Nice Night out in Windhoek Last Wekend
By Michael Paskevicius On Friday, September 19, 2008 At 3:25 PM
I am a Canadian living and working in Windhoek, Namibia. Snail Mail: Michael Paskevicius C/O The Polytechnic of Namibia Private Bag 13388 13 Storch Street Windhoek, Namibia
Hello, I just stumbled across your blog and wanted to say hello. I just killed about 90 minutes browsing through all the posts. Very interesting! And you seem to be very good at keeping at it. Looks like the posts date back at least 4 years or so.
My partner and I lived in Johannesburg for 7 months, September '06 thru April of '07, for his job (HIV Vaccine Trials and Research).
South Africa is a country that gets and stays under your skin, in both good and bad ways. There are many things I miss terribly - though I'm glad to be back in the states. I'll return some - think I'll wait until after 2010, at least. Though I'm sure my partner will visit there at least a few times between now and then for his job.
I always wanted to make it to Namibia, but we didn't get to. We saw a lot of South Africa, including Cape Town and Durban and the surrounding areas. Saw Swazi, Gabarone, Maputo. But Namibia was just far away that we could never quickly and easily plan.
Best of luck to you there. You seem happy and comfortable, and I wonder how much longer you'll be in Southern Africa. Certainly in Joburg we always felt the spectre of crime and took so many precautions, lived behind walls & gates & electric fence, panic button in a couple different rooms of the house, etc. My perception from various reports and your blog is that living in Namibia is nowhere that... paranoid? Fair to say?
One thing I like about your blog is that you do use lots of photos (a picture is worth a thousand words), and that you can click on them and see the high-res size.
We had DSL in Joburg (provided by the hugely monopolistic and extortionarily-priced Telkom) and even though it was DSL it was much slower than DSL as we knew it in the states. Probably due to a simpler technological infrastructure keeping everything together? Last I heard South Africa's death grip on Internet access and rates was to be opened up to competition in the not too distant future. I wonder what's going on with that now.
I look forward to checking in with your blog from time to time.
-Alex Moreno
Seattle, WA USA