When I went to visit Blanche and Daniel I flew 1time from J'burg to Durban and back. It's a South African low cost carrier, along the lines of Southwest and Ryan.
(As I understand it, Southwest started in the 1970s, back in the days of regulated air travel. They got around the federal laws because they only flew in Texas, it being a rather large state. This was still in the days when they chose stewardesses in basis of attractiveness. The targeted businessmen and there were two levels of tickets. One for $X and one for $2X. With the $2x tickets you got a free bottle of whiskey. An early frequent flier incentive, since the company pays for the ticket.)
1time is perhaps most like JetBlue, though I've never taken that airline. I'm only thinking of the leather seats. Like other LCCs, you pay for extras. Want a Coke? Pay for it.
I flew SAA (South Africa's national carrier) from Jo'burg to Cape Town. Quite a difference. It was a two hour flight, with a hot meal and free drinks. It costs more for service, of course. I don't know by how much. Friends say it isn't that bad, and sometimes it's worth it. It wouldn't have been for the 1 hour flight to Durbs.
I'm on SAA now flying north, and north, and north to London. Flight map says we're about level with the Namibia/Angola border, with about 9 hours to go.
Speaking of that trip, the three of us went on the beach. It was the downtown beach - Hamilton and Amanda say there are better beaches, but this is what we did. While walking on the beach there were small jellyfish with long blue tails. We didn't know what they were. They walked on them, producing popping sounds. I avoided the main body.
We walked along the water's edge. All of us started feeling strange, painful feelings in our feet. Okay, avoid the jellyfish. We got to one of the swimming areas. They were widely separated, with large "no swimming" gaps between. The taxi cab driver says it's because of undertow. The swimming regions are in the safe areas.
We swam in the surf. It wasn't like Florida. I've spent a lot of time on the beach, but Florida's beaches aren't that diverse. Some months ago I mentioned that with the shingle beach at Hastings. Here the surf didn't curl quite right. We body surfed and while there were decent sized waves there was only one where I got a good ride in.
There are two places I've had good body surfing waves. Sebastian Beach, Florida, near where my dad's parents retired. It's on the Atlantic ocean, far enough north that the Bahamas don't help attenuate the waves. And San Diego, where I body surfed once late enough in the summer I didn't need a wet suit and near sunset so at times I could see fish silhouetted in the wave between me and the sun.
As we relaxed on the beach afterwards the lifeguard P.A. said "Beware. There are blue bottles. You are advised to keep young children out of the water." No one seemed to do anything different. Only latter did I look up "blue bottles" in Wikipedia. (Do it yourself; I'm at 35,000 ft with no internet access.) It said they are also known as "Portuguese Man O' War", and with a picture of one taken in around Biscayne Bay, near where I grew up in Miami.
Had I known there were PMO'Ws in the water, I might have reacted differently. I heard such horror stories about the pain, including one kid in scouts who had stepped on one. The remedy, supposedly, is to put meat tenderizer on the wound. But I've never bought nor used meat tenderizer so that suggestion doesn't help me. I can say that the pain is sharp, but dies quickly. I didn't stop on it directly though.
The taxi cab driver said several stung him at once when he was a kid. Wrapped around him even. He had to go to the hospital because of his body's reaction, and now he's allergic to them. These are the stories I heard growing up in Florida, hence my surprise that people were in the water with blue bottles about. Though they were there because of the onshore wind, which meant they were mostly at the water line and not in the water where we were body surfing.
Also, a new sight for me was the Moslem women in the water with full burkhas on, next to women wearing bikinis. There are different levels of strictness, so some Moslem woman had visible faces, walking with those that didn't. Some of the kids were wearing a pretty complete bathing costume as well. Though I hear some kids in the US wear those too, and not necessarily out of body modesty. Some parents insist their kids wear those clothes to protect against UV. Compare to my day when "sun block" was still called "sun tan lotion" (a habit I didn't break until about 1999 when Susan pointed out my dated Floridianism) and my sister and I at the start of the summer would have contests pulling off the largest patches of peeling skin from the sunburns we would get swimming and playing for hours at Venetian Pool.
Body modesty, even in US culture, is a strange thing. I've read that in the old days, pools like at the YMCA required swimmers to be naked. (That's "Young *Men's* Christian Association" - no women were present.) As a kid I read a series of books - the Clearwater gang series? They were about a boy being raised in a good Christian home. These were books you would buy at the Christian bookstore. I remember liking them. I learned the phrase "flotsam and jetsam" from that book, and some other things too. They were decent stories, for the most part. My grandmother bought a Christian science fiction book for me once which I recall was really bad. It SF elements (scientist, helper, and two kids build rocket ship) but wasn't SF and was structured almost solely on "if you pray then God will provide."
In the Clearwater books, the boys would skinny dip in the river.
Once with my grandma (the same one mentioned twice already) we were at the beach. My sister and I wanted to go in but we didn't have swimsuits with us. Grandma said "why not swim in your underwear?" We didn't. That just didn't seem right to us. Thinking about it now though, when she grew up it was before nylon and other fast drying clothes. Cotton and wool don't make good bathing suits. I wonder if it's a materials thing - people just didn't have anything better to wear, so it was best to go naked, if no one else was about.
There were mixed sex beaches of course, with everyone in full swim costumes, bodies completely covered. Again, as I recall, there was a riot at Atlantic Beach some 100 years ago or so when a few of the men decided they would go topless.
Ahh, without internet access I can't research this or provide interesting hyperlinks. :(
For the last couple of weeks I was staying with Heikki and his family. They are Finnish, excepting Minna's daughter's husband who is English. They of course have a sauna downstairs. It came with the house, though it wasn't well designed. They did a lot of work getting it up to spec, per Finnish customs and expectations.
It was my first time in a Finnish-style sauna. Swedish ones are dry. They run the one at AZ at about 90C/190F. Heikki ran theirs at about 72C (165F) which doesn't seem as hot, except it's a wet sauna. That's where you pour water on the rocks. Frequently. The steam comes up and ... well, it's hot.
There's a Finnish word for the steam, which I can't remember well enough. (Hence I've failed Heikki's test. Something like löljö. Grrrr. Wiki "
sauna" to get the answer.) The translation is several things: "steam" and "spirit" are two direct ones. It's the steam coming off of the heater (some Finnish word like "kivas", which I confuse with the New Mexican term) but it's also what makes it the sauna. Hence the Finns disagree with the concept of a dry sauna.
Everyone is naked in the sauna. The same is true in Sweden, for the most part. It's a bit different with the AZ sauna because so many people in the comp. chem group are non-Nordic. So there people wear suits, or keep a towel wrapped about, even when it's only guys. The only other Swedish sauna experience I have is at the gym locker room, which isn't a good enough data point.
While naked, it's not sexual. I don't doubt that it could be, but that's not the general case. There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a Nokia executive going to the US to run an office there. He schedules a group sauna as a getting-to-know-each-other event, and is surprised at the response he gets against the idea. I suppose in the US organizing a mixed-sex sauna for work could count as sexual harassment. There isn't the social expectations of what is and isn't proper in that situation.
I looked once into getting a sauna for my house in Santa Fe. It would cost some several thousand dollars for the sauna proper, which would be electrically heated. That needed 220V power, compared to the normal 110V in the US. Which wouldn't be bad except that my junction box was already maxed out. Any electrical work done to the house would require replacing the box with something bigger, costing a few more thousand.
Perhaps I should have done it anyway. After I put my house on the market, and with a few weeks before I left the country, I found out there was a leak in the roof, which went through the ceiling fan/lamp in the office/bedroom. There was a storm, and water was dripping off the bottom of the fan. I called a roofer who said it was a simple problem. They would patch it for a few hundred dollars and that was it.
Turns out it was worse. When the buyer's inspector came he said the roof needed to be redone and the electrics fixed. That lowered the price of the house by about $10,000, and I suppose it can handle a new 220V circuit now.
It wasn't a good house for a sauna. It would have to have been in the corner of the patio or the back yard, with no plunge pool (though there could be snow banks in winter), and getting to the shower would mean going through the garage and house to the normal shower. Doable, but not as nice as I would like. Wonder how having one would have affected the resale value of the house.
Heikki has a pool right outside the sauna. Last night it was about 18C/64F. I did go in the water, but not for long. Watch out though! Give me a few years in Sweden and I might be rolling in the snow like a native.
We're 2/3rds of the way up to the northern border of Angola. There's now only 8 hours to go. My laptop's at 13% power, the cabin lights are off, so it's time for me to (try to) sleep. From way up high in the sky I bid you all good night.
