Pushstart

Woke up on Tuesday morning after our first full night's horizontal sleep since Saturday night. Beds are very nice. Today we had a lot of business to take care of including picking up our World Cup tickets, figuring out our cell phone situation, and getting visa for Cameroon.

As it happened, we probably needed a lot more than just one night's sleep to tame the dumbness which seems to go along with the jet lag. We arrived at the world cup ticket pick up only to find that we had forgotten some key items including money (to pay for parking), ID, etc. We had to drive all the way home and back through the traffic and construction (there is lots going on here in preparation for the big event).

But then.. We arrived at the FIFA HQ along with a dozen or so excited fans – One set of dudes was there the whole time taking really high quality photos of their tickets in different positions – fanned out on the floor, held in their hands with big smiles, etc. When our turn came, the ticket booth worker showed us each ticket and pointed out where the bus pick-ups would be to take people to the stadiums and inquired about our favorite team. Knowing that we are pulling for the Cameroonian Indomitable Lions in our Netherlands v. Cameroon, he noted that, he would not lie to us, he does not think that the Lions can prevail in the match. He also said that, he noticed that we are Americans and said that fans in fans in South Africa were very proud of how the US performed in the Confederations Cup. USA! USA!

Note: there are still tickets to US/England game to anyone considering the trip!

We next headed to the nicest part of South Africa and maybe all of Africa, Sandton – It kind of looked to me a bit like Arlington, VA, big parkways, lots of 6-8 story condos, big hotels (where a lot of the FIFA-selected hotels are), and of course office spaces and big malls. We went to the Sandton mall to look for a proper cell phone – It turns out that stupid our AT&T Blackberry will not accept international SIM cards – We decided to potentially purchase a cell phone here for about $20, then we can buy minutes as we go along. The mall also had wireless internet for purchase, so we bought that but then realized our trusty laptop was out of juice. We hadn't charged it the night before. Dumb dumbs.

We got home to charge the laptop and of course we left the headlights on in the car and drained the battery. Whoops.. After a brief conference we decided to try to push-start it in the apartment complex parking lot – this involved pushing it out of the space and down the small hill in the lot. Thank golly for these little cute cars, we easily pushed it out of the space and, I must say, we had quite a feeling of triumph when Scott popped the clutch and the engine turned over! Yahooo, the end of dumb-dumb-day.

We spent the rest of the day with Jessy in the Apartheid Museum which is pretty impressive. We only had 2 hours before they closed and that was not enough. An interesting thing, going through the museum we saw several references to Tim's boss, George Bizos who is a Greek immigrant to South Africa – He was Nelson Mandela's friend and an attorney at the organization where Tim interns that provides free legal services.

- Becca