Out of Africa!

Here begins the narrative of my visit to the African continent, (my second visit, although it turns out folks in South Africa do not count Egypt as an African country.  They say it is a Mediterranean country.  Who knew?)

When you write a summary like this, of a journey, you can start it anywhere, at any point - I mean the beginning is favorite, but which beginning?  Packing?  Getting into the car to drive to the airport?  Buying the plane tickets a year ahead of time?  Getting a half dozen immunizations (urg) and starting malaria preventatives?  

Well, for me, there is only one place to begin this story, and that's with my eyebrows.

Yeah you heard me.

There were ten of us, on this trip.  And we were all at the airport, in the first class lounge, and I was dwelling on the fact that I had a) failed to book an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed prior to traveling and b) totally forgotten to pack a pair of tweezers.  Doom.  My eyebrows looked like untrimmed privet.  I was afraid that any bushmen we met would mistake me for their Queen, and whisk me away to chuck me into a live volcano or similar*.  This in the face of all logic and a total dearth of live volcanos in Botswana and Zimbabwe.  Shrug.  You guys know how much I've been poking fun at Anoop Desai on American Idol for his giant black caterpillar brows...yeah.  Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones...

Let's depart from the eyebrow train of thought for a second, and talk about first class lounges.  Sure, the drinks and snacks are free, and the chairs are padded, but what y'all might not realize is that those f*ers are CROWDED.  Usually you cannot FIND a padded chair, because they are all taken, and it's standing room only in there.  You feel like you're at an awkward casual-dress cocktail party, with one hand holding a free drink, and the other hand holding a napkin with a stone-cold appetizer of some sort, and your elbows tucked in really close to your body, keeping a psychotic eye on your luggage which is on the floor across the room, just in case some other first class passenger makes a lunge for your toothbrush.  In my case, I was also speculating about whether or not any of the luggage around me contained that most erudite and coveted of items: a pair of tweezers.

A human being can only endure so much of these luxurious surroundings.  We had to get out.  So a bunch of us left a second bunch of us to guard the luggage, (when there are ten of you traveling together, there are always extra eyeballs available to keep psychotic eyes on things), and we set out into the bowels of JFK.  Only a few doors down from the lounge, I found the Promised Land.  An Asian waxing parlour!  I told the rest of my party that I'd track them down when I was done, and I sidled over.

Allow me to introduce Your Hindbrain.  That's the part of your brain that has kept your species alive through times of great travail and hardship;  times of fire, flood, and huge bloody packs of wolves; times of glaciers, inter-tribal warfare, and angry volcano gods...and even though the chances of modern man encountering any of these things are pretty slim, there are still times when your hindbrain feels compelled to give you some input on your recent choices.  And during those times your hindbrain nudges the rest of your brain and says, "Psssst...what you're about to do?  Yeah...it's a bad idea.  No no, really.  Take it from me.  I know bad ideas, and that's what you've got here.  You do not want to cover yourself in honey and lie down on the ant hill.  You don't want to sleep in a straw hut downwind from a wild fire.  You might wish to reconsider making your home at the lowest point of the Nile valley, on the river bank, during a drought because droughts don't last forever.  I'm just sayin'.  And whatever you do, don't go poking that alpha wolf in the eye with a sharp stick and saying, 'good doggie.'  Trust me."  

Then you have a choice.  You can either listen to your hindbrain, or you can ignore it.  When I saw that Asian Massage Salon in the airport, offering a variety of waxing services, my hindbrain kicked the bloody hell out of the rest of my brain and howled, "Don't do it!!!"  But of course I ignored it because it's like your appendix - clearly outmoded and unnecessary in this modern world.  What does IT know about Asian waxing parlours?  I walked up to the group of 8 or so Specialists outside the shop, and I stood there, grinning expectantly at them.  They ignored me, and talked to one another.  I continued to stand there, although my grin was becoming strained because my hindbrain was screaming that here, clearly was a) more evidence that the plan was flawed in some way and b) a bloody good opportunity to walk away.  Eventually one of them looked at me, and said, "Yes!"  It was not a question.  It was an exclamation.  I said, expressively, "I need to have my eyebrows waxed."  She wasted no time with further talk.  She seized my arm in a very tight grip, and hauled me into the shop, yelling over her shoulder at one of the other technicians still standing in the doorway.  The other technician ignored her.  She yelled some more.  Technician still ignored her.  She dragged me BACK out the door, and grabbed the other technician.  My arm was passed from one iron grip to another.  I was steered firmly towards a vibrating chair.  

They terrify me but I sat down.  She hit a variety of buttons which caused major earthquakes in the region of my lumbar and small mudslide tremors down by my calves.  The chair reclined.  Then she bustled around the chair for a bit clucking to herself.  She appeared to be severely annoyed that I'd become her responsibility.  Suddenly she made a noise of inarticulate fury, and grabbed my upper arm again in her vise-grip.  She indicated that the wax pot was stone-cold, and that I needed to vacate that chair in favor of another - preferably one with a functional wax pot.  I was steered across the shop, to a small room with a bed.  And then, for reasons I could not explain, I became the responsibility of a third small Asian woman.  The previous ones had mysteriously disappeared.  

I was positioned upon the table, and the wax pot was tested and found acceptable.  I closed my eyes as the technician began spooling wax from the pot up onto the applicator...but they snapped open again immediately, because the technician had begun making a truly bizarre noise.  I thought at first that she had burned herself really, really badly somehow.  She was hissing very loudly between her teeth, in and out, in and out, like a really moist Lamaze breathing technique.  The pain must be intense, I thought.  I realized shortly my mistake.  She was not hissing in pain, she was blowing, terribly, upon the wax to cool it somehow.  I say "terribly" because the hissing and blowing was really, really wet sounding.  I mean it sounded like she'd collected spit in her mouth, and then hissed through it onto the wax.  

I'm not normally a very fastidious person.  I mean some things obviously gross me out but usually I can roll with the punches.  If this weren't the case I wouldn't be able to live with two dogs that can fling strands of viscous drool up to 3o feet.  The sounds this woman was making, huffing and puffing and blowing the wax cool, were obscene.  My hindbrain said, "I told you so," in a very insufferably smug tone of voice to the rest of my brain.  But it was too late.  I was on the table, and she was bearing down on me with the wax held triumphantly in front of her on the tongue depressor thingy she was going to use to apply it, and I was well and truly trapped. 

There is only one thing to do in a situation like that:  laugh, and take mental notes for the blog post you intend to write about it later.  So that's what I did.   

The next ten minutes were unbearable.  The hissing spit blow routine was repeated about six times before the entire operation was completed.  I paid rather sheepishly, (as only someone whose hindbrain is still being smug in the back of one's head can be sheepish), and left to find the rest of my group.  When I reached them, I realized that though the wax had been cooled by the spit-and-breath routine, it had not been cooled ENOUGH to prevent me from reacting to it in spectacular fashion.  Everyone was staring at me.  I found a reflective surface, and assessed the damage.  I looked EXACTLY like an Uakari.  

Go ahead, click on the link.  I'll wait.

See?  It was pretty bad.  And that was how our journey to South Africa began.

*Come on people, you've all seen the literary precedence.  If you're a foreigner adrift in a strange country and the natives suddenly decide that you resemble some mythic ancestor or prophesied leader, it's Volcano time.