mo gae wa me mo Gaborone

This is another link to another snapfish album. Sorry, people, for making you open a new windows, but I don't know an easier way. The pay-off for opening the new window is seeing inside my charming abode in Extension 12.

Gaborone is made up of extensions, blocks, and phases (and probably a few other pieces I'm missing), each of which are numbered. Directions are given using a combination of these numbers, plots numbers, and major landmarks. Telling a local you live off of Kaunda Crescent will get you nowhere; apparently, even saying that you live off of Kaunda Crescent behind the South Ring Mall will get you nowhere. People want to know your extension, block, or phase number, and maybe your plot number. Naming nearby malls and major roads can sometimes help, but it really depends. What people like to here is something like: "I live in phase 2, in plot number 32651, behind Game City and next to Thabo's Bottle Shop." I think.

I took a taxi last night to a braai. Because I didn't know the plot number and couldn't describe to the taxi where to come, I walked down to the South Ring Mall, called the taxi service, and told him to pick me up at the Caltex gas station (or garage, for all you southern Africans out there). The South Ring Mall is a pretty piddly mall, though it does have a braai place, a grocery store, a liquor store, and a pharmacy. The reason I say it's piddly is that no one at the braai knew where I was talking about when I said I lived behind South Ring Mall.

The host of the braai had given me directions that indicated the house was in phase 2, but I had forgotten to write that part down. I had driving directions, though, and a plot number, and a major landmark in the form of the Botswana Defense Force (BDF) flats. I even had an orientation to the landmark, e.g., not so far north as the BDF flats. The taxi driver seemed nonetheless rather dismayed that I couldn't tell him in which extensions, phase or block the house was located. He radioed dispatch, who looked up the plot number and found it in phase 2.

I decided to ask for a little help, and learned from the driver that I live in extension 12. (This is, of course, nowhere marked locally, and either you're lucky enough to simply know or you carry around a book of maps the size of a math textbook and look it up as needed. I don't have a map book yet.) I am not far from 'the village', which is, I think, meant to be the part of Gaborone that existed before the town became the capital.

Historical disgression: Gabs was, before independence, pretty much a sleepy backwater Tswana village. The capital of the Bechuanaland Protectorate was over the border in Mafeking, which has since be renamed/returned to Mafikeng, meaning 'the place of stones'. The name made no sense to me until I watched a documentary filmed there and saw that there really are big rocks sticking out of the ground all over the place.

Needless to say, a good, coherent city map of Gabs doesn't seem to exist, and it's only silly ex-pats like me that try to navigate using street names. That said, here's a map of major roads (thanks to SADC), and if you enlarge it and find the intersection of Kaunda and South Ring, I live in its corner somewhere.

I got to the braai without much incident. Getting home was another story entire. I don't have a car yet, and my knowledge of Gabs is limited to what I have covered on foot or by combi. (Combis are minibus taxis that, in Botswana, are pretty well regulated, meaning they follow set routes, charge set fares, etc.) The point being, I don't drive around Gabs -- at least, not yet -- and directing the poor people who had agreed to give me a lift home was difficult to say the least. The driver's husband, who was feeling his booze, kept trying to engage me in conversation while I was desperately trying to get my bearings. The driver, on the other hand, whose sobriety I hadn't questioned, seemed inclided in turn left whenever I asked her to turn right. I hadn't had that much to drink, but it was after 1am and I had been up early. It really took only a few false turns, and I was somewhat pleased with myself that it didn't take longer than it did.

All the more reason to find my own set of wheels. More about that to come...