It's a country alright

Since I fainted in the shower the other day, nary avoiding the sharp edges and blunt walls (upon a third-degree regarding the painful bump on the side of my head this morning, the Viking admitted to witnessing me "possibly having bounced my head off the wall a teensy bit" as I went down, before he could completely catch the limp me), I thought that I would have plenty of time to write this superbly long (and needless to say, eloquent as shit) post about driving through Namibia and Botswana and packing for Europe and all that excitement I'm about, on account of the Viking taking all of the car keys with him, so that I wouldn't pass out on the road and kill myself. Or possibly one of the poor guards at our gate (who jump out of nowhere straight in front of my car due to no fault of mine, as you all know).

What?

Yes, we shower together. We're that kind of a childless and sickeningly sweet deal. With hefty doses of caffeine and alcohol thrown in, and I guess now, complete with some earnest Victorian drama, just without the stifling corset.

But I just kind of sat there all of Monday and instead of uploading the photos from my camera onto this here laptop, I kept googling 'brain cancer', 'hypoglycemia', and ' exercise and sudden loss of consciousness', like the raging hypochondriac that I am, as well as 'how to hot-wire a car' in case the hypochondriac would start to feel her brain swelling, cooking, leaking out through any kind of orifice, and/or filling with blood. As one so often does.

(Naturally the smart and most definitely the sane thing would be to hit the road if one's brain was leaking out of one's orifice(s). Yes.)

But she didn't. Which is good, because I don't think I even know where the lever to open the hood of the car is located, having never googled that (I clearly still have no idea how to do any kind of wiring, hot or cold, or even gently spiced, Google), which would have left me with no other choice than to furiously kick the car and yell at it, and that would have surely worsened whatever brain-condition the hypochondriac had arrived at, and we all know what a mess that would have made in the garage. And the maid hates cleaning the garage. Spiders, bottles, guts, and what have you.

So yeah. Namibia. On Wednesday Thursday (I went out to lunch on Wednesday and managed to raise my trophy wife status to new heights by spending a good 7 hours at it) instead. While I'm supposedly going to the dentist and packing for Europe. In list form:

1. Namibia is pretty awesome. Not in that intense, in your face with experiences way, but more like in that "didn't we drive past here a 1000 kilometers ago? Oh no, it's just that the desert goes on for like... forever" way. Not to mention the "are we still in the third desert, or is this the fourth consecutive desert now?" kind of way. Or the "dude, shit, I think I see an actual person, and I'm pretty sure it's totally not a tiny dune this time" way.

2. There are very few people in Namibia. But there is a lot of sand. And somehow these people, who are even fewer in the places where the sand is mostly (the locals call it the desert as you might have gathered), have made an industry out of charging Germans lots and lots of money to drive them from one place with a fair amount of sand to a place with much more sand. And sometimes some dead trees.

We didn't let them drive us, seeing as they thought we were German too and made me royally pissed off at them, leading to our car now being half-filled with sand and making a sad noise when the wheels are turned sharply to the left at a high speed (which is incidentally how I like to make my left turns).

And the car was not a happy car to begin with.

3. It is very likely that on any given day in Namibia the amount of German tourists, all of whom seem to like to travel in herds in big air-conditioned busses, order beer loudly in German, and own creepy, circa mid-nineties styled fanny packs, exceeds the amount of actual Namibians. Statistically speaking. Or maybe it just seems that way, because they are so very... German*... like all the time.

4. Oysters. Who knew you could even prepare them breaded?

5. There are some pretty big holes on this continent. Most of them don't make for good photos but you are urged to go see them all. As are all of the German tourists, who, by the fifth big hole in the ground, you begin to suspect might be following you. And not in that good way, but with their fanny packs rudely pointing at you every time you glance in their direction. Not a good feeling, let me tell you, being eyed by a gathering of nineties fanny packs.

The holes do NOT come equipped with functioning toilets. And now many Germans are telling their neighbors of this hippie-woman with a mohawk and a camera around her neck who felt so moved by the beauty of [insert name of hole here] that she felt compelled to dance and jump up and down upon seeing it.

And then she might have even leaked a little.

6. Any Namibian as well as a Botswanan town can be comprised of a gas station and a bakery/liquor store in its entirety.

The town of Solitaire

7. The cows in Botswana very likely outnumber people. Or at least while people are nowhere to be seen,  the cows like to hang out on the roads, especially the Trans-Kalahari highway, and it makes little impact on them to see you hurtling down that very same road at a breakneck speed smack towards them.

8. Forcing the Viking to learn how to change a tire was a good thing indeed.

Yes, I own a mint-green car.

9. Seeing the sun rise over anything is the best feeling ever, a sunrise will always kick a sunset's ass, and sunrise has the best ever light for photos. Ever. The only downside is the lack of sundowners at sunrise, but I'm working on that as I write, and contemplating a possible inclusion of a coffee-based cocktail as a morning picker-upper or some such thing.

10. Now that I'm actually studying to become a real photographer, turns out I don't really take that many photos anymore.

*Normally I have very little problems with Germans, although I must admit I'm quite put off by that whole Nazism thing, and this television show about a bunch of German highschool kids they used to show in Finland. Also, I don't like their idea of grammar. Or the schlager tradition (it's too sing-along-y, which is always my downfall). Or beer. 

Ten points. Whew. There you go. I'm onto bigger and more important things. Such as figuring out whether I should a) pack my stripper-heels instead of my skull and bones hoodie, or b) just wear my golf clubs as an accessory on board the plane. Tough decisions. But I must go, those stripper-heels are not going to windex themselves.

I have to go tell the maid to do it.