21 posts tagged “holiday”
It really is an odd week here in South Africa. Monday was a public holiday because the 27 April Freedom Day fell on Sunday. Tomorrow is the 1 May Workers' Day holiday, and then Friday has been declared an extra public holiday because two holidays fell on the same day on 21 March (Good Friday and Human Rights Day).
That means the working week is just two days long - yesterday and today.
We don't have any real plans for the long weekend - except to do more work on the house in preparation for selling it. I am unlikely to post anything, so I'll see you on Monday!
The minister of home affairs and I took advantage of the Easter weekend to spend some time with my family down in the Eastern Cape province. As money is a little tight at the moment, we decided to drive down.
Being the avid statistics collector that I am, here are some of the details.
The road distance from our house to my parents' house in Chintsa East (near East London) is 995.5km. On the return trip we left Chintsa East at 01:57 and got back home at 13:15. The average moving speed was 99km/h and we stopped for a grand total of one hour and 16 minutes. Actual travelling time was 10 hours and two minutes. That's a bit better than the trip down, which took 10 hours and 18 minutes actual travelling.
We had a great weekend. We left Johannesburg on Friday morning at 01:30 and arrived in Chintsa East at lunchtime. The weather going down was awful - a lot of heavy rain - but for the rest of the weekend we experienced lovely weather.
It was so nice to spend some time with everyone (and to take photos of the beach and my parents' lovely garden).
We left yesterday morning, at, as I say, 01:57.
I returned to work today after a two-week summer vacation that seems to have just whizzed by.
During the first week the minister of home affairs came down with a stomach bug that lasted several days, but I am glad to say she recovered well. Before that, we celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary and spent a lovely day together. We celebrated with a wonderful lunch at Glenburn Lodge.
We spent quite a few days painting the inside of the house (I even spent my birthday painting!) to get the place ready to sell. There is still quite a lot to do, so our next few weekends have been planned for us!
Christmas was great. The minister and I spent the 24th cooking the next day's meal. Her parents joined us after church for a good meal and a very pleasant day. On the menu was tea and pannetone, followed by a lunch of mashed potato, roast vegetables, a cauliflower bake, haggis, Cornish hens and apricot turkey, and then dessert: Scottish Christmas pudding, ice cream and pumpkin pie (a tradition we have adopted from America). It was a veritable feast, and we were still eating it days later!
So now I am back at work. God willing, we will spend Christmas this year with my family in East London. Just 358 days to go!
Today begins Día de los Muertos. What are your rituals or occasions when you remember loved ones you have lost?
Never heard of it, to be honest. I assume it's a Catholic thing, and I'm not Catholic.
But it strikes me as a strange concept. I don't know why anything should be ritualised. That becomes formal and loses its meaning over time. Mourning, to me, is a genuine feeling of a sense of loss at someone's absence. And then, true mourning should not last so long as to become ritualised.
Sure, there are people I sometimes miss - my maternal grandmother, for example, who died in 1993. And there is my grandfather, who died this September. But I don't need occasions to honour them in some way. The best way I can honour them is to live my life according to God's will, to the best of my ability. That's it!
At Epcot, one of the theme parks at Disney World, we were treated to a fantastic fireworks show:
This is a ride I went on at Disney-MGM Studios in Disney World. It is called the Hollywood Tower Hotel, or Tower of Terror. You get into a lift (an elevator for our American friends) and it drops you 13 floors!
Here is another photo from our trip to the United States. This is the centre of the Disney World theme park Disney-MGM Studios (Mickey's hat from Fantasia):
Another photo from our trip to Disney World. This is Cinderella's Castle, at the centre of the Magic Kingdom theme park:
Here it is - the first post of a photo from our trip to DisneyWorld. This was taken during the Dreams Come True Parade which took place daily at 15h00 in the Magic Kingdom:
The minister of home affairs and I are back from our trip to the US.
We had an absolutely fantastic time, bar a nightmare flight back (we shall not fly Delta again nor use our travel agent again).
We are quite jetlagged and exhausted, but are both back at work today hoping we will manage to remain awake and alert.
I took hundreds of photos and video clips, so look forward to a detailed account of our trip in the near future, once I have processed everything.
It's odd to come back to winter!
