Ngikhona eGoli.

My luggage and I have arrived in Johannesburg! We're spending the night here (we being me and Becky, not me and my luggage). We went straight from the airport to the hotel, so I haven't seen much South Africa, but here are the few differences compared to Indiana that I've noticed.

It's summer. When we landed, the pilot said it was 78 degrees F.
Cars drive on the left side.
Lots of people aren't speaking English. There are 11 official languages in South Africa, but I just know I've heard Afrikaans, some Nguni language, and the guy who loaded our bags into the hotel shuttle said he was speaking to someone he passed in Pedi, but he knows 10 languages.
There are palm trees.
The money doesn't have people on it.

Each bill has one of the big five animals (we're missing the ZAR200 with the leopard).

 
The rand coins are silver and have antelope sorts of things, and the cent coins are gold and have plants. Underrepresented as always, fungi, protists, and bacteria are absent from the currency
You have to flip little switches to make the outlets work.

 Our hotel room is kind of weird.

Here's the key in the bathroom door


and a mysterious window/shoot that opens behind the shelves. The toilet paper has little dogs on it...

Sala kahle

(This is what I didn't write yesterday because I was being responsible and packing.)

Salani kahle! Ngizonikhumbula nonke. Sizobonana ngoNhlangula.

Important lesson #2: Zulu is an awesome language.

In Zulu, instead of just saying goodbye, the person who's leaving says "stay well" and the person who's staying says "go well." Salani kahle means stay well (addressing more than one person). The verb ukukhumbula means both to miss and to remember, so ngizonikhumbula means I will miss you all and remember you all. The month of June in traditional Zulu is uNhlangula (though they also use uJuni), which means that the trees have started to drop their leaves. The translation of what I said is "Stay well. I will miss/remember you all. We will see each other in June," and it just comes out awesomely in Zulu.

blogging?

In just a few days, I'll be in South Africa. As a result of peer pressure, I am considering blogging. It seems that some of my friends and extended family members will become intensely more interested in my life once it starts taking place on another continent. I actually find my life intensely interesting all the time (except the painful stretches devoted to studying mass spectrometry), but I suppose I can't blame them. At any rate, I realized that having a captive audience puts me in a powerful position. As long as I include some photos of wildlife and weird food, these friends and family members will listen to whatever I want to tell them. (This assumes that the majority of the wildlife photos are not of lichen, another of my unshared intense interests). If I actually manage to keep this up, five months is plenty of time to convey all sorts of important things about South Africa, and maybe even put in a plug for leafcutter ants, the coolest organism on the planet.
So here's important lesson #1: I am going to South Africa.

I've had a number of conversations that go like this:

Me: I'm studying abroad in South Africa for the spring semester.
Other person: I have a friend/acquaintance/cousin/colleague's child who went to Africa.
Me: Cool, what part of Africa did they go to?
Them: Hmm, I can't remember.


 Africa is a very big place! As you can see, it has a land area greater than the contiguous United States, India, Argentina, Western Europe, and China combined. It has more countries (53) and more languages (over 1000) than any other continent.

In South Africa, I'm studying at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. It's a little inland from the eastern coast in the province that's gray on the map. Pietermaritzburg is a city with about the same population as Albuquerque, New Mexico and about the same latitude as the panhandle of Florida (on the other side of the equator of course).

Now you are prepared to have well-informed conversations like this one:

Another one of your awesome friends: I'm going to Uganda this summer.
You: I have another friend who's in Africa.
Other friend: Where in Africa?
You: She's studying in South Africa.
Other friend (who may be thinking that Uganda is farther from South Africa than NYC is from LA): What part of South Africa?
You: Pietermaritzburg OR She lives in the province of KwaZulu-Natal OR near Durban

Or if you forget the name of the city, that's okay too, just try to remember that Africa is really, really big.