are you traveling with your parents?

finally, free internet. what a blessing. although, it's really not free i suppose, but at least i'm not being charged a couple of bucks per minute to send my worried mother a quick email. i just read through some of my earlier posts, and i feel like i have cheated you all out of a quality blogging experience. i hope to make it up to you all with this, the last chapter of the burton-flavoured* african adventure.

pretoria is nothing special. don't go there. matt and i were there for one night, and i felt like that was too much. i shouldn't be so harsh; we did have a good experience there. we stayed in a small backpackers in a decent suburb of pretoria, and because we were in one of the safest neighborhoods in the area, matt and i felt like we could walk around and find a place to feed. we sorta lost our way, so we ducked into a gas station to ask directions to the square we were looking for. not much help there, but a couple of afrikaner girls took notice of us (i mean matt), followed us (i mean matt) down the street and asked if we (i just happened to be with matt) needed a lift to the square. we figured they looked innocent enough, so we hopped in. the girls were students of the nearby afrikaner university, and their english was decent enough to carry on a shallow conversation. they asked if we were traveling with our parents (which confirmed my suspicions that they were diggin' matt), which i found quite amusing but not surprising since we are confused for siblings every now and then. they dropped us off, we had a decent dinner, we jogged back to the backpackers through the relatively "safe" neighborhood, and that's pretoria.

we hopped back to jo'burg the next morning, and we met up with matt's former co-worker chris klomp (he's on transfer to the jo'burg office). what a stellar friend chris is; he let matt and i snag his car for the day whilst we explored the apartheid museum (absolutely fabulous museum; i could use a whole blog to rave about it, but just trust me and read about the apartheid on wikipedia... fascinating stuff) and shopped for african crafts. that last statement makes us sound kind of nerdy, but we had seen these really nifty giraffes carved out of wood that ranged from 3 ft to 7 ft tall, and we found one that suited us and brought him home to texas to live with us. that night mr. klomp, the ever gracious host, took us to a lovely dinner and let us sleep in his bed while he took the guest room. what a king.

i'm gonna pause and post this so my posts don't get too long... zimbabwe is definetly worthy of its own blog.

*i think the british use many unnecessary letters in their words, but in honour of south africa i thought i'd play along.