Does anybody hear you scream in cyberspace ?

It is getting awfully lonely out here in cyberspace ?
Time for you lot to pull out the finger and throw a few comments my way - otherwise the gin drinking is likely to start before 11 (am)
Hmm, what... Yar, pesky natives

Mozambique Impressions

Immigration procedures are such a pleasant way to be introduced to a country - and the Mozambican officials that I had to deal with at the border with Swaziland could almost win the award for the rudest immigration officials I have ever come across.
After standing in a queue with all the other bus passengers for over half an hour, as we were served by a single person, whilst 9 or ten other officials were standing at the neighbouring counter talking aimlessly, when I arrived at the counter I was informed that I had filled out the wrong form and another form was thrown at me and the instructions to fill it in were barked at me. So I diligently applied myself in the usual fashion to completing a form which requested
information which was clearly printed on my passport, and giving further details as to where I lived, where I was going to stay in Mozambique (presuming they let me in). In the space asking how long I was to stay in Mozambique I wrote 60 days just to see if I could lucky.

The form, and my cash then disappeared to a small office at the back of the building and I was told to wait. About ten minutes later somebody appeared from the office with my passport and form in hand, and he proceeded to have a conversation with the serving official, as if I was
not present. "This form is no good, he says he wants two months. This is not possible, he must fill in a new form" I overheard, so I piped up explaining that I could amend the form to make it a month. He then went on about how I hadn't filled in an address for Mozambique, when I told
him I only knew the name and not the address, he nodded his head to signify write it down anyway, and once I had completed the formalities he took the form back and wandered off to hos office.

Whilst I continued waiting some officious worker thought that I should be moved on as waiting in the waiting area presented some sort of existentialist threat to the state of Mozambique. He took a fair bit of persuading to allow me to remain in the waiting area, and despite the fact that by this time I was the only person there, the official who had taken my form and knew what I was doing choose to steadfastly ignore the discussion raging before her and pretend that the flies on the roof where occupying her full attention, rather than intervening to back up my claims.

In a way the immigration game is almost the perfect metaphor for the inanity of bureaucracy, the art of which third world countries seemed to have adopted from their colonisers, then have gone on to perfect. Exactly what a poor third world nation gains from having to print,
collect and store a scrap of paper with the same details contained in my passport, kept in some office on the border is beyond me. (I also observed the immigration official simply copy the details from my passport in to a register he had on his desk, thereby creating another
copy of the essential data about me.) Other than the details on my passport I responded to every other question on the form with a creative answer, my address in Australia was in Darwin, my occupation was a Professional Ignoramus. I didn't even get to spend one night in the
hostel that I wrote on the form as it was full, so that would have provided little use tracking me down. At the end of it all though I did get a fancy sticker visa in my passport, even with a little flashy hologram in the corner, and two stamps over the top of this (with, of course, my details written on to it by the dutiful official as well). It is not as if Mozambique is being flooded with people trying to get in, and the largest group of foreigners to visit (South Africans) don't
need a visa, they just fill in a form and they are in.
So what exactly the point of collecting and rewriting all of this information is beyond me. I am sure that the people employed to collect the information, and the other associated costs could be better spent on providing some of the essentials to those millions in Mozambique who go
without. I suppose how if a State is to be a State it must surround itself in all the trappings of a State, nothing more important than a bureaucracy that does nothing.

So far Mozambique has provided plenty of linguistic fun, it is like speaking Spanish but putting on a funny accent.Surprisingly I can understand most of what people say, relying on my Spanish and the few tricks I learnt when I studied Portuguese in Mexico. All those nasal vowel sounds and the nya that sounded so wrong in Mexico now actually evoke a response from people.

South African impressions

• It seems that everyone (by that I mean white people) in South Africa has shocking skin - that is my shorthand test so far to see if people are locals. Combined with the incredible number of goatees and the epidemic of mullets. All appear to confirm my worst suspicions about these strange bunch of people.

• My first little reminder of being back in the Third World - I go to the terminus to catch a city bus and after waiting half an hour without seeing one bus I ask someone sitting on the bench next to me whether there are any buses. He explains that the drivers are on strike and that if you are lucky one or two buses a day come past. Initially I thought, just my luck, the one day I want to catch a bus the drivers are on strike. Later I found out that the strike had been going two months, after the city sold the bus routes to a private company without the drivers. The drivers went on strike, burnt a few buses, and now neither the city or the buyer runs a bus service. Of course there is an alternative, they are called meat lockers, white vans and minivans, run by private operators, stripped of their original seating to fit 20 people in a Tarago sized van !
• Durban conjures up pictures of a decaying, perhaps even post apocalyptic Gold Coast. There is a narrow strip of high rise apartments along the shore, on the edge of a sweeping bay, flanked on one side by a huge port and three sugar towers standing to attention, and a series of points stretching out to as far as the eye can see on the other. The rest of the city slowly climbs away from the beach, via a few love hotels - pay by the hour - through a section of Japanese imported car yards, through down town to the railway tracks
  
• However everywhere there is the air of decay, paint peeling off buildings, plenty of windows that have broken and not been replaced, boarded up buildings - sometimes with rubble strewn at their feet as they begin to show the effects of no maintenance, rubbish lying about in the streets in large piles, that general thick layer of black, greasy dirt that covers cities so quickly, people sleeping in the streets, and semi-permanent camps at the end of dead-end streets or on median strips - with little fires burning as kids and drunks mingle in the piles of rubbish sorting through what has been discarded by others. I can't help imagine what it must have been like back in the day - a kind of glittering seaside city for the folks from Joburg to come down and visit for the weekend - I guess this is what the South Africans who reminisce about the good old days mean. Things definitely look as they are going to get worse before they get better.
  

• I moved out of Durban to a seaside suburb, perched precariously on a steep sand duned hill, looking as though with a good rain the houses will slide in to the sea. (Strangely it reminds me of those 70's brick veneer Australian coastal towns, built before people recognised that perhaps the suburban home wasn't the most appropriate design for a coastal dwelling)  The suburb is predominantly - no, that word doesn't capture it - almost exclusively (that's better, implied exclusion) white. In fact the only black people I see are in the back of utes and trucks driven around by fat white men, delivering them to various building sites, and the odd gardener here and there. Whilst official separation may have ended a while back, there is still a de facto separation - the town centre is pretty much straight black as to the market area, the shops are owned by whites or Indians, only black people travel on the meat locker buses or even on the intercity buses, white people all have cars. The beach suburbs (and the water) and white only, except on Sundays when blacks come down to the beach for a swim. There is also a latent tension in the air, whites look skittish and don't really look anyone in the eye - afraid of those uppity blacks who are now allowed to look you in the eye and are capable of who knows what, blacks look afraid - every time I was walking along a footpath in the suburb and a black person was coming the other way they would stop, step off the footpath and wait for me. And everyone bemoans the crime and the general insecurity. Yet despite all this negativity people are incredibly friendly, lots of people went out of their way to help me out - giving directions, helping me on to a bus, indicating the best place to eat, even shouting me a few beers at the internet cafe so they could talk about Australia. And whilst I was only there for less than two weeks I didn't see any crime or really feel that unsafe. So who knows what it all means !!!
  

Americana (Last part)

• 1820's GRAFITTI

The Temple of Dendur was relocated and rebuilt holus bolus in the Metropolitan Museum of Art t avoid its destruction due to the building of the Aswam dam in Egypt. The temple is huge, taking up an entire wing, and is housed in a purpose built building as large as the rest of the Egyptian collection.You can walk through the temple, and what struck me was that the building some of the stones contained graffiti from the 1820's. And what insightful piece of wisdom did people think was important enough to deface a monumental building to pass on to future generations ? Such wisdom can be summarised with the simple phrase (insert the particulars) " _(Name)_ woz ere, from _(Place)__ in 18__" It makes you wonder whether human beans ever change, from marks on the wall in caves in France, to elaborate spray painted designs on trains, it seems we simply which to make the point that we came, we saw and we left evidence thereof.
(One of the pieces of graffiti had a name, followed by New York, 1830, and it made me wonder if some family in New York comes to the Museum every year to show there grand kids and great grand kids what there grandfather did back in the 1800's)

• BREAD AND WATER

Walking around Central Station and Fifth Ave, past a swanky restaurant, noticing that all people are eating are bread, salad and water. But I guess if you have the money you have to flaunt it - wondering how much they charge for bread and water these days.

• THE PARADOX OF THE F BOMB

At the same restaurant, I overhead two suits having a conversation
" There is your fucking problem... That fucking guy is never fucking going to pay"
New Yorkers are known for their directness, but the F bomb is everywhere on the the street, yet you never ever hear it on TV - with one exception. I didn't quite work this out completely but apparently it works like this - free to air TV has no swearing at all, basic cable likewise has no swearing either, however if you have extended cable - for which you have to pay a pretty sum - then you suddenly hear swearing coming from the idiot box - but usually only late at night. Thus only the rich get to hear the language normally associated with the poor and uneducated.
Yet somehow despite this straight out wealth based discrimination reserving swearing on the idiot box for only those rich enough to afford extended cable TV, the democratic street allows everyone to drop F bombs as frequently as they like.

• EPONYMOUSITIS

Eponymousitis [€ponImsItis] n the social disease in which every act of philanthropy must be recognised by naming the use for to which the money was put, commonly seen in foundations (Ford, Gates) museum wings, university chairs etc. Endemic to the entirety of the US. (Query whether really is philanthropy is the give receives something in return ?)

Grand Central Station

The island of Manhattan, which for most people is what is New York, is covered with  a plethora of buildings, but there is one that whilst not towering above the others certainly serves as an outstanding testimony to the art of constructing a public edifice to be at once a lasting, well designed, efficient, effective and aesthetically appealing statement.

In 1871, when New York was still a small town, the city authorities alarmed at the way steam trains kept exploding and killing people, passed a law that restricted trains to below 42nd Street. At this time New York was the epicentre of US trade - almost everything that was traded into or out of the US came through New York, and of course in the age of rail roads, this meant most freight was carried by train. At this time the station that was to become Grand Central was sixty tracks wide - the length of five city blocks (from 42nd to 50th street).  A bright spark at one of the railroad companies came up with the idea of putting the tracks underground - or more accurately building over the top of the tracks. (If you walk between Lexington and Madison avenues between 42nd and 50th streets you will notice that you have to walk up a hill, which is completely artificially created - you are walking between two and three stories up and over the railway tracks. All of the buildings built on this hill have specially designed steel foundations that fit between the tracks)



Grand Central Station was opened in 1913 and was built so that no major structural work would be required for 700 years. (The railway companies took full advantage of this and no major maintenance was carried out until 1995 because the companies wanted to knock down the station and sell the real estate. This was the fate of the apparently even more impressive Penn Station built around the same time - it was demolished and the land sold off. Notice the two small black squares in the photo - that was the colour of the roof in 1995 which restoration work began) 


The station was constructed as a statement of the achievements of a grand society, and was intended to uplift all those who passed through it, encouraging them to see the full range of human potential. The design of the station was a work of passive architectural genius, designed to funnel people in and out in the quickest time possible:

• despite descending four floors underground there are no stairs - only gently sloping walkways
• passageways begin as narrow, low roofed walkways and progressively become wider and taller, leading to large, open well lit rooms with atriums
  
• only 6 platforms were used for arriving passengers, all grouped together, with a narrow walkway that lead out to an open meeting room with an atrium, and then directly out on to the street to a taxi rank or to a subway train. Departure platforms were located a floor below so that departing and arriving passenger wouldn't cross paths
• the building didn't have air-conditioning, instead the large windows in the main hall were opened and the sea breeze (after all Manhattan is an island no more than 2 miles wide) would blow through and cool the building). In winter the windows were closed and the 100 watts per person of human generated body warmth was exploited to heat the station

(Later most of these design principles were appropriated by shopping centre builders to subconsciously direct customers through shopping centres - obviously with the principles reversed)

These days when most public buildings are now more than slabs of concrete, chugging through the world's resources at an alarming rate to heat and cool them, with no apparent underlying design other than to reduce the cost of construction, it is reassuring to see that humanity does actually have the knowledge and ability to construct functional  and aesthetically pleasing buildings which "uplift the human spirit". If only the knowledge could be applied.