That Old Saw About Kitchen Heat

I recently spent three hours in this kitchen of the restaurant Zambi on the waterfront in Maputo, Mozambique. I was learning how to make peri-peri sauce - a hot sauce made from ground chiles. It was the peak of summer and about 94 outside with high humidity. In the kitchen, there were no fans and no real ventilation and there were open grills, bread ovens and steam ovens filled with crabs. I stood there with the chef tasting painfully good chiles. Hot chiles. I can now say that I do not have to get out of the kitchen - I can stand the heat.

When The Lights Go Out

So I'm a month late with the resolution to blog more but, hey, living gets in the way. January was full of travel to Mozambique, Zambia and Swaziland and then a thousand daily details that don't need to be detailed here.

This doctored image is one of the funnier ones I've seen that combines South Africa's recent power crisis with the ever-present doom and gloom about the country's ability to host the World Cup in 2010. The power crisis is a problem of massive proportions: the country's largest mines - gold, platinum, coal - were shut down for four or five days while Eskom, the power parastatal, scrambled to devise a plan that preserves power to crucial facilities - like hospitals - but the plan has yet to be fully realized. At home, we had blackouts every day for a week last week and, before that, several times every week. Eskom has promised that blackouts will be a part of life here for at least the next five years; they're just hoping to become a bit more reliable about it while cities and businesses try to adapt. Traffic lights are the primary immediate hurdle besides the daily multi-million dollar mines. I returned from Maputo, Mozambique to Pretoria recently by bus and the trip was smooth until we arrived in Johannesburg on a Thursday afternoon. The power was out, the traffic lights were out, a huge rainstorm was underway and rush hour traffic was gridlocked like nothing I had ever seen. The bus did not move for 10 minutes at a time. The trip to Pretoria by bus usually takes 45 minutes if traffic is moving. This time it took three-and-a-half hours. Cities are now planning to install solar panels onto the lights and I even heard that Johannesburg is going to install switches into some 200,000 homes that will allow the city to cut power to hot-water heaters when there is a power shortage. In northern Pretoria, furious and stranded train commuters vandalized several cars. Their anger was legitimate but they just reduced the number of commuter train cars. The fault for this crisis lies with the government which restricted Eskom from building new capacity in the late '90s while the government pondered new energy policy (i.e. - how to attract private investment). Then they changed their mind but the economy and power demand had steadily grown for years by then and Eskom didn't raise the alarm about the looming shortage.

It's going to be quite a year here with big political scandals - the president of the ANC, and thereby the presumptive president of the country in 2009, is facing a corruption trial - and power outages.

Thankfully, the wine is good and grapes grow without electricity.

Poet Laureaute

From an interview with Charles Simic, poet laureate of the U.S.:

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

For starters, learn how to cook.

Happy Holidays

Santas on Patrol

Today I was driving in southeastern Pretoria, a more rural area, and a nursery was holding a giant Christmas sale. Someone thought it would be a good idea to post a Santa Claus at the driveway entrance for advertising. This Santa Claus was skinny and black and his red suit was very baggy and he was not in a promotional mood. He was sprawled in a yellow plastic chair with his legs jutting straight out while he calmly watched traffic and waved at no one. On my second pass an hour later, he hadn't changed his position but his long white beard was pulled beneath his chin so he could pop nuts into his mouth without interference. He was the most bored, skinny, African Santa I've ever seen and, while he didn't convince me to buy plants, he did make me laugh.

At the stoplights, there are always vendors. You can buy sunglasses, mesh "table tents" to keep the flies off of food, cellphone car chargers, drinks, rubber balls, brooms and clothes hangers which are very popular. There are often poor whites at the lights too but they only hold signs asking for money. Sometimes there are young black men whose faces are painted white who step in between the stopped cars, do a dance and then pass by with their can for some coins. I don't know what the history is for "white face" in South Africa but, depending on the mood and the day, it's often kind of creepy. But yesterday I saw a guy who tipped the scene into the absurdly hilarious category. He was dancing with a painted white face......and wearing a Santa hat with white dreadlocks hanging from the cap. The dreadlocks were whipping around his head while he danced and he clutched his can in one hand and hats for sale in the other. I fumbled to get out my cellphone camera but didn't make it in time for the green light so I watched the white-faced, dreadlocked black Santa prancing away in the rearview mirror.

Photos

The registration process for seeing our photos hasn't worked very well for some people so we're making the new photos visible to everyone.

Gecko