home sweet homes... the response....

i've been very bad at making posts lately. i don't know why; it's not like i have a job or anything. i just sit around commenting on other people's blogs, and also managing my properties. that's it.

but today i read a post that hit me so much that at first i had written a very long response to it in the "comments" section over there, and then realised that you know, it should be a post here.

this is the post that inspired me; below is my response.

i'm that very rare person who has lived everywhere on my lists.

but first, i'll talk about yours.

i lived in london and paris during times where it was somewhat difficult to be a young black male; the late 80s/early 90s. [i was 17 when i moved to paris to live, basically unsupervised, even tho i was nominally with an aunt, and 22 when i rocked up in london all on my lonesome for the first time.]

i've been back for visits on a fairly regular basis after having moved away, and i'm glad i'd lived there when i was young rather than when i was older.

the thing i liked most about new york is that i didn't have to speak english if i didn't want to; i was perfectly fine, getting everywhere i needed to be, speaking only spanish. but i couldn't live in new york these days because while i can *afford* to live in a 1,000 square foot apartment all by myself in new york if i wanted to, it's really effing expensive to do so. the expense of the life to which i've become accustomed outweighs the potential awesomeness of living there. to put it another way -- i live in a 1,000 sf apartment on a main artery in central cape town for USD1000 a month. i fast talked my way into such a great deal on this place that don't see myself giving it up anytime soon.

my lists:

i think i've just fibbed. i haven't lived everywhere on my lists -- i haven't lived in salvador da bahia, but i've been there so much that it practically seems that i have. and the main reason that i haven't lived there is because i'm not a very big fan of hills. at some point i will make it to fortaleza and get a house there, but i'm fairly sour on brazil as a whole.

it's a socioeconomic thing -- as a black person raised with a lot of upper middle class sensibilities, it can get trying when being in places with large black populations where black people are near the bottom of almost every social indicator. [this is another reason why i can barely tolerate the city where my mother lived at her death.] hearing "but *you're* not like that" by well-meaning non-black friends is just as nerve-wrangling at 40 as it is at 20, but at 40 you're even more aware of what happens if you were to pop them in the mouth for saying it. so you avoid the situation. it would also, of course, be easier if i only spoke english. but i've been reasonably fluent in at least one local language in every place i've lived at the very moment i got off the plane, so this adds a dimension that many "americans" who move abroad don't have.

other than that... i've lived in santo domingo, which is salvador-lite.

i've lived in dakar as well. i actually liked living in dakar. i lived in a part of town where the foreign population is from guinea and mali, not from the eu or the usa. it's a big difference. first of all, it meant that my 1000sf apartment cost USD500 a month instead of USD3000 a month; if i wanted to pay european prices for accommodation, i would live in europe. [this is also a reason i currently don't live in the parts of cape town known to house lots of first-worlders.]

interestingly enough, i also liked living in .... wait for it ... birmingham. [that's burr-ming-um and not bir-ming-hayum, even tho i have family living in the latter.] there was a vibe there that was just unexpected. now if only they could have a decent football team: villa and city are barely out of the drop zone, and if you go into the wider west midlands conurbation, it's very likely that both wolves and west brom are going back down.

a city that disappoints me greatly these days is abidjan. that was the party place of africa while south africa was under apartheid. after the rise of johannesburg, abidjan could have kept its party-spot status at least on a regional level, but the political situation there has sent everyone fleeing. the IADB moved to tunis [oops], many of the cool party places [and partiers] moved to paris, and those that wanted to stay in africa moved to dakar. i think the dakarois social scene was the only place that actually gained status out of the collapse of cote d'ivoire in general and abidjan in particular.

well, i think that's it for now. i need to get some things ready for my upcoming UK/US trip. i leave on wednesday. i pick up my son's report card at school and then i head straight to the airport. imagine that.

so i got back from brazil two weeks ago...

okay.

so i guess it's finally time to write a few of these posts that really need to be written. they've been bouncing around my head for MONTHS and yet, they've never made it to the small screen. i'd even considered just youtubing it, but given that at the moment i'm having fun with bell's palsy, that's not really an option. [i can't talk clearly right now due to the right side of my face being frozen.]

so i spent nearly a month in brazil. i have to leave or renew my visitor's permit every 90 days, and brazil was my choice for some reason. sadly, it was the middle of high season -- my south african permit expired 28 december -- but that's okay. i did have fun for new year's in rio [where on copacabana beach my friend said it was chilly in the breeze at 22 degrees C].

now i've always had a love-hate relationship with latin america. i can speak a couple of my preferred languages without being looked at like i'm a moron [i'm quite sure i'm one of the few black spanish-speakers in south africa not attached to the cuban embassy], but being black -- in the what you see definition, not the american "one drop makes you black" definition -- is bad news. it's something like a lot of american blacks experience in europe -- you are cool because you're *american* not because you're black. you lose a lot of cool points in many quarters from hanging out with black locals, especially if they're tricked out in hip-hop gear. [especially in the eyes of the police] some people i know seem to be completely incapable of accepting this particular point of view [being treated "better than a local" because they're american], but after a long conversation with one of my friends whose parents [correctly, it turned out] thought their children would have a better chance at life as coloureds in 1970s south africa than as morenos escuros in 1970s brazil, i've just decided to drop the whole issue with anyone who didn't spend significant amounts of their childhood in BOTH latin america and southern africa. the only people who will "get it" ... yes, it's a small selection of people, i know.

now, i was tempted to go on this trip to close the empty hole in my flightmemory.com map -- i've got north atlantic crossings, i've got central atlantic crossings [though i'm missing the DKR-SID-FOR link on TACV], and but i was really missing the southern atlantic crossing. there are only two regular flights besides the TACV one, both of them on SAA. JNB to GRU, and JNB to EZE. that's it. and yet, they're not as overpriced as i feared they would be [read: as is the rest of africa].

on the plane to sao paulo i had a really interesting conversation with the other person in my row. she was an older lady. lightskinned with straight hair. i saw from her carry-on that she had started her journey in maputo. my mental self said "that's interesting, most people in moz that look like her would be dressed a bit more expensively." but i didn't say much to her for the first half of the flight. [it's a 10 hour flight] near the end of the flight, though, she asked me for a pen, and then i started to talk to her. i had seen a friend of hers who had come up to chat earlier, and from their accents i could determine they were brazilian and not african. in our discussion, she verified that she was indeed brazilian, but four of her sons lived in mozambique. she showed me pictures of them -- all of them my complexion. the next statement was something which has dogged me ever since: lula has started to do right by us for finally letting us have education, but the businessmen isn't letting us into their world in any meaningful fashion.

there was NO ambiguity in what she meant by "us".

i heard the same thing over and over again during my time i was in rio. and i met lots of people who, like the old lady, had relatives working in lusophone africa because they couldn't find work in brazil. i even met a few people who had clearly done their homework and were working on their english to be able to bring their degrees and skills to south africa, which is ridiculously starved of black talent due to an education system which continues to be crap. [honestly, if you're black and you have a degree in maths or science from any country except zimbabwe, you can pretty much just rock up and write your own employment contract. even most graduates from zimbabwe can do that, provided that they don't want to teach. that's how bad the state of south african education is.]

i had to stay in rio for ten extra days. the reason? i lost my new yellow fever card [i'd lost the old one in new york on labor day weekend]. i'm on the schedule of people who aren't allowed to get the shot, and so i had to bob and weave to get my exception out of the way. it was worth it, tho, i met some cool and interesting people in that interim.

between that and some random stuff that happened to me there, i'm very much happy to have moved to south africa -- including having picked up dengue fever despite all efforts to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes, which meant i missed some really good parties. the good thing about dengue is that all i have to do is keep hydrated and take the really good painkillers my doc gave me. [tramacet. oh. em. gee.]

that said, i am a bit peeved that i didn't make a financial investment in brazil six or seven years ago -- even at a flat rate of return in reais, i would have doubled my money just one the exchange rate. that sort of hurts. this is why i'm going to make some serious cash in south africa before i go back to brazil to do some investment.

---

i'll stop here now. i've got a lot to do, and oh em gee tunisia and egypt have gone off the hizzy. wow.

and lookie... today is six years since i rocked up in this largely mosquito-free city. i moved here because i am just not up to living in fear of skeeters, and after what just happened in brazil, i'll be staying on. yuppers.

i need to get back on track.

[i had just written a post, and it got eaten. i'm in brazil right now. more later.]

i'm back, i'm back, i'm back...

so these last few months were fraught with fun drama, as i sorted myself through my mother's hoardy house and found out that if i never wanted to work again, i don't have to.

but now i'm back in south africa. i treated myself to flying business class on british airways, and their departure lounge in philadelphia, and arrivals and departure lounges in terminal 5 at london heathrow were just... spectacular. 

i ended up with a free southern african flight on BA, just getting here, as i received 15,000 extra miles because my entertainment system wasn't working well. 15k miles, plus the 14.5k i got for just flying here = more than enough for a round trip flight to, oh, vic falls or harare if i so desired. 

i'm heading to brazil for new years, tenatively speaking. i might change my mind and only go to zim or mauritius, but who knows -- i actually think i want to party it up in brazil. i haven't been there since 2000, and it's about time. that said, i'm going to get clobbered by the exchange rate -- in 2000, it was nearly 4 reais to the dollar; at the moment, it's R$1,66 to the dollar. ouch! 

i'm in a new posh flat in the city center, one that used to be offices. to that end, it is fully wired with cat5, which means that my computers don't have to live anywhere near my router. the cross street is strand street, and because i've lived in london, "i live on the strand" has already come out of my mouth more than once. oops. it's going to be pretty painful when i go to renew my lease, as the exchange rate is looking like it will be 10% worse than what it is now, and my rent will go up 10%. bah. time to start saving now. 

over the next few days i'll post about a fun customs-related issue i'm having, and how it's being resolved. 

but yes, i am in fact back home. yup, home. 

planning return

so people have emailed saying that i should leave a post on here, since it's been six weeks since i left a post.

so, it turned out to be uterine cancer, not bladder, and my mother died 3 days after i arrived here. the original plan of caring for my mother until she was better and then taking her back to south africa is no longer on the table.

i'll be returning to south africa much sooner than previously planned, which is going to require quite a bit of planning, et cetera, since i got socked with a fine when i left the country. the reason? i had technically been an overstayer -- my visa extension request had been denied and i had put in an appeal, but a year later there still hadn't been any decision made on it, so when i needed to leave, i was treated like an overstayer. R3000 fine, but i can get out of it, so...

probate is a bitch. on top of that, my birthday was this week, and as it was the first without my mother... it was a rough week.

more later, and for the next few months, i'll make some views as well as to why i live in africa and not, say, miami or elsewhere in latin america. being back in the usa is quite the eye opener.

----

this is my last post from south africa for a while. however, due to my connections *in* south africa, i should be able to continue to write about it for most of the time that i'm gone.

two days after my last entry, i received a telephone call from my aunt, saying my mother was sick, but they didn't say how bad. now we know. stage 4 bladder cancer. uncool. basically, they are thinking she is waiting for me to get there so she can go to the next plane.

anyway, money being a joke at the moment, not to mention the cost of airfare having gone up something around 50 percent since the last time i actually *paid* for a transatlantic flight [late 2004], i needed to buy the miles in order to make this flight happen. when i finally got that right, i booked a flight on award travel.

now, fly-brother HATES HATES HATES american airlines, one of the two leading carriers in oneworld. but he concedes that they have the easiest accrual and redemption methods of all the mileage programs and also the most partners. do you see on my previous post, my flight memory? most of those were done on BA [heathrow is in fact my most visited airport]; there is an occasional flight across the atlantic on aa, and one on iberia.

anyway, i've done two award trips between the united states and africa. it's nice. [it's also 75,000 miles in the cheap seats, if you wanted to know.]

one of the nice things about things about oneworld is that you can redeem miles for a one-way flight using half of the miles as for a round trip. ergo, instead of 75k for a round-trip flight, this only costs me 37.5 for a one-way flight. schweet.

so anyway, i've just flown the cape town to joburg leg of this journey, and in an hour i fly the joburg to madrid leg, have a five-hour layover there, and fly to chicago, spend the night in chicago with my cousin, and then in the morning i fly from chicago to philadelphia, where my aunt picks me up and drives me to harrisburg.

[ugh. harrisburg, pennsylvania. if you've ever been there, you would know why i have been living for the past five years in the city that is, basically, in terms of flight time as far as you can get away from there and still be on planet earth. ]

i'm currently sitting in johannesburg airport. unlike harare, it does not have free wi-fi. [harare's wifi is some of the best airport wifi ever. and it's FREE.] airports company south africa [ACSA] is a beast when it comes to airport wi-fi. if you do the time-based wi-fi, it's R50 for one hour, R100 for two hours, and R150 for four hours. eww. that's nasty. the way aournd it, depending on your usage in airports is to get the bandwidth-based option. if you meticulously watch your bandwidth -- and if you are resident in south africa, you tend to do so -- you would know that by far the best option is the R100 for 250MB for which you have 30 days to use up.

this morning, cape town airport was pretty fly. i hadn't been in it since november 2008, so i hadn't seen the finished product yet. it is really fly. it will give a good impression to foreign tourists landing there, i will say that. [of course, it's surrounded by shantytowns, like GIG, so take that with a grain of salt.]

i'm sitting in joburg airport and the best thing about this upgrade is that you no longer have to GO OUTSIDE to walk from the domestic to the international terminals. this is something that is absolutely fantastic. it doesn't look like you need to do that in cape town either. given that joburg in the winter is freezing, and cape town is 10 degrees C/50 degrees F with gale force winds and rain to match... this is excellent.

so i give these two airports hmmm.... marks out of 10, tambo gets 9. it would have gotten 10 if the gautrain were running -- it doesn't start doing so until two days before the world cup. cape town gets an 8.5, because it doesn't have train service to the airport, just high-speed bus. i was originally thinking of giving it only an 8 out of 10, but on match days during the world cup, if you have a ticket in your possession, the high-speed bus to town is free. yeah, that touch is really cute.

i may make another post after check in. for reasons i'd rather not go into now, checkin is going to be quite taxing and i want to talk about it AFTER it happens.

it's 4/20

4/20 la la la la.

of course, instead of writing about the befok political situation here -- and so much has gone on in the past couple of weeks, that it's just been crazy -- i am going to shamelessly plug something from fly brother -- he explains it quite well, so open his review and results in another tab. i spent most of this afternoon filling in information on flightmemory.com, only filling in the flights that i absolutely remember, and not just flights that i've taken.

it was funny -- it was fairly easy to absolutely remember a lot of flights i've taken; all i need to do is open up my passport. through my mentioned flights, i've covered 87% of the miles that ernesto has on less than half of the number of flights (100). [full disclosure -- there is one more transatlantic flight whose details i know, but i like having the round number of 100 flights].

my domestic flights are appalling. all but three sets of them are, in fact, flights to get me to the real airport for the intercontinental flight. one set of flights is for my sister's graduation from high school; another set of flights is for my brother's wedding. the third set of usa start and finish flights is for a family reunion in columbia, south carolina -- where i ate at the waffle house on the wrong side of the tracks [ie, i was the only black person there].

of course, the real flying is elsewhere. my top two flight routes? IAD-LHR and back. close behind is DCA - JFK, which, like i said, is basically the flight to get me to the real airport. rounding out the top five are JNB-CPT and back.

which brings me to how i have 87% of the miles on less than half the number of flights that ernesto has done. i suppose this is where i channel chris rock from bring the pain. africa is far. real far. it's like a 25-hour plane ride..... and there are three african airports in my top 10. there are also three european airports in my top 10 as well. toronto is also in my top 10, and amsterdam is 11th, i think. wow, look at the time....

american airlines gets the nod for the airline most used [see, it's flights to the caribbean plus DCA - JFK to get me somewhere interesting]. LHR is my most used airport -- which shouldn't be a shock to anyone who's heard me rant about the decade-old remodel of terminal 2 where they yanked the burger king out, not to mention purposely taking the heathrow express train because there is a burger king just on the other side of the gates in paddington. after eating steers down here, you sort of want the real thing.

oh, i can throw in my intra-europe flights. to be fair, the only destination flights are the ones to amsterdam and las palmas. i still need to do ibiza before i turn 40. actually, i don' t think that will happen; i think that will be when i *turn* 40, as i'll be already in london for the olympics. being an 80s-era club kid, i'm trying to figure out how i missed out on ibiza, ayia napa, and rhodos. [i actually know the answer to this; it mainly has to do with dating extremely jealous west indians. bah.]

there's a ski trip to austria that i need to throw in also. living in england, i went to austria to go skiing with people from zambia [that happened to be related to the malawian dictator].

but overall, in europe, i've mainly been a train guy. i like trains. you get more legroom, for starters. and to be honest, if i were to turn my train rides in the northeast usa into flights, there would easily be another 20,000 miles added. when i lived in washington and had new york as the destination, i would take the train, not fly.

i'll have to do some more checking into my 70s and 80s era flights. i don't think i can put the dates, but i will be able to mark the routes. none of the flights i've taken on air afrique are posted, for example.

i will get back to the political silliness going on here before work gets really busy for me. i promise.

a language post

in honor of the post that fly-brother made today viz spanish/portuguese, i was thinking about making an afrikaans/dutch post, but i might just keep it to afrikaans and throw in a few other southern african languages.

many black south africans -- and a few black americans who i know that live here -- get on my case on my ability to speak afrikaans. it's not a particularly difficult language unlike, say, xhosa with its 15 noun classes, or sotho with its highly tonal and contextual meanings. don't get me wrong, i can read xhosa [and by default zulu, since they are as mutually intelligible as, say, iberian spanish and iberian portuguese] and still get the meaning. it's not a problem. but for speech and gossip, i don't have a problem with speaking afrikaans. at all.

[two major, major caveats here -- the first is that i could speak in dutch reasonably well due to my creche and my post-18 exploits in dutch-speaking places; the second is my stepson is afrikaans-first-language, and his grandmother doesn't speak english at all. so if i want to talk to her, ek moet met haar in afrikaans praat.]

one of the main things i like about afrikaans is that it's the lone "new" language from a dutch colony that is based on dutch -- papamiento and srinantongo are both based on iberian languages; the former from iberian languages and west african ones, the latter iberian languages plus west african plus bahasa. both languages have a lot of dutch words, but it's largely because they still go to school in dutch. conversely, afrikaans speakers don't go to school in dutch, and only see the language in place names and old bibles. but an afrikaans speaker can largely understand dutch, although the other way around is somewhat problematic.

two things that i often say to people who are afrikaans first language who think that dutch comes from afrikaans and not the other way around [and, christ, south africans are worse than americans and almost as bad as the chinese when it comes to thinking the world revolves around them] are that a) to a dutch person, afrikaans is like listening to obasanjo speak english and b) afrikaans was the slave language; it was called "koshuis nederlands" [kitchen dutch] for a reason.

both of these, while true, are not very welcome views here. oh well.

here's a tip for afrikaans -- if you know the dutch word for something, you can probably craft together afrikaans from breaking it in half, taking out some of the consonants, and/or turning "z" into "s" and "ij" into "y". you'll then be halfway there. seriously.

english - dutch - afrikaans

he - hij - hy
his - zijn - sy*
she - zij - sy*
her - haar - haar

company - maatschappij - maatskappy

to give - geven - gee
to know - kennen/weten - ken/weet
to stay - blijven - bly
to write - schrijven - skryf

*why yes, you do need context for this in afrikaans. the clue is, of course, that for "sy" meaning "his" the next word is almost always a noun; for "sy" meaning "she" the next word is almost always a verb.

there are a lot of words that come from bahasa in afrikaans as well, the most notable being "baie" meaning "a lot" or "very [much]" -- in dutch one would use "heel" or "veel"; in bahasa it's banyak.

the letter "g" as well as the digraph "ch" is the same as "ch" such as bach in german or loch in scottish ... which means you are looking for somewhere to spit after you have said the word for canal, which is "gracht" [it's the same word in dutch, and you see street names ending with -gracht in both the southwestern cape as well as in other dutch-speaking places].

the letter g had me thinking about writing this post today. i had to go to town to sort some mess that telkom did me this morning, and one of the first signs you see on the taxi rank when you get to central cape town is --

geen ingang sonder magtiging [unauthorized entry prohibited; literally "no entry without permission"]

that's 4 times you go "g" ... bah.

and given that "ge-" is one of the four ways one makes a past tense in afrikaans, you hear it a lot. the other three ways to make a past tense are "be-", "ver-" or you leave it alone if the base verb starts with "ge-" "be-" or "ver-" such as gebruik [to use], betaal [to pay], or vergeet [to forget].

xhosa/zulu are also a lot more fun [not]. the whole EVERYTHING MUST AGREE thing is really annoying. that said, i've noticed a lot in *spoken* xhosa [and also zulu], there is less agreement than one would expect. i've heard people say that it's the effect of english on the language, but personally the jury is still out.

for me, the main problem is for possessive adjectives --

-ami for my
-akho for your
-akhe for his/hers/its
-ethu for our
-enu for your [pl]
-abo for their

the dash means that the first letter is indicated by the class of noun -- and remember, there are 15 classes of noun.

the short version is that for the classes that start with "u" for both animate and inanimate nouns, the first letter is "w" --

umsebenzi wakho [your job]
ugogo wakhe [his granny]
umshini wethu [our machine]
ukukhula wami [my childhood; contextually, this is more like "the time while i was growing up"]

and the classes that start with "i" singular nouns start with "y" or "z" depending on accent for animate objects, and with "l" for inanimate objects --

impundu zami [my butt]
itjommie yakhe [her friend]
igugu lethu [our pride] -- hence, gugulethu
igama lakhe [his name]

it's stressful trying to get right. and that's just for possessive adjectives. what about, you know, in a sentence that says "these flowers are green" or somesuch. in english green doesn't have to agree with flowers in number [and/or gender], but in most other languages, of course, it does, and this is no exception. the wikipedia article on the xhosa language explains it better than i can.

now, this is largely a vocab issue because kirundi, kikongo, kimbundu and kiswahili all do this to an extent, really. that said, trying to do it while getting the 18 click sounds right on top of it is lots of fun, let me tell you.

that said, because this is cape town, i don't live in a place with a lot of xhosa speakers; most of the black people who live close to the city center are from other parts of africa. this is in part due to the forced removals in the 60s, and also, frankly, people not being able to afford to live centrally. [it's kind of expensive to do if you're not living five people to a house].

i think i'll stop there because i want some sleep.

accent américain comme coup fourré!

so, i went clubbing saturday night. ran into some friends of mine, hung out with them until the clubs closed.

one of them asked me to walk him home, as the metered cabs were acting stupid, since the cape argus main race was on sunday morning, and they were asking R50 for R20 and R30 fares.

so i walked him home to sea point, and then went to watch the setup for the finish line of the cape argus race.

as i left beach road -- the race ends along the boardwalk -- to get a minibus taxi to go home, i was stopped by a policeman. i got 20 questions as to why i was there. "this is a known drug dealing area," they say. i don't think they were prepared for my response: i know, but i figured with the bike race setting up, the dealers wouldn't be out in full force like they usually are.

me 1, bacon 0

so the cop says, still not turning down his blue lights, which are blinding me, "we're allowed to do a stop and search. can i search you?" me: i would prefer if you didn't, but if you feel you must. that's right, i did say i don't want you do fucking search me.

me 2, bacon 1 [he did in fact search me]

inside my wallet he found my old uwc identification. i kept it for reasons like this. and it led to a few questions about how long i've been in the country and stuff. i told him five years on and off, waving that american accent around like the weatherman on e-news.

he asked me what nationality i was, and i told him american. i then said, "you know, i know i look nigerian. i'm pretty sure that's where we got on the boat a couple of hundred years ago. even nigerians speak to me in nigerian languages, so it's not just you. but i really hope you're not going to be like this to foreign africans during the world cup." the look on his face: priceless.

me 3, bacon 1

it's going to be really fucking interesting during the world cup. cameroon has a game here, and england, france, portugal, as well as holland -- cameroon's opponent in the game here -- all have substantial black followings, many of whom live in africa or the diaspora.

it's going to be real interesting. watch this space.

passport control woes

so, the cape argus cycle tour is coming up. the organizers of the cycle tour scored a major coup in getting lance armstrong to attend.

lance arrived last nite. well, sort of.

they almost didn't let him into the country because his passport was full.

see, for south africa [as well as namibia and lesotho], you need to have two blank pages in your passport, or they won't let you in. rubbish.

as i said on crackbook, this does not fare well for world cup visitors from other parts of africa, especially people flying from the united states or europe on african passports. you see, with african passports, you need visas for almost everywhere, and you are very likely to fall foul of this while flying to south africa for the world cup.

this has been mentioned in thought leader, and i'm going to give a bit of advice stemming from this article. if you are flying into joburg and fall foul of this, they will deport you. instead of letting them deport you back to the country from whence you came, ask to be deported to swaziland, which doesn't have this rule. if you're a first-worlder, there's probably an embassy for your country in swaziland, so you can quick get some extra pages. if you're not a first-worlder, then you may have to stay in swaziland for a few days until your passport can be replaced in pretoria. depending on the country, it's very likely that you might miss the matches for which you have tickets. it may be a good idea to consult your embassy before embarking. oddly enough, he very presciently says "i wonder if they're going to say anything about this for the world cup"... and if you look closely, the blog entry was written in 2008.

also, in the comments section of that thought leader entry, i've mentioned some really crappy experiences that i've had at the hands of immigration officials. [you should be able to spot it fairly easily.]

but it was worth a chuckle. and even a black-belt traveller like lance hints at the phallic nature of the passport control officials in this situation.