Intra-African Travel : The Gong Show I Know and Love

Our last night in Cape Town I went out with three of the Winnipeg attendings to a restaurant named Pigalle. I cannot even describe to you how amazing this restaurant was – it was like we had suddenly been transported into the 1940s with big booths and a 3 piece band playing jazz all night. The lead singer played the bongo drums and wore a tuxedo with a white jacket and there were huge chandeliers from the ceiling. It was me, three staff physicians and a newly appointed judge - needless to say the conversation was top-notch – and the food was probably some of the best food I have ever had in my life. I am certainly going to show my Mennonite roots here and talk for a minute about the food. I had this incredible smoked salmon-citrus-avocado starter and tomoto crusted line fish on roasted red pepper and truffle mashed potatoes and chocolate cheesecake for dessert…and I had some fancy champagne drink that the doctors said I should get and the wine never stopped flowing and in general an incredible evening. Thank you to the newly appointed Lord for picking up the tab – it’s so much better being taken out for dinner in a foreign country where you have to calculate an exchange rate. It was the perfect way to end the conference and to say farewell to Cape Town (I’m sure we will visit again – what an amazing city).

Today was spent with the lovely South African Airways. They are my favourite airline: extremely courteous staff, real cutlery, consistent in-flight entertainment and good food. Those things did not disappoint but there was certainly more chaos than on our previous flights.
This morning Raymond (the driver who picked us up from the airport last Saturday) dropped us at international departures because, silly me, I thought that would be where we were checking in since we had an international flight today. We got there and it was deserted. No passengers, no ticket agents, just an information guy who told us that even though we were flying to Nairobi today that we were technically a domestic flight cause our first stop was Johannesburg. The domestic terminal was “just there, not far” so we walked with the stroller, 2 roller luggages and a backpack – more ambitious than we had anticipated. We got there and the South African Airways Economy Class All Departures lineup was the size of the domestic terminal. Good thing we had given ourselves plenty of the time at the airport and I had partially checked-in online. Finally we got to the front of the line and dropped our bags off. We proceeded to our “gate” which looked like a Greyhound bus station that was half outside with multiple lines for the different destinations flying out of Cape Town that morning. When we went through this queue we got on a bus (so I guess in that way it was kind of a bus station J ) which drove us to the plane. We handed our stroller off to the woman at the bottom of the stairs saying we wanted it in Johannesburg and she assured us it would be there. The flight to Johannesburg was pretty uneventful – Cian was pretty decent and we sat beside a man who vigorously wrote in Chinese through the entire flight. We departed the flight (with Cian getting lots of smiles and waves from the flight attendants and the captains) and knew we had a short stop-over in Jo-burg so we had to be quick about things. Get to the base of the stairs – no stroller. Luckily the flight staff were excellent and helped us out realizing that it was shipped all the way through to Nairobi. It was a good thing that I had kept my sling so Cian went in the sling and we walked briskly through the Jo-burg airport. Obviously in a hurry we rush up to the Passport Control window to the slowest passport officer I have ever seen in all my international travels. It was like he was trying to personally best himself at seeing how slowly someone could check a passport but these are people you don’t want to rush for fear they will take you into some back room for further interrogation so we just stood there fidgeting so bad we looked like we had to pee trying to be perfunctory and polite. Finally we got through, walked through what is essentially a shopping mall and finally to the same bus-like terminal (remember this is the international terminal) where we were taken to the next plane. At this point I need to acknowledge the African man on the transit bus who offered me his seat because I was carrying a 20 lb baby like a sack of potatoes – I don’t believe anyone has ever offered me their seat on public transportation when I was pregnant or with a baby so I feel he needs special acknowledgement. When we finally got to the plane behind us sat some obnoxious and extremely loud (I am well aware this is coming from me) American woman who I am assuming is an OB/GYN resident in Kenya (not in Nairobi) because she spent the entire flight loudly expressing her opinions and creating the call schedule for their program. Seriously, you think that one of the perks of being on off-elective would be that I wouldn’t have to worry about the call schedule and then I spend a 4 hour flight listening to someone halfway across the world complain about theirs!

*Warning: This section might have a little too much information and/or might make you consider me somewhat of a bad mother so if you can’t handle either of those things please skip ahead to the next asterick*

Also on the plane we had Cian and Mommy’s Excellent Adventure where I took Cian to the bathroom to change him because we had no time in the airport. We had done this before so I figured we would be ok but I also had to go to the bathroom so I figured since I am so excellent at multi-tasking I could accomplish both in one outing. So Cian and I are in the airplane bathroom and I decide in all my infinite wisdom to put Cian in the sink because a) he fit and b) he was kind of wedged in there so he couldn’t really squirm out. Then I’m going to the bathroom and he starts making these noises that seem like he is less than impressed with the situation and since he’s usually a pretty good-natured kid I figure something must be wrong and since we’re not a great distance apart I reach up to see if I can readjust him. So I sort of pick him up out of the sink and water cascades off his rear-end spraying out of the sink that his bum/diaper has turned on full-blast over me, the diaper bag and the floor of the bathroom. So there I am pants around my ankles in a room I can’t really manoeuvre around in hanging onto a soaking wet baby by the armpits as he looks at me unsure of what’s going on not able to put him on my lap because he’s soaked and not able to put him anywhere else because I was in an airplane bathroom and I had no pants on. I eventually figured this whole situation out and returned to Keith having to explain the whole story – which was made even funnier when later I went to the other bathroom at the back of the plane and it had a changing tray.
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To top off this flight we showed Cian one of his Baby Einstein videos on the plane because he was a little antsy and the person sitting next to us was not completely baby-enamoured. At one point I turned my head and Cian managed to rip the CTRL key off the laptop. For those of you out there missing Keith jokes this is where Keith replied that this was a metaphor for how we were losing control. Grrrr….So we arrived in Nairobi safe and sound and our friend Lisa’s driver Francis picked us up. He helped us with our bags as we left the airport and said that hopefully we would be lucky because soon the rains would come…it was raining. I missed Africa.