Step out

It's a weird time of the year.
Idealised memories of Christmas spent with cousins cluster like grapes around the realities of the non-season here. In one we are all at my grandmother's first house, the one with the patio above the garage (above some other room?) where one had a startling view of the sea. My aunt asked someone to play Santa Claus and to a pack of preschoolers the man in the red suit arriving at our doorstep was everything.

In another memory we are again at the beach, always at the beach, and my grandmother has tossed the traditional idea of a Christmas tree by using the long branch-bloom that extends from the middle of some type of succulent. She has made little packets for each grandchild containing a host of tiny 'onbenullighede', things she has picked up at farm stalls and convenience stores during the past year in her pursuit to be fair to us all. The families are all there, the aunts and uncles and my mother and sister.

A different year sees my grandmother, always my grandmother, with us in 2000, the first one without my father. I remember him gifting me a Celine Dion CD, a sign that he had not noticed I had moved away from 'My Heart Will Go On' to falling for my sister's Backstreet Boys collection.

Then there was the one year my sister and I spent Christmas alone. The sad year, the bad year, the one where we fought and ended up in our separate rooms.

But it is the Christmases of my 20s that I yearn for now. I miss planning how to get my grandmother to wherever the celebration will be; coordinating a menu with everyone doing different dishes; thinking up cool presents; bickering and fighting and the feeling of needing distance from the overdose of family; having everyone unpack each present individually, stretching the time spent with one another; hanging out with cousins that are so very different from me and still so relatable; sitting outside in the sun with whomever is there at the moment, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up; and lastly, more than the event that is Christmas I miss the sense that blood is thicker than water.

This Christmas will surely be its own shrewd kind of miracle, and I look forward to spending it with people close to my heart. And last year was experiencing Christmas as an observer more than as a participant, by no fault of the kind family that hosted me. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed getting to know the little rituals of a family quite different from mine.

Nevertheless, none of this is Christmas. Forget about the religious aspect of the season, dismiss the name and the particular date all together, and center on what it is that makes the time spent together on those few days so memorable: the people. Sometimes, it is as simple as this - I long for my people.

Baby, you're a firework

Yesterday we joined the Joburg Photowalkers for a date in Old Chinatown because of the Chinese New Year celebrations. Last year we went to the Nan Hua temple in Bronkhorstspruit where the festivities were on a much larger scale.

Last year, it was so much fun. This year, I don't really know. It was loud, messy, disorganized and more for 6-year-old boys than for adults who value their eardrums. The festival was held in one corner of Commissioner street, but in comparison to the vast amount of activities and stalls at the temple this was rather disappointing. If one wanted food, one either would have had to book a table at one of the restaurants beforehand, or one had to queue behind 200 other people. When our hunger did finally overcome our desire not to stand in that queue, there was almost no food left, which meant we paid R30 for rice with a splash of that fake reddish sauce and a ball of chicken hiding in a corner of the Styrofoam container.

The event's flyer announced that there would be a large fireworks display at 21.00, but for the three hours before that random children and old men kept lighting crackers and other bang-sounding things. Initially it was fun, but after the 20th cracker explodes on your leg or next to your ear you really want to make a piñata out of whoever threw that thing and beat the living shit out of them. Then people had the brilliant idea of lighting their floating lanterns, which just ended up crashing into the crowd. And people don't like balls of fire floating towards them.

Although the final fireworks were an hour late, they were spectacular. The sky lit up the way the eyes of a 15-year-old girl  would when she gets asked out by her crush. Only it was 50000 better. Somehow the Chinese also really really really really really really really like Gangnam Style, so after numerous attempts throughout the evening to get the crowd to participate by dancing to the song, the organizers also orchestrated the fireworks to match Psy's hit.

I think it is worth going once, but would rather recommend whatever Nan Hua plans for that year. This was overcrowded and baldy organized no matter how brilliantly the night was lit up.

Sex tea, anyone?

Clap your hands say yeah

The whole weekend I was thinking that I had so many interesting topics to blog about, but now everything escapes me. On Friday, the 27 April, South Africa had a public holiday ( Freedom Day) to commemorate the first democratic elections held on on that date in 1994. I went to the festivities held at the Union Buildings, which is where the president does his leading-the-country-thing. Well, when he is in Pretoria, at least.

I took these photographs last year.

The building is situated on top of a hill that overlooks Pretoria, so it has a very nice view of the city and vast gardens where one can have a pick-nick and just chill on the lawns. The gardens go down in various levels, like steps, and at the bottom they set up a stage for the celebrations. I was waiting for my friend at the top, enjoying the view, but it was a bit awkward because 100% of people who go are black ( the percentage of white people that go is so small that I am guessing it would't even figure into a count). I felt a bit like a zoo animal. Young girls asked if they could take a photograph with me. It was weird.

As I was waiting, this group of young men walked past, and I must have looked like a welcome challenge because one of them came and sat next to me, while the other five squeezed onto another bench to watch what would happen next. The "I-live-in-SA-and-I-am-a-lone-female" in me a bit like "Ja, you will get robbed in a few minutes", but the optimist in me decided that they were probably nice and I should just have a little chat. Shame, the boy did not expect that.

He told me they had come in a bus from Vereeniging, a city ( town rather) south of Johannesburg, for the day's festivities. They were all still at school and he enjoyed accounting the most. Our conversation was going well, although his English was not brilliant and my Sotho is non-existent. My grandmother can speak Sotho, but all I remember is something that sounds like hutla? It means you aren't listening? Or something. My grandmother says it a lot. The boy just laughed at my bad pronunciation and asked who I had voted for. BAM. There it was. Politics. Fuck.

I hate talking about politics. It is like religion: everyone refuses to change their view while still trying to convince the other person to do exactly that. It is pointless. I wanted to talk about Freedom and how it feels like to be a post-Apartheid youth, not about how I think the ruling party's majority is to big, and that all the parties engage is stupid little squabbles over nothing instead of effecting positive change where it matters. All these parties create division, not unity.

So I said I did not vote and avoided the subject. Luckily my friend phoned, he was already at the bottom, so I said my goodbyes, wished them good luck at school and walked away.

I was barely three meters away when the other boys, who had been watching the interaction intently, started cheering and clapping. What for, I don't know. Perhaps my conversation skills have dramatically improved. Or it was just another weird thing on Freedom Day.