Daniel Eliasson

As you can see, the blog has moved to a new url. The old start page was a bit of a hack—I won’t go into Wordpress internals, but it was. And it was also not going anywhere. Besides, I wanted to use the main domain for a sort of professional profile, and this blog has a distinctly informal feel. So here it now hides.

In other news, there are very little other news. Exams are coming up, so everyone else is working their butt off, and I have little else to do but to work myself. The weather gods decided to punish me for bragging to people the other day about the great weather, so now it’s taken a turn for the colder and wetter. You don’t expect Africa to be cold, but unlike Europe, there’s no insulation or heating in the houses (I don’t think I’ve ever seen single-pane windows before, and here two walls of the room consist of them), so .

Anyway, instead of a proper post, please accept a random lump of links to pictures.

We’ll start nice and cute with a squirrel adopted by a dog with puppies. Awwww. This chipmunk is also cute, not to mention the beagador puppy. For the bird lovers out there, here’s a charming story about a little bird who used her own body as a dam to save her kids.

Now let’s look at something less cute: 15 pictures of bedrooms from German brothels (no people, don’t worry, just rooms). Actually, the page title says Germamy, but I assume they meant my old homeland. I must say that I expected the rooms to look more dodgy than they in fact do. Some of these rooms look like passable hotel rooms. One of them also has the same shape as my old apartment in Sickla, which makes me wonder if anyone from there came up with a business idea and brought it to Germany.

Finally, here’s one of those catch 22’s that life just keeps on handing out.

Now I’m going to go hide under the covers and hope I survive another night of tropic cold.

At times, South Africa gives the impression of existing on its own timeline, where the sixties just didn’t happen. On that note, I went to the Engineering Ball with Stephanie. After pre-drinks in a restaurant with a largish crowd of engineering students, we proceeded to the ball, which was held a short drive into the winelands. Reane’s date Wim, from Namibia, drove us out there.

Regarding the lost sixties, the ball struck me as a strangely semi-formal occasion; the guys were wearing suits, and the girls wearing formal or cocktail dresses. There was dancing, to an interesting mix of 80’s music and lekker Afrikaans stuff like Kaptein, and at one point, the people even broke out in spontaneous line dancing. At which point the evening went from interesting to scary.

Notice, if you please, the large concentration of guys dancing alone.

The groke, for most readers probably known as "Mårran", here shown as a reminder, is hiding in the dance picture above. A prize will go to the first commenter to spot her!

As the evening went on, and the party started slowing down, we decided to get going back towards Stellenbosch. Wim, our ride, however, decides that he doesn’t want to leave yet, presumably because of some girl, so the douche decides to just ditch his date. Luckily, we manage to catch a ride with another couple, and get driven back to Stellenbosch by a guy who probably had drunk a bottle of wine or so, and was driving like a car thief. As back seat guests in the car, we had the honorary mission of holding onto all the cocktail glasses the couple had collected during the night.

Just outside of town, a speed camera caught us on picture.

Namibians have a keen sense of fashion.

When I withdraw cash in an ATM here, I pay SEK 40 for the privilege, and since carrying around huge wads of cash isn’t necessarily a good idea in SA, I decided to open a bank account.

As it turns out, South African don’t operate quite like the banks in Europe. A European bank usually gives you an account for next to nothing, charges you nothing for cash withdrawals, transfers to other banks in the country and similar. Instead, they make money by taking the money you put in your account, and lending it to other people at a higher interest than you get.

South African banks instead make their money by having charges for everything. Withdrawing cash carries a charge, as does transfers to other accounts, even between your own checking and savings accounts. They probably charge you for checking your hair using their branch office window as a mirror, too. Presumably they do this because Africans are so poor that they have no money the bank can lend to anyone else, nor are there any people eligible for a loan.

Stephanie has, however, found a bank which does not charge exorbitant fees for everything: Capitec. This bank is so lekker, in fact, that not only do they not charge fees for withdrawals in their own ATMs or at the register in Pick ‘n Pay supermarkets, they also give you amazing 10 % interest on regular accounts without withdrawal limits. In times like these, when a typical savings account gives you 0.0 % interest, it sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

Well, it is. First off, the bank doesn’t actually have any ATMs, except outside their single branch office in town, but that’s okay, since you can get the money in the supermarket. The explanation for the high interest rate is simple, their loan desk could more properly be called the racketeering department. Check out their affordable 28-60 % interest rates for loans.

But that’s not all, in fact, not even the part which bothers me. The part that bothers me is that they’re simply not a real bank. When I’d opened my account, I asked how I can transfer in money from my foreign accounts. Answer: I can’t. I’ll have to move money to an account in some real South African bank or other, then transfer from there to Capitec.

Round about this time, I began to understand how they operate behind the curtains. Imagine, if you will, a bucket full of money, and a bunch of people sitting around it with notepads. “R100 withdrawal for Mnr. Eliasson”, someone would shout, and then someone would scribble this on their notepad, as the messenger pulls out a wrinkly R100 note from the bucket and run to the ATM with it, where he’d slide it through a little slit. I imagine that at the end of the month, they’ll tally up all their hand-scribbled transactions and then get an account balance for each customer.

At any rate, I thought I’d simply go to an international ATM, withdraw a large amount of cash from my Swedish account, then bring this wad of banknotes to the Bucket and have them deposit it on my account. As it turns out, I can withdraw a maximum of R3000 at a time (which is paid out in the form of 30 * R100, by the way), which means that those SEK40 they charge is more than 1 % of the money (on top of their pricey bid-ask spread), and if I try to overdo it, the bank in Sweden will probably invalidate my card, thinking I’m being robbed.

So there I stood, in the dodgy little shopping centre down the street, with a thick roll of cash. I went to the Bucket to deposit the money immediately, and here insult is added to injury. The door was locked. It was around 14:00, and the door said they were open until 15:30. I could see customers sitting inside, waiting to be served, I could see a bundle of keys sticking out from the lock on the other side of the glass door, but I could not get in. The security guard who was hanging against a rail outside the window just shrugged when I asked if the bank would open again.

So I took my pile of money and put it in the Drawer at home. Probably about as safe as the Bucket, anyway.

Just a few little pictures from Stellenbosch and surroundings today.

Housemate Danni’s boyfriend Leroy once told me that all of Australia is like Cape Town’s suburb die Strand. I admitted that I hadn’t been to neither die Strand nor Australia, and he just said that I’d understand when I had. The other weekend, Stephanie, Reane, Danni and I went for a little trip to Gordon’s bay, next to die Strand, and I got a chance to see what Australia must be like. It’s not possible to isolate any specific cause for alarm in die Strand, there’s just so much that is so wrong about the place, but foremost I must put the architecture. In fact, that’s somewhat of an issue with South Africa in general: nobody here seems to bother taking a look at the other houses in an area before they build a new one. There are acid addicts with more coherent style than this.

Danni and I agree: Strandstralia is where it's at.

We visited a lovely used books store in Gordon’s bay, where amidst the droves of kak the girls found a book with the title This is Sweden calling, and the subtitle Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the Eurovision Song Contest but were laughing too hard to ask! The keyword Sweden obviously caused them to bring it to me, and since the price was the amazingly low R8, I bought the book. In the car back, Stephanie read aloud from the book, and I fielded questions about the magnificence that is the ESC, and by the time we were back in the Bos, the girls were very excited about the prospects of the ESC. Kerstin has promised to record it and send us a DVD, and I am looking forward to a chance to introduce the poor Africans to this marvellous event. Imagine never having seen an ESC in your life! No wonder they call Africa the dark continent.

Turning now to the more lekker side of life in S’Africa, let me mention a few plants. Everyone loves trees (right?), and there is one tree that I’ve particularly come to associate with South Africa, namely the bloekomboom. A magnificent tall tree, the bloekomboom is a hardwood with smooth bark and a funny characteristic way of growing in levels. From up the mountainsides, you can easily spot bloekombome, as they tend to send one level of growth over the canopy of the other trees. From afar, the trunks are somewhat hard to spot, which makes it look almost as if there’s some vegetation floating over the forest. I bought a book on southern African trees, but I’ve been unable to find this species in there, so I believe it might be non-indigenous. But it is still common.

Bloekombome outside the fynbos reserve near our house.

Other plants are less inviting. Acacias get their names from a Greek word for sharp point, and a lot of them have very impressive thorns indeed.

Acacias: serious business.

The climate of the West Cape is rather mediterranean, with hot dry summers and cool, wet winters. Of course, in African terms, “cool, wet” means “all plants get rejuvenated after the murderously dry summer, and suddenly the lawn starts growing”, not “the rain makes you wet and then the cold gives you pneumonia”, like in Stockholm. As such, the local plants tend to keep their leaves on all year around. That just makes the imported trees all the more striking in Autumn, such as the many oaks that line Stellenbosch (which is nicknamed Eikestad because of those very trees).

The best of two worlds: trees like this, and 25 °C.

Of course, Stellenbosch isn’t all fun and trees. There’s the barefoot douches, for instance.

Not surprisingly, this turd sandwich studies engineering.