You Are Here

Port Elizabeth is not Los Angeles. This is stating the obvious to anyone who has been to both (or is even aware of both) and is on a similar level to saying a dog is not a cat or to be more precise, a dog is not turnip. 

If you were to drill down, straight down, through the metaphorical stereotype layers of Los Angeles, you would find yourself on the other side of the metaphorical stereotype world, or, as the people who live there like to call it, Port Elizabeth. Some people who used to live there have other, more coloureful names for the place. 

All completely undeserved. The world needs places like Port Elizabeth so that we can have more people who want to leave places and go to other places. Go and see things and hold a feeling in the pit of your belly, that there is a somewhere or perhaps an anywhere that is better than, here. 

Which is all a very round-about way of saying that I'm currently in Port Elizabeth for Christmas with my family and my brother's wedding. 

There is a silence here that I never noticed until I missed it. Really, really missed it. You know that low hum, the sound of the sea, caused by thousands of thousands of car tires along tarred roads? Here, there's only an ocean of deafening silence. Occasionally, a bird will start to say something then think better of it.

So that's where I am. 

_

After the first 10 hours of flying, you start to smell like a homeless person. After 20 hours, you start smelling like a dead homeless person. It took me 33 hours to fly here. There were points at which I would've paid a stranger to hose me down. 

LA to London to Johannesburg,  with delightful 5 hour layovers in both London and Johannesburg. 

This combined with the fact that I didn't really get too much time to go shopping while I was in LA (besides going down to the Manhattan Beach Mac Store and picking up this spiffy new Platinum MacBook, which I'm typing on currently. The keys make soft, refined expensive noises when you hit them.) means that I ended up splurging on duty free stuff on the plane, at LAX and at Heathrow. 

I'm not too much of an audiophile but I do tend to obsess over headphones and end up buying a new pair at least once if not twice a month. On the way through to Amsterdam, there were a pair of Bang & Olufsen ones that I really wanted but I figured I'd wait until I'd actually made some money first before buying them. So I got them on the way back, somewhere over Michigan and they worked incredibly well, for at least half an hour. Which is when the left speaker started to distort, horribly. I'm going to have some words with Mr Bang and Mr Olufsen. 

I will be back in Amsterdam and/or Los Angeles in February. I may do some more traveling before I start working again. But for all intents and purposes, for the next month or so, I'm going to have a drink on the beach. In silence.