Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Day 43 Afrika

With a k. 

My Hansa Brauerrei beer is a perfect balance of hops and malt. A Prussian brewmaster stares down at me from a faded 1905 black and white photo as I sip and listen to Bavarian satellite radio play the hits of the 80s. The beer is brewed right here in Swapokmund, a couple blocks away, past a beautiful series of Art Nouveau buildings from the early 1900s that wouldn't look out of place in Hamburg, through the fog, past the Kaiser Wilhelm Hotel on the eerily wide and often empty Bismarck Strasse, past bakers making brötchen and kuchen and past butchers producing wurst. Walk another two blocks and you're in the high dunes of the Namib Desert. Go the other way, cross the highway and you're in a township of tin shacks that sprawls far inland.

Germany was kicked out of its African colony a hundred years ago, but other than the Namibian flags, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the war had a different outcome. 
Surreal doesn't even begin to describe this place.


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