Wednesday, May 26, 2010

... and then I got sick

Well, not immediately. Monday was pretty well a normal work day (on from business plan template to Power Point) until around 4pm when I realized I had a sore throat. I went out to dinner with a girl from UNH, who is in her first week here. That was quite enjoyable except that I could feel the illness starting to take over, so after dropping her off in Obs I went back to my flat and crashed.

Tuesday morning actually I dropped off my rental car and then went to the South African registry office (I forget the name of it now) to register the car in my name. As I didn’t have a South African driver’s license I had to go off and get some ID photos taken (which is done in a trailer for R30, and beats the heck out of the AAA customer service!). So now I have a sort of driver’s registration document, and the equivalent of the title to the car.

Now the most amazing thing to me about this whole process is that unlike in America where the DMV gives you license plates, or in the UK where the plates stay with the car for the life of the car, here you get new license plate numbers but you have to go off to a shop and have the car plates manufactured (which costs nearly as much as it does to register the car!). To top it all off, the plates are usually attached with heavy-duty double-sided tape! The place we went to get the plates was out of the tape, so I somehow need to procure some here in Cape Town. Differences …

Anyhow I was pretty feverish so I first did some targeted shopping (trying to find double-sided tape), then went home, made some lunch (Indian-spiced ground beef with eggplant and roasted potatoes), and took a nap. But I couldn’t really sleep too well, so I went downstairs to load the Flyers video my friend John had posted on my Facebook wall. The internet was quite slow so this took forever … afterwards I went upstairs to cook dinner (cob with swiss chard and quinoa).

It is killing me a little bit to have the Flyers in the finals when I’m here in South Africa! Of all the years for them to do this … I’m trying to find a way to stream the games but I suspect the bandwidth will be insufficient. I could download them next day but that seems kind of wrong somehow. Then again so does breaking my sleep into two four-hour chunks!

Some of our friends were performing at open mic night at Zula, so we headed over there. Of course it started over an hour late, which ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered me much except that I wasn’t feeling so hot. But I wasn’t about to miss the performance and I’m glad I stayed – actually everyone who performed was fantastic, our friends included. One cab ride and CrossFit recruiting session done, I caught some more of the LOST finale before going to sleep.

Woke up … still sick, but I think the fever is gone. Bleh. Today I didn’t do much besides arrange insurance cover for my car and go pick up my veggies. Soon I’ll be roasting a chicken and some butternut squash or something, and deciding if I want to go out for my friend’s last night in town or stay home and rest.

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