Cape Town: If I die here, tell them my story. It's not a very good story.

So unfortunately, as a journalist, I have to talk about journalism sometimes. Which is unfortunate, because I find 95 percent of discussions about journalism to be mind-numbingly boring. (This is why I could never teach.)

But journalism is a tricky business. You're taking your creative work, which has been created after a lot of effort and research, and giving it to somebody who needs it to make money. What could go wrong? It's hard to take criticism on something so personal, even when it's given in a constructive and not-bitchy way. Just a hard part of my job.

Moving on, I had a story run today, which was exciting. Yesterday was World Book Day and I got to go to a library and watch a bunch of adorable second graders as some librarians read them books. Those kids loved Dr. Seuss. I approved of them as soon as they could read Green Eggs and Ham along with the librarian. The story got a nice spread on Page 4 of the Paper today, which was exciting for me. There were actually books read in three languages: English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa.

Segway time! Africa's eleven official languages are:
English
Afrikaans
isiXhosa
isiZulu
Sepedi
Sesotho
Setswana
siSwati
Tshivenda
Xitsonga
isiNdebele

The most commonly spoken ones on a national level, as far as I can tell, are English and Zulu. People in both Johannesburg and Cape Town can universally speak at least a little English. Here in the Western Cape, isiXhosa, English, and Afrikaans are the most common. Afrikaans is kind of like French, if French people had carried out the crime against humanity that was apartheid: Afrikaans people refuse to take that step down to speaking English if they can help it, because Afrikaans is better than English. Call it a generalization, but it's kind of true. Afrikaans was also the language of the institution that was responsible for that whole apartheid thing and stuff. Anyway, just an interesting part of South African culture.

OK, one last thing for this disjointed post. The building which houses the Cape Times is under construction and has been since I got here, so Abby, Lauren and I (the Cape Argus, where Lauren works, shares our offices) live in a constant hell of jackhammers, dust that coats your mouth and throat and now paint fumes. By "construction" I mean that every floor except the fourth and fifth floors is having everything torn out and redone. We're surrounded by madness. Today, there was a really strong paint smell in the whole floor, especially on the Cape Times side of the office. They turned off the A/C so they could figure out why exactly paint fumes were circulating through the office. That is (probably) why I have felt sick for the second half of today. But yeah, it's definitely a drawback of working at the Cape Times right now. So if I die, you'll know why. Just saying.