quick update
I arrived safely! And I'm still healthy, too, s'far as I can tell.
The landscape was pretty wild on the drive to the school. Nine of us packed for over 4 hours in a 9 person van...was fine though. Saw a few cyclists, and one dirt bike passed us, but I didn't get my camera out in time. AFter we got beyond Jo'burg, the landscape was flat. Then random mountains cropped up. Sticking out of the endless fields, with almost perfectly flat tops, they looked man-made. THen they became more and more numerous and now we are in (small) mountains, very green, with erroded clif faces. I have photos. I was quite fascinated by the mountains. We passed cows of various colors, a field of sunflowers, corn, several tiny windmills (I don't know what purpose they serve).
Met Kavi, but haven't gotten a chance to really talk to him yet. Students say he's very nice, but a slave driver--very ambitious expectations. So I think this might be part of what R and L were trying to prepare me for?
Met someone from UKZN but not the Durban campus, had been at Columbia under Marc Kamionkowski, came back to SA to help develop science and science education here. Her husband is in the education dept, and she said she'll hook me up with some 4th graders during my stay...or maybe the students who will teach the 4th graders...
Food is excellent, temperature is hot, accomodations are nice but no A/C, but I think it gets much cooler now than during the day. People are friendly, networking is easy (but then I usually have a relatively easy time being social among physicists.) The 8 of us Americans--6 from Penn and 2 from Princeton--are the only students from universities outside of Africa, and my accent instantly gives me away. Many of the SA students have never left SA, it seems. Oh, and I asked a couple of them to pronounce "transition" for me, and they pronounced it like we do. They said there are different accents in different parts of SA, though. But at least not all SA electrons need to make trancisions.
The landscape was pretty wild on the drive to the school. Nine of us packed for over 4 hours in a 9 person van...was fine though. Saw a few cyclists, and one dirt bike passed us, but I didn't get my camera out in time. AFter we got beyond Jo'burg, the landscape was flat. Then random mountains cropped up. Sticking out of the endless fields, with almost perfectly flat tops, they looked man-made. THen they became more and more numerous and now we are in (small) mountains, very green, with erroded clif faces. I have photos. I was quite fascinated by the mountains. We passed cows of various colors, a field of sunflowers, corn, several tiny windmills (I don't know what purpose they serve).
Met Kavi, but haven't gotten a chance to really talk to him yet. Students say he's very nice, but a slave driver--very ambitious expectations. So I think this might be part of what R and L were trying to prepare me for?
Met someone from UKZN but not the Durban campus, had been at Columbia under Marc Kamionkowski, came back to SA to help develop science and science education here. Her husband is in the education dept, and she said she'll hook me up with some 4th graders during my stay...or maybe the students who will teach the 4th graders...
Food is excellent, temperature is hot, accomodations are nice but no A/C, but I think it gets much cooler now than during the day. People are friendly, networking is easy (but then I usually have a relatively easy time being social among physicists.) The 8 of us Americans--6 from Penn and 2 from Princeton--are the only students from universities outside of Africa, and my accent instantly gives me away. Many of the SA students have never left SA, it seems. Oh, and I asked a couple of them to pronounce "transition" for me, and they pronounced it like we do. They said there are different accents in different parts of SA, though. But at least not all SA electrons need to make trancisions.