Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday Last night I said goodbye to Sita and her family who are still in the air for many more hours. Although I had the best seat  of us all (a large king size bed) that they would have been jealous of in their cramped economy seats, I had a restless night because of restless nerves in my foot.

This morning I enjoyed a solitary breakfast that Saffi and Faro would have loved: a machine that made tiny pancakes by simply pushing an ‘OK’ button, a dish full of whipped cream that was constantly being refilled, a syrup dripper and all the other things that they want for breakfast.  The hotel on the website did not look attractive but the experience surpassed my expectations. The young gentleman at the reception desk, after I mentioned my web impression, said he would tell the marketing people, implying that they don’t do their job (“they are just walking around”). Maybe they should talk with their guests.

The hotel is super sustainable-economy conscious, even the salt and pepper shakers (made from 100% recycled plastics, refillable, and recyclable again). The toilets flush with grey water, the bathtub has a sign that says that filling a bath would deprive society of 320 glasses of water which made me wonder why they even bothered to put in a bathtub, you get points for using fewer pillows and towels.

It was strange to be alone after being with 2 kids and three adults last week. The silence is deafening. I hope to get some serious reading done; not just Rushdie but also a book by a South African writer Sita left me.

Now the work begins. I turned my vacation setting off and started to prepare for the next 10 days of work that involve both individual coaching, team coaching and who knows what other surprises await me. It will also be a time to reconnect with old friends, people I haven’t seen since my last trip three and a half years ago, when I made three trips here in 2019.

At 12:15 I landed in Jo’burg and got my first chance to use my new Chinese smartphone which I bought in a mall in Noordhoek for 50 USD. It is rather slow and I should probably have bought the 10 USD flip phone because I only want the phone for local calls so people don’t have to call the US to reach me.

Of course I hadn’t fixed the settings (I have to get re-adjusted to an Android phone) so that driver Larry was calling me and looking for me. When I finally managed to call him he was standing right in back of me.

Load shedding, the turning off of the power grid was bad enough in Capetown (stage 2, which means two hours of no electricity), but here in the Jo’burg and Pretoria area it is worse: stage 6, meaning no electricit