Various

New Words

“vuvuvuvu” means “neither hot nor cold”. I think it’s pretty good.

Also, there’s a Kiiraqw word that I think is spelled “fuk”, and is pronounced how you’d expect. It means that something (for example, the car’s gas) has run out, and it allows for some great (and often unintentional) inter-lingual punnage (in situations such as when the car’s gas runs out, which happened this morning).

Exams and Break

Yesterday was the last day of classes for this school term (at my school, anyway [it seems that each school has a unique schedule here]). Next week is devoted to exams, and after next week, we have a month-long break! I’m planning to spend said break relaxing at my village, relaxing in Karatu, distributing kittens like Santa Claus, and doing some amount of teaching prep work for the next term. I’m looking forward to it.

Fun With Cars

So, I watched The Gods Must Be Crazy the other day. Many of the shenanigans with the land rover definitely didn’t seem as shenanigansy as they did when watching it in the US, because I now have firsthand experience of similar shenanigans with the land rovers here. Behold:

- Many of the cars here can’t start without a push. Unlike in TGMBC: 1. We do not have horses to help. 2. We do have hills to help (just push it down the hill and let gravity get it going). Though this morning, we encountered another car that needed a push, so our driver pulled up behind it, very gently made contact, and pushed it up to speed with our car.

- One of my village’s daladalas has a door with a broken latch, so they welded a chain-link-fence-latch-style latch on and use that instead.

- Periodically the cars here get stuck for a variety of reasons and need to be pushed out of the way/out of the ditch/etc. Often the driver will spin the wheels trying to get traction while a variety of passengers push/pull and then try not to get run over when the traction comes.

- People ride on the sides, backs, and roofs of cars all the time.

- People also board and depart moving cars all the time.

- Cars frequently have to wait for goats, donkeys, cows, or cow-drawn carts to get out of the road before continuing.