Friday, March 7, 2008

7 March 2008 – Friday


On the left, a view of Pietermaritzburg from the 'Old Road.' Even the railroad climbed out of this valley to get to Johannesburg.

At the bottom of the picture on the right, is the traffic backup due to the truck accident earlier in the day that stopped traffic on N3.

A set of CD lessons for Zulu have arrived, so that some evenings are spent self teaching and practicing the lessons that some of my students have been giving me at the dinner table. Theater seems to be an easy outlet to get me “off campus.” I can literally see the theater from my front door. Last Friday I laughed a bit at “Hero” with Capt Bliksem & the Fris Four to the Rescue, a one man show that elicited a few laughs but also offered dinner before the show. The Hexagon Theater at UKZN has multiple venues, so that last night in a studio in the round I saw “The Taming of the Shrew.” [‘Witness’ Review] Tonight I plan on seeing a dinner mystery “The Strange Case of the Midlands Heiress”. [Witness Review]. I need to have other outlets to move away from just concentrating on the news.

Traffic news in the morning and evening is nationwide, so there was considerable concern when there were 32 deaths on N3, the national road [read Interstate] that goes through Pietermaritzburg, in the space of 2 hours, just on Monday. On the way back from shooting pictures of the valley that Pmb sits in, the road was closed again, as a semi-truck lost its brakes and the driver bailed out before the truck ran into a ravine. Defensive driving does not seem to be a part of the vocabulary. Yet as you can see from the photos, the townships are considerable distance from the center of town and everybody seems to move in and out. Private schools have parents dropping children off and picking them up, after school sports require parental car pools. In one of my classes, I had a question about the law and the tythe. In trying to show that most of us violate the law, I asked how many had licenses, thinking that I could get some to admit that they violated speed limits. I was stunned when no one raised their hands, at having a license. Then I asked if there was anyone who had never driven. Again no hands were raised. They got the message about breaking the law, but I got a lesson in South African traffic.

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