Back to the Heat

So after 4 glorious days on the coast, where it’s always a delightful 20 degrees or so, with a cool breeze and nice cloud cover, I took the city hopper shuttle to Windhoek this morning. Here, it’s 35+ degrees. Quite the difference and so much so that my body kind of shut down in the afternoon, my lethargy easily turning into one big siesta. When I woke up two hours later, I had that same zombie-like feeling that I used to get when I took marathon naps in Valencia way back in ’89. Ha ha, I can still hear Silvia’s voice chiding me over the phone when she’d call: "Pero Bob, la siesta es corta. De dos horas, no se hace…"

The trip here was uneventful and followed one of the two best roads in the country. I did have to ride along with some of the most verbose Germans I’ve ever met but in the end, managed to stave off their incessant questioning and dig into a nice chunk of Zizek. Yes! A happy side benefit of my sojourn in Swakop was that my academic brain has finally come back to life. I made headway on a couple of essays and was actually excited to read about the "negation of negation" – thanks Slavoj!

Windhoek is not the most beautiful place in the world but that’s fine. The place where we’re staying is very nice and comfortable so the wait until Moz will be nice. Tomorrow, we’ll go a conference centre outside of town to watch Philippe Talavera teach the visiting UK hip-hop troupe some of the Namibian dances, etc. And I hear that there’s air-conditioning… he he.
Oh, and before I forget: we had dinner at the swankiest KFC you’ve ever seen this evening. I wanted to thank Alpha for looking after Helene during their days out in the field so he came over with a friend and I told him I’d treat them to dinner. Their instant choice was KFC, so that was that.