I hear you asking, ‘Gub – why the depressing title?’ I know, there’s enough shitty things happening in the world right now and you sure as hell don’t need to read some blog highlighting the above mentioned shitty things. Well, no need to fear – you’re gonna feel light as a feather and free as a bird to live it up all the rest of 2022 when we’re done! And if not, I’ll buy your next coffee. No joke, you just send us a DM and the coffee is all yours (and free).
Alrighty, let’s dive in – brace ya self.
Picture this: your driver’s license is expired, you’ve successfully used said license in its expired state to drive across the SA – Mozambique border twice and figure a third time may be pushing it. You’ve been putting off renewal because everyone knows the only machine that that prints licenses in SA is currently sitting in Germany (riddle me that?!?). Also, you’re going to Mozambique on Thursday, today is Wednesday… You wake at 4 am and find yourself in a queue already hours long in a bracing July wind and take your place in a line of people who seem entirely unperturbed by this start to their Wednesday morning. All you think about is how your taxes are bloody wasted and service delivery is a joke and how much you fokin hate blue light brigades. Don’t ask me how the string of black cars with tinted windows driven by the worst of our populace made it into your thoughts at 4am, they just did. Also you couldn’t make any coffee because it’s stage 6 and so your eyes are sitting at half mast and you look like you’ve had better days.
Hours later you walk out of that place R425 poorer, still reeling for the verbal abuse you received from the woman behind the eye test machine, having used a minerly fraudulent affidavit curtesy of and a nice policeman who took pity on you (they changed the requirements without notice – classic) and with only a temporary license as your reward for a seemingly wasted 7 hours. All the while, knowing you need to repeat this escapade in a matter of weeks to retrieve your actual license and you have a banging headache – your caffeine dependency really needs to be dealt with and you again resolve to cut down to 4 coffees a day. Again.
At the petrol station on the way home you ask for diesel and feel positively ill when your range goes up by 96km and your bank account down by R300. Another punch to the gut and next month the levy will go up another 5%. How?!
Once home you open your laptop. You’re feeling rather disgruntled to have lost an entire work day worth of hours doing something that should take minutes. You remember the day of work you missed last week to stand in the queue at home affairs to renew your passport, for some reason you think of the unemployment rate at 35%, my gosh, surely they can employ more than one person to manage the 8 booths there?! The monthly fees you pay to the private security to make up for our police forces inadequacy comes to mind and you wonder how one government can screw up so badly. Your laptop searches for wifi. There isn’t any. It’s stage 6, of course there’s no electricity. The cherry on the top and also just another day in South Africa.
Emigrate? Not a @#&!.
Was that a little too aggressive? I don’t usually throw that word around but even after the kinda day when everything went pear shaped – I’d still say ‘Not a @#&!’. And I don’t even have to be in a glass half full typa mood. I’m not refusing to see the bad or only looking on the bright side, I genuinely think that all things considered – here will always be 100x better than anywhere else.
So, why?
When weighing up our little tip of Africa, I have come to think the scale will always lean in its favour. And if it doesn’t, your scale probably needs adjusting (or you, you may need adjusting but that’s the good news because it’s easier to change ourselves than the things going on around us).
Laurie, the genius behind Shopfox would agree, she immigrated to South Africa, leaving the state of New York for Cape Town and she has never looked back, in fact she’s been in The States the past few weeks and she is missing this country like mad. I know because she won’t stop reminding me…I called her that morning – when everything that could have gone right went left. I was pissed off and I hated that. I said to her, ‘we have to get so excited about South Africa and what we have here, that we have no time to think about the kak things’. So, that’s what I am doing.
Anyway, back to the scale. Why does the scale always lean in the ‘I’m staying’ favour? Well, because you have to choose what you put on it 🙂 sounds a little faulty, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t… It’s quick-math, really…and a lil airy fairy too.
Let’s over-simplify and sum it up in, ‘what we focus on magnifies’. We only have so much focus we can spend, right? So where are we spending it…choose wisely, fam! It’s bloody tiring to spend it on eskom or people like Ace, so let’s not?
The way I figure it, our focus is currency, we gotta be spending it well and investing it wisely. I’m sure someone else said that, but for today, let’s just pretend that someone was me.
I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of things worth our focus, please feel free to make any amendments you see fit…. Let’s call this list 50 Reasons to get excited about South Africa…
- Sunny summers (duh)
- Our indomitable national spirit is embodied in ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’, also commonly referred to as ‘’n boer maak ‘n plan’ … give someone a piece of wood, some wire, a few doohickeys, and they can make anything work.
- We have the most complicated accent in the world. We get a thrill and are so proud when we hear foreign actors completely botching the South African accent. We must be special if no one can speak like us!
- We are several countries in one. Travel for three hours in any direction and you will feel as if you’re in a different place altogether. Experience different landscapes, fauna and flora, languages, customs, dress and traditions together with a range of religions and beliefs all in one country. Not to mention every type of weather possible – from blizzards of snow to tropical heat.
- South African sunsets
- We’re damn friendly (and that counts for a lot)
- Braai culture – and if you’re a vegan, there aint nothing wrong with a smokey aubergine or a fire roasted sweet potato!
- No natural disasters (big plus here)
- Rolling fields and farmlands. Where else can you drive half an hour out of a bustling city and find farms just cropping up??
- The passes – don’t even get me started on Sani Pass!
- Rusks (need I say more?)
- The longest wine route in the world – ‘nuff said
- Karoo Lamb…
- Homeless men who direct the traffic when the robots fail
- Hipster coffee shops (not the hipsters, just the coffee they drink)
- Hikes, my gosh do we have the most beautiful hikes
- Elephants, because they are the best animal in the world.
- Friendly fuel attendants – comm’on that’s a big one
- Woolworths fruit and veg (fine this may be a stretch, but it’s a topic close to my heart)
- More public holidays than one thought possible!
- Penguins, especially the sassy ones. While we’re on this topic, let’s throw Simons town on the list?
- Our sense of humor is pretty on point and we just don’t seem to take ourselves all that seriously. And in 2022 that is rather refreshing.
- Bovril
- Rugby (even if you don’t like the sport, you gots to back our boys, at the very least)
- Road trips up the west coast. And oh, my gosh – during the flower season!!
- We’re one of only 12 countries in the world that still has safe tap water. Which is a pretty crazy statistic, considering water is life.
- Our beaches – we have 2789 km of coastline!
- Our constitution – which is one of the fairest and best examples of legislation in existence.
- Windmills . There are around 280,000 windmills scattered on farms across South Africa – second in number only to Australia.
- Johannesburg is the world’s largest manmade forest, home to over 10 million trees which help to reduce noise in the city. So cool!
- Rooibos tea
- Table mountain’s pretty cool!
- Highveld thunderstorms
- We might have a nuclear power station or two, but we’re the only nation to voluntarily dismantle our nuclear weapons
- Biltong
- Jacaranda trees, an entire city that turns purple for two month of the year.
- You can do your shopping at a robot
- Whales
- Siya Kolisi – what a man
- Nandos and their sauces.
- Fever trees
- Howzit Ja-Nee, Eish, Next-of-next-week, Now now – Our South African lingo is a language of it’s own.
- Baobabs – marvels, arent they?
- Thuli Madonsela – the woman is courage and didn’t take JZ’s sh*t
- The Kruger Park
- Protea Flowers
- Hadedas (in a weird kinda way)
- Ultramel Custard and Malva pudding
- We have 8 World Heritage Sites – that is a lot
- We say the word ‘sorry’—and mean it. Trip over your feet, cry in public, hobble on crutches, bump into someone, and we will say ‘sorry’. Sometimes the ‘sorry’ is accompanied by a hug or a pat on the arm. Try doing this overseas. See astonishment or alarm with the rejoinder, ‘But you didn’t do anything!’
Now, you do the next 50. It really isn’t that hard, in fact I wrote that list before having even finished my morning coffee. And coincidentally, the pinterest algorithm just threw this one at me, ‘your words are the house you live in’. Cheesy, sure. But bang on too. Imma live in those words above, today. And when I’m stuck in a traffic jam because the shed got our robots again, I’m not going to cuss out Eskom and our thieving politicians, I am going to think about more reasons to get excited about South Africa. And maybe the guy in the car next to mine will wonder what this idiot is smiling about, (he may or may not wonder why she’s talking to herself, too).
Go and spend your focus wisely, and remember what the Dalai Lama said, ‘just one small positive thought can change your whole day’. I googled that right now, I don’t just know Dalai Lama quotes off the cuff, but it seemed fitting so I added it in.
Speaking of positive thoughts though – as hard as we try, we simply cannot seem to think the petrol price down. And we’ve tried – believe me. We’d have tried just about anything to get the bloody thing to go down. All that trying has led to not much improvement, I am afraid. And so with heavy hearts we are adding a little bit of padding onto our delivery cost – it’s not what we want nor what you deserve and in these unprecedented times we wish we could keep at least that ‘precedented’, but please bear with us as we bear with skyrocketing fuel prices and couriers who are quite literally getting by on the smell of an oil rag. We’re committed to giving you the best possible online shopping experience and we ain’t out here to take your money – Lord knows there are enough of those people about (anyone else being especially hounded by Nigerian Kings this week?), but to carry on doing the most for our local brands and our local customers we have had to increase our delivery price – marginally.
Thank you for buying small and supporting our local brands. With all the shite things of 2022, it’s helluva nice to have people like you backing us!
We’re increasing our flat shipping fee to R139.
We know it sucks. But hey, it’s only active from Monday, 25 July – so take advantage of the R99 shipping while we’re still covering the difference!
