The daily lives of the Lepaks. With animal pictures!

It’s been a few weeks since we posted an update, so I thought I would write a longer one describing our daily lives here—what Kale and I have been up to instead of blogging—and then show you some animals from our trip to the game park, Umfolozi.

Life has been very busy.  Kale’s research team is understaffed and the work load has been heavier than usual.  Apparently, it’s hard to keep good workers in South Africa.  They call it “brain drain.”  Brainy people leave because more money can be made elsewhere.  In addition to brain drain, people in Durban tend to think that their lives have multiple elements—and work is not the most important one! Maybe it’s the nearness of the ocean (every male here is a surfer), but people with jobs don’t even bat an eye at taking off for long, cool vacations.  Kale’s manager just left for three months—to Australia, Thailand, and Vietnam!  This leaves even more work responsibilities for Kale, but it also puts a nice perspective on life.  We are in the midst of planning some exciting vacations of our own (more like week long vacations.  Three months: can you imagine?)

I, on the other hand, have been busy preparing my CD “Send Me Home” to go to print next week in Minneapolis.  I did a crash course in Adobe Photoshop with internet tutorials to create the artwork, and I also did a crash course with garageband to record an ode to Minneapolis which is a last minute song add to the CD.  (Don’t get any ideas, though.  This CD is anything but a crash course—it has been in the works now for over a year!)  I am so excited “Minneapolis” has a home.  Well, it is a home.  It’s my home.  I’ve really been missing it these days.

This brings me to the next part of daily life: missing family and friends.  Now that we’re over the shock of arriving and have settled into a routine, the missing part has had room to creep in.  We’ve been meeting incredibly friendly and interesting people in Durban, but meeting new people all the time becomes exhausting!  “Hi, this is me,” over and over and over and again.  ”Where are the people who already know me?”  Oh yeah, reading this blog on the other side of the ocean.  The only new friends with whom I’ve reached a certain level of intimacy are the mosquitos that visit me every late afternoon on the patio.  It’s a regular family gathering, and they leave me with more love bites than any past boyfriend or current husband.

So our days now consist of patterns.  We wake up to the sounds of African birds every morning (this isn’t as peaceful as it sounds—some of them are mean little squawkers!),  then, if we are motivated, we walk around our neighborhood, and sometimes, like on this particular morning, we stop at a bakery for chocolate and cinnamon croissants or a meat pie.  (Yes, I said meat pie.  They are like hotdogs here, sold everywhere, and extremely delicious: flaky pastry and Indian spices!).  Then Kale gets ready for work while I get ready for work too except I don’t get paid or have to drive anywhere or have anyone telling me what to do.  It’s a pretty nice job.  I don’t even have to look nice, although, I’ve noticed that I work better if I put real clothes on.  I spend the mornings practicing guitar and writing songs and the afternoons reading, writing prose, and emailing, while Kale puts together marketing proposals and client presentations and sometimes buys a samoosa or two from the lady who comes around with them every day during lunch (samoosa is spelled with two “o’s” here).  Sometime in the afternoon I go for a walk down to the main neighborhood intersection (the one with the bakery, but I don’t always go to the bakery), and on Tuesdays, I buy a paper because Tuesday has the week’s music column.  Kale and I go out to hear live music about once a week, and twice a week, we go to the gym.  The gym is called Virgin Active, and we have almost gotten over the hilarity of the name.  Our favorite part of Virgin Active are the Finnish saunas in the locker-rooms.  However, it’s a more pleasant experience for me because the women are usually toweled (the men love being naked) and the women don’t yell at me about sauna etiquette—which some guy did to Kale a few weeks ago.  Apparently, Kale poured a little too much water on the rocks and the guy said, “Hey, you can’t just come in here and pour more water on the rocks.  It’s sauna etiquette for the person who’s been in the sauna the longest to decide how much water is allowed.”  To which Kale replied, “If you don’t want to sweat, don’t use the sauna.”  (I’m paraphrasing with a little added edge.)

Our most tortuous weekly routine is a weekend visit to “Hyper by the Sea.”  Hyper by the Sea is like Walmart on steroids.  We tried to take a picture of it for you, but the camera couldn’t capture it’s outrageous expanse.  Just imagine standing at one end of Walmart and looking through five Walmarts lined up next to each other in one long rectangle.  Rows and rows as far as the eye can see with home repair on one end, groceries on the other, and everything else in between.  And it  is packed!  Navigating is like changing lanes in south Mpls!  You know what I’m talking about, swerving back and forth so that you don’t get stuck behind a car turning left or a bus stopping on the right, only this is with grocery carts.  Madness.  Pure and utter madness!  The reason we shop at Hyper is because it’s very close by and because our health care plan gives us a 25% discount an all of the healthy food items that we purchase from there.  They actually put the money right back into our bank account at the end of the month which is awesome because food is expensive!  We’ve finally gotten familiar with Hyper’s layout so that we don’t end of walking a few miles while pushing a grocery cart.  “Brace yourself,” I say to Kale as we walk across the parking lot to one if its six sets of doors.

The only other regular routine in our lives is the library.  We love the library.  It’s a five minute walk away, and we check out a DVD every week.  Limited selection, but who cares?  We haven’t made our way through it yet.  (Oh, and we also check out books.)

Well, there you have it.  Our life for right now.  I have also been playing a few gigs and loving my guitar lessons, but I’ll save a music blog for another time.  For now, (if you can take any more), onto the animals!

Umfolozi is a game park about a two hour drive from us, and lucky for us, we had the friendliest tour guides for our first visit.  Kale’s parents put us in touch with a couple from their church who live fifteen minutes from Umfolozi’s entrance.  Kenny and Annita invited us for the weekend, fed us deliciously, and brought us really close to all of the animals that could eat us in return if they wanted to.  The craziest part at the game park was when Kenny pointed out the window at a dinosaur!  Or, at least that’s what I thought it was.  After the game park, they took us to the nearby town of St. Lucia where hippos and crocodiles just hang out in the river.  It’s so weird!  Imagine driving to a park, parking your car, and then walking down to the beach not too many steps away, and boom: a family of hippos is splashing in the water and there are five crocs hanging out on a sandbar next to them.  “Um, there are no fences,” I said to Kale, Kenny, and Annita.  “Nope,” they all shook their heads, and then Kenny proceeded to tell us two stories about people getting dragged away in the night by crocs when they went fishing down by the river.  “Never go fishing at night down by the river.”  Well, I thought that one was obvious.  But then he told us the story of hippos crossing the highways at night, and how a person can just be driving along, when wham, their car slams into a hippo.  That is some mighty roadkill.

Well, enjoy these live animals that we caught on camera.  I keep wanting to post pictures of monkeys but I have tried and tried to capture them and they keeping running away!  One of these days, I’ll catch them after a fruit binge when their eyes are all goggled over and their bellies are cemented to the ground.  This is also how you will find me after a trip to the bakery and my own meat pie.

Our trip to see the animals. . .

The first animal we saw! She was a beauty!

Impala breed like rabbits! We saw hundreds and hundreds.

That’s a big rhino!

Yep, it's a dinosaur!

Zebra stripes are like human thumbprints. Every zebra is one of a kind!

Mama zebra and baby zebra. But what I want to know is, did the mohawk originate with the zebra?

Warthogs

Does my smile contain some apprehension?

Kale, of course, thinks the whole thing is hilarious.

There's so much variety in croc and hippo signs these days.

Our animal weekend finished with a boat ride around Richard's Bay. Kale caught a cap! (I always knew he was a great fisherman.)

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