Trip to South Africa, Day 5: Cell phone and sunshine hunting

Day 5, 4^th of September

We were at the doors of the dinner room at breakfast time, just to be able to get time to eat breakfast before the field trip, and hurried through that. Sadly enough our guide for the day had to cancel and postpone until tomorrow, so instead I recorded three 5 second time series at different times during the day of how the sun affects the temperatures at engraved stone plaquettes. My problem was that the sun didn’t want to show its lovely face, so I ended up “camping” 1h hour beside the church, working on my laptop. Later I found a second rock plaquette at the inner yard of the university.

Grahamstown down high street sometimes really looks lika an American frontier city a la some western movie:

At the lower end of the street is the derelict train station and an old locomotive:

Wanting to be able to actually talk with my family I wanted to buy a payphone of the cheapest sort, but it turned out I actually needed to both visit the local municipality office and get a special document (“proof of residence” I think it was. Bring your passport.), and then bring it and the passport to a *good* telephone store (I chose MTN). Before learning all this from Jan I just went into some store and bought a phone which proved to be a) without a working battery, b) without any SIM card and c) a used one. I returned that one…

The phone cost 169 RAND (~150 SEK), simple NOKIA telephone which was a nice history lesson of a time before iPhone; the hateful T9 function (I loathe autocomplete), actually using buttons, and all these menus. On the other hand: being able to phone home. A call for about 3-4 minutes didn’t actually cost more than maybe 8 RAND. I will have to double check that with a second call later on.

Jan and I were then invited again to Ians, where Jan treated us all with pancake wraps with brie cheese, homemade tapenade and salad. Delicious, and I managed to grab the spot infront of the heater… ;-)