accident scene on Saturday night on the same stretch of road which kept us waiting for half and hour, and I wondered what the odds were. In fact, they’re not so bad…

As I’m on my bike, I could squeeze through, just as the traffic starts to flow. On the opposide side, I see this scene:

Whooaa, I thought, there’s no way someone will get out of this one alive, and my mind jumps to an audiobook I recently bought where a guy, Don Piper, told how he was crushed to death in a similar accident but was prayed back to life (90 minutes in Heaven). What I surprise I got this morning when I heard the following story on radio! 702 Eyewitness News reports:

A Johannesburg man has described his miraculous escape from a 25 car pile up on the N1 in Sandton.

Absolom Morifi crashed into a truck on the highway between Rivonia Road and the Buccleuch Interchange late yesterday afternoon.

The truck driver lost control of his vehicle after his brakes failed, causing him to swerve across all four lanes.

Emergency personnel were amazed to hear Morifi talking as they tried to reach him in his wrecked car, wedged under the truck.

As he was removed, unscathed from the wreckage, he dusted himself off and praised God.

Morifi says he went to church on Sunday and felt bad about not paying his tithe and so yesterday morning cancelled his life insurance so that he could cede his monthly installment to the church.

He says as he saw the truck heading towards his car, he called out Jesus’ name and prayed.

The Buccleuch Interchange was badly backed up for several hours and two other people were slightly injured. [702.co.za]

Big up, Absolom, that you weren’t found hanging from the proverbial tree, and please write your story so that we can keep it for the future!

In fact, I thought of compiling a book of crashes of the N1, which is notorious for its fatalities (1 person dead per km per year, I think)… “N1: 1 life/km/yr” would be a fairly unlame title. But I won’t, not until there’s more good news like this…

Truck wrecks car, driver walks away: ‘Jesus saved me’

Lohan — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:22:30 +0000

As I’m on my bike, I could squeeze through, just as the traffic starts to flow. On the opposide side, I see this scene:

A Johannesburg man has described his miraculous escape from a 25 car pile up on the N1 in Sandton.

Absolom Morifi crashed into a truck on the highway between Rivonia Road and the Buccleuch Interchange late yesterday afternoon.

The truck driver lost control of his vehicle after his brakes failed, causing him to swerve across all four lanes.

Emergency personnel were amazed to hear Morifi talking as they tried to reach him in his wrecked car, wedged under the truck.

As he was removed, unscathed from the wreckage, he dusted himself off and praised God.

Morifi says he went to church on Sunday and felt bad about not paying his tithe and so yesterday morning cancelled his life insurance so that he could cede his monthly installment to the church.

He says as he saw the truck heading towards his car, he called out Jesus’ name and prayed.

The Buccleuch Interchange was badly backed up for several hours and two other people were slightly injured. [702.co.za]

Big up, Absolom, that you weren’t found hanging from the proverbial tree, and please write your story so that we can keep it for the future!

From Acsa with love…

Lohan — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 20:25:00 +0000

From Acsa with love…

Well done Acsa for cocking up for the third time in 12 weeks. Airplanes aren’t the only things that’s designed to fly, you know.

Anger over airport fuel spills 07/11/2006 13:26:10
The Environment and Conservation Association says it will take legal action against the Airports Company of South Africa, following recent fuel spills at OR Tambo International Airport.

It says the spills are detrimental to the ecosystem, as the fuel contaminates the nearby the Blaupan dam. This morning, several planes were grounded at the airport because of a fuel leak.

Emergency personnel are now trying to prevent fuel from spilling into the dam. In September, wildlife in the dam was severely affected after petrol drained into the water.

The association’s Nicole Barlow says a report on the matter is almost complete and it will approach the Johannesburg High Court next week.

Telkom, si! Service, no!

Lohan — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:01:00 +0000

So what does one do when Telkom never gets round to fixing your ADSL connection? Put an ad in the paper of course!!

Ad as in the Beeld newspaper.

Full story here.

South African factoid

Lohan — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 21:11:00 +0000

Did you know? South Africa contains the A-Z of languages in the world – Afrikaans being first on the list, and Zulu last. Having 11 official languages, I think we deserve it ?