When Saying Goodbye Is Hard To Do. February 19, 2009

Many South Africans seem to be searching for their Utopian Dream.  A place where garden lasers and security systems don’t have to be switched on before turning off the lights and they can sleep without worry.  A place where they feel their children have a future and they can grow old.  The crime statistics here in South Africa are high, our current government are starting to show cracks as the old order retire and the new ‘cadre’s’ start taking control.  There are too many instances of fund mismanagement and corruption is starting to seep from under the parliamentary doors.  Many question where this will leave us in the years to come and many like to predict a future very much like Zimbabwe’s.

It is with this in mind that the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, amoung other countries,  are seen as their salvation. 

Today I have a heavy heart.  This weekend I am to attend a farewell party of a close friend who has made the decision to immigrate. This is not like the 1990’s when many of  our friends were going overseas for work experience, where we knew that they would return at least once a year for a holiday and eventually they would return home… maybe?  This farewell party is just that, a finale to having the pleasure of a friends reachable company.  No more long phone calls, late Friday glasses of wine, dinners out and birthday parties. 

How do you conduct yourself at a farewell party?  Smile? Cry? Pretend it’s just like any other party and go into denial?

Either way I think waterproof mascara may be in order.

When you wish upon a star… September 20, 2008

My first introduction to Germany was a wonderful Christmas in 2000.  Although our meeting was brief before we hit the Autobahn to Austria for my first white Christmas, I was in-love with Frankfurt am Main.  True, she was at her best, all her buildings where twinkling with Christmas cheer and the city square was buzzing with people enjoying traditional Gluhwein and Lebkuchen at the annual Christmas Market.

I gushed and reminisced about our brief encounter until my German Father-in-Law decided I should go back and have a proper visit and see the city without it’s lights and cheer and get a ‘real’ perspective on the country.  I flew out two years later to stay with my aunt-in-law and her decision to take me to Berlin just increased my love for this strange and beautiful country.  I was mesmerised!  Three weeks of travelling the Rhine, seeing the Castle of Heidelburg, riding bicycles in the forests and walking the streets of Frankfurt am Main, I returned home to South Africa with a different perspective.

I have had the wonderful opportunity of taking my parents with me on my next trip to Germany and they loved it as much as I do.  I would gush about how I would love to live there, how I think it is such a progressive country who picked itself out of it’s disgrace and ashes in the 1940’s and is now counted by the world as one of it’s equals.

If you have read any of my past posts you will pick up that there is a thread of dissatisfaction that I have with my country.  Don’t get me wrong I love my country  and it’s people but politics can bring a country to it’s knees.  Hubby is talking of going back to Germany for possible interviews with companies who will hire a primarily English speaker although he is attending German lessons to ‘reconnect’ with his ancestral mother tongue.  He is serious and I am petrified.

I am angry at myself for whinging!  I want to shout at myself and say “This is what you wished for!  You can’t stay here in South Africa and whine about it!  The decision is simple if you don’t like it and not going to be positive for your county and it’s people then you need to leave!”  This journey is exhausting and the mental roundabout is frustrating.

Sigh! As the cliched saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for….”

Changes June 23, 2008

I like to analyse things and form an opinion which I then feel the need to express.  I talk at length and generally like to discuss my point of view.  In short I am a talker.  Hubby is not a talker.  He takes action.  He will discuss things to a point, do some quite deep thinking and then he takes action.  I generally would like to talk a little more but that is because procrastination is my weakness.

Today Hubby took action.  He is tired of talking.  An email arrived in my inbox and it was a rough draft of a cover letter to start applying for positions of employment in another country.  He says that he is more scared of staying in South Africa than he is to leave.

Leaving family, friends and familiarity, I just don’t know if I am brave enough to do this.