SA Flight 63

I've made it on the South Africa - no thanks to South African flight 63. I've found South African to be a real nice airline, but today was an adventure. I caught the shuttle from the Taj Pamodzi (which is a fantastic hotel - although I made the unpleasant discovery this morning that my room was not actually prepaid afterall, which meant another $900 had to be added to my already overwhelmed credit card) around 11:15 this morning, and getting to the Lusaka airport was no trouble. Things were pretty busy/chaotic at the airport with some tangled, meandering, glacially slow lines to check in. Luckily I was standing in line to a new friend, a German woman named Maya who also attended the conference. So we could swap stories about her daughter (aged one) and my son (aged twenty-two) - plus she had arrived early with her boss and went on this amazing flight down to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls as well as what sounded like a wonderful visit to some lodge on the river. It included a trip up and down the river in a boat, with elephants, giraffes and other wildlife just yards away - just made me want to go back to Zambia even more. I got stuck in a souvenir shop trying to spend excess kwacha - I would have bought more but the guy behind the counter was so slow that I thought I'd miss my flight. His answer to my concern - "oh, they'll wait, don't worry.". The plane was fine, but the majority of the crew seemed to be making their first official run, if not their first flight. The very young man and woman who were serving the meals (obviously this was not a flight on a US airlines because they actually fed us a hot meal - and on a short flight) were moving at a comically leisurely pace. At one point I saw the more experienced attendant in the front catch their eye and give them the hand signal to hurry up - except that it was more like "hurry the hell up and don't make me come back there!". At one point I heard the pilot say that we were something forty miles outside of Johannesburg and they were still several rows away from me. My assumption at that point was that they were going to cancel the meal service, but instead they soldiered on. And then we hit the turbulence - and some serious turbulence, the kind where you're lifted off the seats and the seatbelt actually catches you (I was flashing back to the first episode of Lost). The young woman lost control of the aluminum trays and four went flying majestically through the aie - two landing on the floor, and two landing in the lap of the young man sitting next to me. He handled it better than I would have, and smiled bravely as a hot mass of fish and vegetables soaked into his crotch. Oh, and he was reading Crime and Punishment (submit your own literary or moral joke here). The rest of the flight was uneventful and we actually arrived almost on time (although I've never actually ate while the plane was in its final descent before) - and my luggage made it. I hung around a little to see if Maya's suitcase was going to arrive, before I figured out that her luggage had been checked on through to Frankfurt even though she had not been given the ticket for the Joburg-Frankfurt part of the trip back in Lusaka. I tried ti convince that she just needed to check in and that her suitcase was in fact already on its way to the Frankfurt plane but she said that she had been told in Lusaka to pick up her suitcase in Frankfurt and check in in again. My response - "and exactly what did you see in the Lusaka airport that makes you think that they had any idea what they were talking about?" convinced her that all was well and off she trundled to try and get her boarding pass. No harm no foul, except that she had to go through customs twice instead of just transitting (international travel is kooky). Anyway, I arrived safely in Joburg and my friend Zanetta picked me up and delivered me safely to my hotel in Pretoria. Along the way we had a great meal in a quirky and great restaurant with a Brazil/Mozambique theme, but more on that later.