REVISITING SOUTH AFRICA (V): PLEASURE!*

During this stay I finally could experiment, at the Lanzerac Spa, something I’ve always wanted, but never got to do, because whenever and wherever I tried to have a go at it before, sessions were all either temporarily unavailable or fully booked: stone therapy.

It was a full body massage with stones bathed in natural oils alternatively cold and hot.

It was a bit disappointing because I didn’t get to rest with stones sitting down all my spine as commonly seen in the advertising pictures, but it was a pleasure nevertheless.

***

I started this visit with some of the things that annoy me at the OR Tambo International Airport, only to leave it in the most pleasurable way: at the check-in counter, soon after I handed-in my documents, the assistant, a very young black man, started talking to me in Portuguese. It took me a few moments to recover from the surprise, upon which I said to him something like being always impressed at “how far Angolans can get” – yes, from his accent I could immediately tell that he was not Mozambican, which would be a more plausible hypothesis given the sheer numbers of our brothers from the Indic in South Africa…
He then explained: “nao sei se ja’ ouviu falar do 'Batalhao 32'… os meus ‘parentes’ faziam parte desse batalhao e eu nasci aqui” (note that ‘parente’ in Portuguese means ‘relative’, but he really meant ‘parents’, or ‘pais’ in Portuguese). I then asked how come he could speak Portuguese, to which he told me that they normally speak Portuguese at home.
I was really pleased to meet him, not exactly, although also, because he spoke Portuguese, but mainly because I felt like I had found a long lost relative from whom I had been separated by the war… I was also pleased at the fact that he was well employed in a country where foreigners or their descendents find it very difficult to get integrated.

So, the end of my “revisitation of South Africa” was all marked by one thing: pleasure!

*Pleasure!: that’s how South Africans generally answer to something like ‘thanks’.

During this stay I finally could experiment, at the Lanzerac Spa, something I’ve always wanted, but never got to do, because whenever and wherever I tried to have a go at it before, sessions were all either temporarily unavailable or fully booked: stone therapy.

It was a full body massage with stones bathed in natural oils alternatively cold and hot.

It was a bit disappointing because I didn’t get to rest with stones sitting down all my spine as commonly seen in the advertising pictures, but it was a pleasure nevertheless.

***

I started this visit with some of the things that annoy me at the OR Tambo International Airport, only to leave it in the most pleasurable way: at the check-in counter, soon after I handed-in my documents, the assistant, a very young black man, started talking to me in Portuguese. It took me a few moments to recover from the surprise, upon which I said to him something like being always impressed at “how far Angolans can get” – yes, from his accent I could immediately tell that he was not Mozambican, which would be a more plausible hypothesis given the sheer numbers of our brothers from the Indic in South Africa…
He then explained: “nao sei se ja’ ouviu falar do 'Batalhao 32'… os meus ‘parentes’ faziam parte desse batalhao e eu nasci aqui” (note that ‘parente’ in Portuguese means ‘relative’, but he really meant ‘parents’, or ‘pais’ in Portuguese). I then asked how come he could speak Portuguese, to which he told me that they normally speak Portuguese at home.
I was really pleased to meet him, not exactly, although also, because he spoke Portuguese, but mainly because I felt like I had found a long lost relative from whom I had been separated by the war… I was also pleased at the fact that he was well employed in a country where foreigners or their descendents find it very difficult to get integrated.

So, the end of my “revisitation of South Africa” was all marked by one thing: pleasure!

*Pleasure!: that’s how South Africans generally answer to something like ‘thanks’.