Bafana Bafana

The meaning of Bafana Bafana? Google it! We just spent 9 days of our Spring Break in the country of which Bafana Bafana is the national "football" team. We were able to spend quality time with some great friends including the Shearers and the Rainbolts. While in Cape Town, we ran into Tom and Lori on a daily basis...it was very nice to see them outside of a work setting. They really are like second parents to us over here the way they look after us. They took us to an amazing restaurant called Balthazar's. We wouldn't even be writing this blog if it wasn't for Mr. Shearer getting us over here so we are, of course, eternally grateful. We also got to spend the last few days in Johannesburg with the Rainbolts. They are a lot like older siblings to us. I know I look up to David quite a bit and respect him as a mentor to me. Kara really enjoys spending girl time with Gina as they go and get manicures and pedicures once a month or so. Their kids have made their way into the ranks of niece and nephew and actually call us Auntie Kara and Uncle Bryan...it's pretty good stuff and we've really enjoyed watching them flourish over here.

As I'm sure you have noticed above this post, there are links to two sound recordings I made over the Spring Break. Both come from Johannesburg...there are more that I have made including the sounds of a group of musicians playing some tribal hits. I will get that uploaded as soon as I can, but the upload process takes forever with our super slow internet connection. Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the photos! We took over 600 photos while in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Joburg. This was a lot more than I was anticipating! Here are some of our favorites, again sizes are shrunk down to help minimize upload times!

The photos kind of work backwards, so these are from the end of our trip. You can see me down there collecting the audio of the 2 year old female, Charlotte. I think if you actually listen close enough to the audio recording, you might hear the camera snap in the background . I can't remember if the edited version has the camera click in it or if I took that part out...just listen closely! That's Emily and Jacob there with me. Charlotte LOVED Emily!!! She just wanted to play with her the whole time.

The cheetahs that we encountered were part of the De Wildt Cheetah Park about an hour outside of Joburg. They had tons of different animals beyond Cheetahs, but of course, cheetahs were the main attraction. I have to say that this was one of the coolest experiences of our whole trip. Here's a picture of three cheetahs eating! They actually feed these guys Iams cat food!! Pretty good stuff eh? I think these three would agree. It was pretty interesting to see all of the wild animals associate our vehicle with feeding time. I think there are 2 tours a day and to get the animals to perform, or to be in the vicinity, they feed them while we're there. The wild dogs were the craziest! They knew it was lunch time when we came through the gates!

Here's a couple more cheetah pictures!



Okay, the next picture is the one Kara is most excited about. This is a picture of us and a King Cheetah named Shaka. The King Cheetah is not a different species, it's just a different version of the same traits that the cheetah's have. In other words, the dark pattern is not common on cheetahs and only a small handful of King Cheetah's have been spotted in the wild. The last spotting was in the 70's, but nonetheless, it's not impossible to see. They happen when a recessive trait is activated...Kara can tell you a lot more about it, but we saw one here at De Wildt and another back at Spier just outside of Stellenbosch.

Kara was in heaven petting Shaka! By the way, do you notice anything about Kara's hair here!?!? It's brown!

Just me recording Charlotte.

This was another cheetah that we got an opportunity to pet when we visited the Spier cheetah center. This guy's name was Hemingway! At one point, he was alerted to a dog barking and we had to step away to make sure he didn't do anything crazy. This was the biggest cheetah they had at the park...pretty big. On a side note, they have a course that they let the cheetahs run on twice a week. The public is not allowed to view it, but they chase a plastic bag attached to some sort of vehicle that is similar to what they use at Greyhound tracks. The cubs love chasing it I guess. They timed the fastest cheetah in the world at this facility...0-60 MPH in less than 3 seconds. He ran a 100 meter dash in 6.1 seconds...absolutely flying!

This is a picture of the other King Cheetah we met at Spier...his name is X-Ray and he's 11 months old. He loved Kara!

X-Ray again. Check out the dark stripes on his back. Pretty cool huh?

Random Cheetah pic.
He was just yawning...calm down!!!

Okay, moving on from the cheetahs, we now have penguins! We took a cape tour for an entire day. Part of it was visiting the penguins out near the Cape. These guys were pretty cute. It was extremely windy so Kara and I didn't stay long. These guys were just trying to weather the sandblasts.


Check out that water! It was pretty gorgeous out there.

Hey hey!!! Guess who those two are?!?! Not the penguins silly...the shadows!

This is probably the most photographed location in all of South Africa...so of course we had to get ours taken. It was extremely extremely windy. They used to call this the Cape of Storms until the Dutch realized that with that name, no sailors would ever volunteer to sail down to deliver supplies. So they had to change the name to the Cape of Good Hope...yeah...right.

We started our trip in Cape Town and one of the first excursions we took was to the top of Table Mountain. This picture was actually taken from about 3 miles away but I was fully zoomed in. The clouds spill over the top of table mountain and so they cleverly call the clouds the "Table Cloth."

Here we are at a place called Camp's Bay...houses down here are pretty expensive. In the millions.
After Camp's Bay, we took a trip out to a place called Seal Island. I almost got sea-sick on the way out there. I don't get seasick often so that gives you an idea of how rough the trip out there was.

No doctoring done to this photo...

Or this one. You can see just beyond the cape there in the distance...that's Seal Island.
Here we are at the top of Table Mountain. Off in the background is the Indian Ocean. Notice Kara's hair is now blonde...this is because we are still moving backwards in time!! This was very early into our trip.

The Table Cloth.

Again...
After Table Mountain, we made our way to the old Slave Quarters. Today, the houses are painted in "Jessie Colors" as Auntie Kara calls them :-)!



The top of Table Mountain was foggy one second, and then gorgeous the next...then foggy again. The wind was blowing the clouds right over us for most of that morning.

Cape town way off in the distance down there.

I love this picture of my wife!



This picture above is my first attempt at something called HDRI...check out this link to HDR imaging used on photos of Graffiti. This technique is something I'm going to explore further when we get home but it's pretty darn cool. You need Photoshop CS2 or CS3 to be able to do it.

Here's that band I was telling you about earlier. I'm going to try and get the audio uploaded but don't be surprised if you have to wait until we get home to hear it!!

Table Mountain without the table cloth on it. It was very windy still up there, so windy that they had to close the cable car to the top.

There's Kara standing by a statue of Nelson Mandela. By the way, we went to the Apartheid Museum (pronounced in Afrikaans "Apart-hate"). It was unbelievable...


And here's one last picture for you. Me standing next to a chunk of the Berlin Wall. Actually, as a fan of all things Jack Bauer, I wanted everybody to see my shirt...

Anyway, we really enjoyed our break and I'm glad to finally be done with this blog post. 3 days and counting just to get these pictures uploaded and mp3's working. Hope you enjoy! Talk to you soon.

Video of Lagos

Well...happy 2008!! I know...I know, it has been too long! In all honesty, blogging over here is a time-consuming process with the time it takes to upload pictures and such. Life has been a little crazy over the last few months between getting ready to take groups of 40 to 55+ students to both Spain and Florida and getting ready for our own trip to South Africa this Spring Break.

I am posting a music video of an American rapper who just finished filming in Lagos, Nigeria. In this video the Hostile Gospel, Talib Kweli, the artist, rides around on Okadas(motorcycle taxis) and passes by Danfo's (yellow buses) in which they sometimes cram up to 20 people into. I felt the video did a great job showing the extreme poverty in which most Nigerians live. I'm 99% sure all of the profanity is edited - it would take about 30 minutes just to get the 4 minutes downloaded and listened to just to make sure, and right now, I don't have that time! If you do not want to hear the rap music, just mute your speakers and watch the video!



We miss you all! Talk to you soon.

Eid-El-Fitri

Well, we're not sure what to say about how long it has taken us to update our blog - we've been working pretty hard and pretty non-stop lately. We finally have a long weekend, longer than any we've experienced in our careers to this point. It is the end of Ramadan, a holiday known as Eid-el-Fitri and because of that, we have 5 days off in a row.

So with that, we figured there was no excuse but to update our blog with some of the recent things that have been going on over here. I think it is safe to say that Kara and I are pretty used to Lagos now. We find ourselves much less in a hazy reality and more in an acute state of awareness when we go out now. It's amazing what kinds of things we are noticing now that we are past the whole culture shock deal. We have noticed that the stores carry some awesome candy that we never noticed last year. We've also been able to do things that we didn't do last year, like a take a boat out to the harbor right before entering the Atlantic Ocean. That was quite the experience and on a number of occasions, we thought we might not make it out alive!! Don't panic, it was just a small boat and big waves. We also just had Nigerian Culture Day a few weeks back, and we'll have pictures uploaded as soon as we get copies of them for ourselves from our friends the Rainbolts and Teagues.

I have uploaded a few of the sounds we are used to hearing around here for you guys to listen to. I highly recommend putting on a decent pair of headphones before listening to get the full stereo effect. Before I get into the Lagos sounds, I want you to hear this storm I recorded in Cinque Terre in the middle of the night. The thunder isn't as spectacular as it gets in Lagos, but I have yet to capture the Lagos thunder in its fullest splendor.

Because Ramadan was going on for the last month, I decided to go out and record the mosque. I'm still working on trying to embed the sounds into the site, but until I figure that out, here is the link. This recording was taken at about 9:45 at night, and it proceeded to go until well past 11:00 PM that same night. I walked around out in the playfield, so if you hear the audio shift from ear to ear, it's because I was moving. Also, on a side note, while out recording this, I saw my very first firefly! I didn't know we had them here, so I ran back in and got Kara to come check them out with me, and we ended up finding a whole slew of them in the corner of the field. It was pretty awesome. Here is another recording I took of one of the dances at Nigerian Culture Day, it's called the Atilogwu (At-ee-low-goo) Dance. I was backstage when they started the dance so that's why they sound so close and then kind of fade out. It's the same story with this dance as well, the Igba Ndieze (ee-bahn-deez-ee), here's a snippet of it. You'll hear people screaming in the background, that's because there were these guys doing flips and crazy acrobatic stuff on stage, it was getting the little kids all riled up! Finally, there's this clip of when I was wandering around during the actual event and ran into a group of drummers. That little sound recorder that Kara got me for my birthday last year is pretty amazing huh?

Anyway, like I said before, we will upload some recent pictures when we get them on to our computer. Until then, we'll talk to you soon!

Emeka Okafor? At AISL?

On Friday, we got a surprise visit from Emeka Okafor, NBA's Rookie of the Year in 2004 and the second overall pick in the 2004 draft by the Charlotte Bobcats. His family is from Nigeria and he was visiting while spreading the word on his One Million African Lives Initiative - basically a clean-blood awareness campaign that he is the spokesperson for. His full name happens to be the same name the Igbo people gave me over here, Chukwuemeka - meaning "God did well." When I told him that, I think he thought I was messing around until I showed him I knew what it meant. Then he asked how in the world I got that name and I had to tell him the Igbo folks named me that. I think he was pretty surprised that a white guy could have an Igbo name, let alone, the same as his. I think I have more Nigerian adaptations of my name than he; my Nigerian friends call me Chooks, A-Mex, and Emeka (pronounced Eh-Meh-kuh).

He spent about 30 minutes at AISL's lunchtime playing hoops with the students and of course signing autographs for the students. I would venture to say 95% of the kids didn't know who he was but figured that a 6'10" man walking around AISL had to be famous for one reason or another.

On a separate note, Mr. Shearer was given a jersey by Mr. Okafor, and he gave it to me for helping him with being able to listen to his son Matt's football games online. It turned out that they had technical difficulties this Saturday with the radio feed, so it didn't work out. Needless to say, I couldn't do anything about it, but still feel pretty bad that he didn't get to hear Matt's 9 tackles broadcast over the air. Hopefully this next week it works out better, or I'll be needing to give that jersey back!

Anyway, Emeka Okafor was so humble and gracious with the students. Very nice, down to earth guy. He finished school at UCONN in 3 years and graduated with a 3.76 (he was a lot more specific than newspapers get listing him at a 3.8) after majoring in Finance. Anyway, thought I would add him to the list of famous people we've met while traveling the world!

That's what 1 foot taller than me looks like.

The Big Blog Post is Coming!

I know all of you have been waiting patiently for our "everything we did this summer" post, but that's going to take a little while longer. We start classes tomorrow, so here's some pictures of Italy to tide you over!

(A picture of one of the villages in Cinque Terre, Italy)

(Another one of the five villages)

(A picture of a third village!)

(This lady was talking to her cat in Vernazza, the last of the 4 villages on our hike)

(Thundering waves would hit these rocks. A lot like the Oregon Coast, but the water was more blue.)

(Just one of the reasons Cinque Terre was our favorite stop in Italy.)

(Foundation in stone. Matthew 7:25)

(Like I said before, thunderous waves)

(World Travelers!)

(Our gondola ride under the Ponte Rialto - Rialto Bridge in Venice.)

(The only bridge still standing in Florence after WWII is the Ponte Vecchio. It was built in the 1200's).

(This is the view from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence)

(Back to the Cinque Terre shots. This is the city we stayed in, Monterosso).

(The view the morning we went on our hike. See all the salt in the air?)

(Finally, this is the view from our airplane as we crossed over the Sahara. We were at 38,000 feet and you could see the Sahara's sand being kicked up into the atmosphere all the way to where we were in elevation.)