Last week had a mysterious touch to it.. We went to the office on Wednesday like we had agreed with our contact person. We merely "turned" there and heard that the next time we would meet, was the next Wednesday. One could call it a short week at work.. Well, it didn't take long for us to realize that the only reasonable thing to do, is to fill the car up with unleaded 93, and hit the road. Sunny Durban, here we come! 600 km to travel and sun gleaming in our retinas. Scenery en route was breathtaking. Everything went well until our trusted navigator took the wheel. The sky was lit by the ominous flash of a traffic camera and some curses might have been heard. Well, cool as ice the navigator kept on driving. I reckon we'll be hearing from the rental agency sooner or later.. It was a nice 15 minutes of driving after that and, *SNAP*. Here we go again.. The leadfooted navigator had done it again. Going slowed down a bit after that.
Arriving to Durban seven hours later was not as glamorous as originally anticipated.. Fog and rain wasn't quite like the sun we had been looking forward to.. Luckily the lodge wasn't bad at all. Patio overlooking the sea and airconditioned bedrooms, what we had been lacking in our place in Pretoria. Even thinking the scorching nights in the sixth circle of hell A.K.A. our guesthouse brings sweat to my eyebrows. We felt that it was our responsibility to check out the Suncoast Casino downtown on the Finnish independence day. What a patriotic act, I might say. Feeling proud being a Finn, we went to break the bank in the casino. And that's the end of that chapter.. We were back in our lodge at four thirty am and the undersigned went to bed dead tired, the rest of the crew went to see the sunrise to the beach, which was amazing believing what the guys said. We went to see the marine world one day in Durban, and with cameras' memory cells filled with strange animals pictures, we went back to our car just to find it washed. Of course nothing is free in this world and we had to cough up 30 rand to please the shady "carwatch" person. The outrageous part is, that he insisted that we pay him 50 rand for his troubles of keeping an eye on our trusty carriage. It wasn't even him that washed the car.. "Is nice, everything number one, my friend, fifty rand.."
After being burned in the sun we started our journey back to Pretoria. Since we didn't exactly have any hurry back and we didn't want to drive back exactly the same highways and sceneries. We just should have left some hours earlier so we would have seen the new sceneries more clearly. Luckily the moonlight was very clear that night so it's wasn't completely as dark as pitch. We followed the route on the seacoast until Swaziland border and then drived thru many small towns of which most looked like Finnish small towns e.g. Askola:) Ermelo town was the one we found most western with 24Hr hamburger restaurant plus western style bars and street culture (on Monday night). After 12 hours and a thousand bathroomstops we were back in P-town safe and sound.
Today we went to NSN to work with another project, which started pretty well, I might add. Tomorrow we have an early wakeup, for we have to storm to the airport to catch a plane to Cape Town. More of that later, though..
We started our day by going to NSN office at nine o'clock as usual. One of the NSN's secretaries had delegated nicely her outdated jobs for us. So one part of our group had to dismantle some old cardboard boxes and count the amount of stuff they contained. The funniest thing of that was that the boxes included year 2005 calendars. Just a respectable job for us after flying ten thousand kilometers. Of course the other part of our group was working with the real project. They adapted the inquiry results to a reasonable form so it would be simple and convenient to handle the results in future.
At the evening we had a meeting with all the groups from our class. SAFIPA-group had invited all of us to their residence. Luckily all groups came at the place, and we were able to exchange thoughts with other groups’ members. After hearing their thoughts we can say that all projects had got off to a good start.
29-30.11 Weekend
After the first whole week we had to leave our first accommodation, and now it was time to move to our new guest house which was Besule Guesthouse. The first impression from our guesthouse was quite contradictory because the place didn't meet our expectations. We had googled information from various websites. Sites said that there will be a swimming pool, wireless internet, a pool table and a jacuzzi. In fact there was only a "swimming pool" which diameter was like three metres. We thought that maybe they had joined the jacuzzi and the swimming pool together in that great "swimming pool". :) The wireless internet was also working but after using it for awhile, we came to know that the manners of using of Internet has totally different concept here in ZA than what we were accustomed to Finland.
I personally managed to get one of my goal here in ZA done when group5's golfMaster Visa took me to a tour to a nearby golf club. We spent a really nice day there by practising our shots, having some nice time in a lounge and at last playing a back nine at the course. Though the playing itself didn't go so well, I enjoyed my day extremely because the environment and the golf culture was so cool.
Xmas-month begins
November is now in the history books and it marks also the last month of the year, as well as our last weeks before xmas and wistful return to home. Little xmas party/class meeting from last Friday had very good timing; everybody had been accustomed to the South African way of life and also experienced many things already. It also made many of us realize that 4 and ½ weeks is really not that long time. And indeed it is not. Now it’s only half left so now it’s really a right time to revaluate our schedule and arrange it so that we will experience the things we thought about so we wouldn’t feel disappointed when it’s time to take the flight back home. Our project work schedule has not been that much favourable to us but these are the conditions we must accept.
1.12 Trip to the PilanesbergNaturePark
During the first two weekdays of December we enjoyed of “work from home”-confidence from Nokia by having all the work material in our possession. Since we had spent our entire time so far in the concrete jungle we were eager to have some “Real Africa”-experience in the form of national park where we should have pretty good chances to spot exotic animals in semi-natural conditions.Because we didn’t wish to pack in when the park had huge amount of tourists looming around we did some of our work already during weekend and moved the rest of the working hours to the evening instead since we had the opportunity to do so.
On Monday morning we woke up early and turned the wheels towards PilanesbergNational Park close to Sun City (a.k.a. LostCity) which is located 150 kilometres north-west from Pretoria. We didn’t pay much attention to the tripmeter but rough estimation is 100 kilometers of driving within the park. Not only the park offered us spectacular views from quite high mountains and all-in-all eye-pleasing landscapes, we did manage to encounter most of the classic African symbol animals such as rhinos, zebras, hippopotamus and monkeys. The highlight of the trip was when the closing time of the park was getting closer and we become little bit concerned about seeing rest of the animals the park was supposed include.It was that time when we finally saw couple giraffes eating tree-tops far in the horizon. Wish we had binoculars in gear was the thought of all of us at that moment. That time we were sure that that’s it for giraffes but then we continued driving and there it was, majestic giraffe just crossing the road in front of us. He wasn’t scared of us at all and continued eating another tree-top just on the roadside and we got our chance to take nice shots of this odd-shaped creature.
2.12 Survey aftermath
During this day we went through the survey results from the GatangSchool in Mamelodi. This turned out to be a bit difficult, since the actual survey didn’t go as we had planned. This survey was supposed to be held face-to-face on a single mathematics oriented class. We thought we had a classroom reserved and we would have time to explain things througly to the students before they started filling in the survey form. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the school the students were already leaving to enjoy their summer break. We had to catch them before they left the premises and hastily give out the forms to anyone with school uniform without having time to give them proper instructions.
Because of this, some of the answers on the forms turned out to be a bit incomprehensive and inconsistent. Though, this was very understandable since the survey was not designed to be held this way. Fortunately, most the of the forms we received back from the students contained good and solid information that we were able to analyse. All together, we acquired 86 filled forms from 100 given to the students, which in our opinion is a great result considering the difficulties. We transferred the data from the survey forms to spreadsheets for easier analysis. Next step is to create diagrams from the results and begin planning our report.
Small tension in the air
After doing the basic research, we had an interesting conversation with our “lovely” hostess of the house. Like we earlier mentioned, the guest house didn’t meet our expectations.On the top of everything else we had got an invoice worth 325 rands because we had used their “free” wireless network. This certainly inflamed our feelings with all those other missing things because we had no idea that we should have to pay something for every megabytes that we transferred on the internet. The conversation with the hostess of the house didn’t go so well. The beginning situation of the conversation was that the lady talked and treated us like her own son who is 18 years old. In the head of the conversation our main speaker got even a threat that he will be out of the guest house next morning because the lady experienced that she was faced insulting behaviour which wasn’t exactly true. At the end we certainly paid our invoice and made at least apparently agreement with our hostess and started wait what next day brings upon.
We felt that it was our responsibility to check out the Suncoast Casino downtown on the Finnish independence day. What a patriotic act, I might say. Feeling proud being a Finn, we went to break the bank in the casino. And that's the end of that chapter.. We were back in our lodge at four thirty am and the undersigned went to bed dead tired, the rest of the crew went to see the sunrise to the beach, which was amazing believing what the guys said.
