Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Oor Hoose



Living/dining, through to kitchen


The kitchen sink, lovely but useless!


Fancy basin in bathroom 1

Fancy basin in bathroom 2

I promised ages ago to upload some pics of Oor Hoose, so here they are. I have had no internet connection for over a week, hence lack of blogs.



Martin has gone back to Oz and is currently job hunting. Les has returned from his travels to US and UK and so things are settling back into the customary pattern here. You have probably read or watched TV news about the xenophobic violence here in the Johannesburg area. We are not affected; it is a problem between different ethnicities of black Africans. Basically many black South Africans still live in shacks in townships or informal settlements. Fourteen years ago after the democratic elections they were promised houses. They have been very patient, I think. Our province is still 55,000 houses short of the target. Now they see black people from other countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe fleeing violence and poverty and they are perceived as getting better treatment as refugees than the indigenous black people. One newspaper letter writer said, “We already have nothing; now we are being asked to share that nothing with people from elsewhere. I don’t condone the attacks but I understand them”
Gloria, my black friend who lives in an informal settlement near the township of Tembisa says that she hears screaming and shooting nightly although she has not been affected as there are “none of these people (foreigners) at my place”
Other than that, we have been planning our final “road trip” as we are taking three weeks to see the Cape area before we come back to Scotland. We also have a load of dinner invitations to return, so we will need to get started on that before we get to the stage of eating strange leftovers lurking in the freezer. Talking of strange, on Saturday we were invited out to dinner and the starter was home made game terrine, made from game birds actually shot by our host! Not for the veggie minded, eh?
Car problems…again… We now have a silver Audi, the black BMW has a puncture. So to date we have had…Grey BMW, silver BMW, grey Audi, white Mercedes, black BMW and now silver Audi. Honestly, a Micra will never do now!

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