I think they went in between the letters R and T.

Here, have a penguin! Or what the hell, have two. (No, you may not take possession of the third. That one is already spoken for by some obscure wildlife organization.)

See (or hear, if that rocks your boat in a less sea-sickening way and unlike the waves that make it almost impossible to get back from Robben Island to the safe haven of the Cape Town Waterfront [that's where they keep the coffee and wine], but are still not enough to scare away the secret tears that almost came at the sight of Nelson Mandela's cell, if you know what I mean, which, naturally, you do.) that silence right there. Right below this here post. A silence of days, if not weeks.

A good, calm silence. Not a thought (okay, maybe a few hundred in my weakest of moments) spared for the abyss of the internets.

I missed you all, and even more than that loved being missed by you. But it was good.

Seriously good.

That silence was me falling off the end of the earth, which, purely statistically and the South African politicians alone providing proof aplenty of this, on the tip of this here continent I inhabit is a much more common occurrence than one might think. Unlike the politicians though, I fell gloriously, and right into the mix of family and great friends, lions (who again refused to eat me - Are they not into pickled things or what is this aversion all about? Am I not good enough?), windy and not so much beaches with white, warm sand, French champagne at its nose-tickling best, farting rhinos (both actual as well as a few more commonly referred to as my brothers), golf, great wine at great restaurants, dolphins, much too much wine at much too many vineyards, talk, discussions, penguins, chatter, smells of the sea and one unfortunate giraffe carcass, one severely flat mountain at sunset, and real, fleshy people, places, things, coffee, and some more of that wine, in random locations this time though.

A decisive sip of Calvados at the golf course.

And I'm just now coming up for (net)air. Only to find that small ants have made a busy apartment complex (or an Asian Shopping Mall, if those kinds of things are more familiar to you) of my MacBook Pro, and that I'm in serious need of an external hard drive (and the various skills involved in using it. Please tell me to create folders before moving a thousand pictures onto there. Thanks.) should I want to empty my camera of the 2000 large JPEGs firmly lodged on there and depicting mainly penguins in various (okay, pretty much just the one) positions.

They are cute, those penguins. But still!

Zeus, what in the name of hockey sticks, soured molasses, and one six-year-old are you playing at? What kind of a signs are these? It almost feels as if me on the internets is no longer working for you? Or is this just payback for the disappearance? What?

*kills an ant making its way across the space bar*

Hey Zeus my man, you are leaving me with very little direction, ants or no ants, when you very well know the in-laws are making their way towards South Africa practically as I write. You know they have packed their fridge down in case I refuse to feed them, or Africa is completely void of anything eatable, which of course is an understandable, rational belief. Yup. You know.

This might just be the end of Extranjera altogether. Or at least the remotely sober-ish, non-biting one.

Look for me in the bottle. The one by the penguins.