Away from the airport

Alfonso drove me to the airport last last week Friday, and explained to me while we drove the problems he is having setting up a gardening project in Seawinds; the suburb next door to Lavender Hill. Alfonso is one of the drivers who cart my students to and from their service placements during term time, and as one of my students recently pointed out, is not the most politically correct character the world has ever seen. But, given my desperate dearth of friends in Cape Town, I'm a bit of a beggar when it comes to getting myself to the airport. So Alfonso drove me, and regaled me with tales of municipal incompetence and general maladministration. He likes to sprinkle a little sugar and spice on his tales though, so I'm not always sure how accurate his information is.

Anyawy, so he drove me to the airport, I hopped on a plane, and spent last week in the grey of the United Kingdom. My friends being my smarty-pants friends, I visited Oxford and Cambridge and finished the week in London. This last week Friday, I hopped on another plane to San Francisco, followed by a brief shuttle journey into the heart of Silicone Valley. I'm spending the week at the home campus of the overseas study programme that keeps me employed. I'm meeting my colleagues and bosses and trying to camouflage the fact that all they employ me to do really, is drink tea and watch sports tournaments. But there are only so many ways that you can say "community relationship management and partnership coordination" without the emptiness of the job description bouncing off the artfully decorated walls. So it's time to start defending why they pay me the big bucks; why having happy, productive and generally equitable and constitutionally sound relationships with community-based organizations and individuals is totes the way you want to float your goat. 

In between my rambling soliloquies on the value of tea-drinking, I've been quietly overwhelmed by this campus. It's Disneyworld for academics. A veritable wonderland of intellectual stimuli, a smorgasbord of caffeinated collegial activities. If there were balloons and cartoon characters you'd need a ticket and a wristband to enter. It's also beautiful, just gorgeous. Trees, fountains, sculptures, lawns, and, being California, sandy white volleyball pitches every few blocks. I love it. I had dinner last night at a "cooperative", a big house that is part dorm, part commune. I ate vegetarian food outside under the trees, off metal picnic tables with twenty-odd undergraduates. The scent of hippie intelligentsia flavoured my spinach and corn salad in the most inoffensive way. Everyone rides bikes here, they recycle their waste and they drink water from old glass jam jars. It's somewhat surreal; a bubble. It helps me understand my students though, who come from this to the gentle chaos of Cape Town. 

Anyway, I'm here for the week, to learn as much as I can and orientate myself to my students' world. Part of me wishes, just a little part, that this was my world too. But they drink coffee here, not tea...