Sign o' the Times

Life has been a little slow here lately. My most recent trip to Pretoria was fairly uneventful. Most of what happens at these quarterly Volunteer Advisory Council (VAC) meetings is bureaucratic and uninteresting to non-Peace Corps folks, so I'll spare you the detail.

Last week, Kim and I were without water for about two days, which was no fun at all, but we've learned our "always be prepared" lesson. Next time (and we've been assured there will be a next time; and likely for longer than two days) we'll have a stash of fresh water under our sink.

But, because we've promised to post at least once a week, and because we've already failed to live up to that promise, we thought we had better put something up, and soon. So we're introducing something that will probably make repeat appearances over the next year: a post about signs. It's kind of a hobby for us to snap photos of signs that make us laugh, or seem unique or ironic, or whatever. Some of you have already seen a few of these if you received our mass emails last year. For example:

...a sign on a rubbish bin at "God's Window," a scenic overlook in the Blyde River Canyon Area. And/or you may have seen...


...the stationary store in our town that sounds a lot like a Ben Stiller movie. Kim and I have done a quick search of our photos and found a few more that make us smile. Here is what we managed to find. In the future we'll post more of these. Enjoy.

This is the name of a store at the Gateway Mall in Durban (the largest mall in the Southern Hemisphere). "Lekker Biltong" = "Delicious Jerky." Well, ok, not exactly; but more or less. You aren't likely to ever see a more quintessentially South African sign. "Lekker" is kind of an all purpose word that most literally means delicious (in Dutch and Afrikaans), but is also frequently used to mean good, fine, excellent, great, etc. For example, if a South African asks you how your weekend was, it's acceptable and common to answer "lekker," even if, strictly speaking, your weekend was not delicious.

"Biltong" is jerky, but more. It's a serious South African institution and it's far more delicious than jerky; oh, pardon me, I mean far more lekker than jerky.


Ok, this one isn't so much funny as it is interesting. South Africa has eleven official languages, so most signs (though obviously not all) appear in at least two or three different languages; usually English and/or Afrikaans and any other locally dominant language. This is the sign for the Pretoria Art Museum. It's in Afrikaans (big title) and, I think, in Zulu, which is strange since Pretoria is primarily Afrikaans and Sotho speaking. Anyway, it looks like they are slowly removing the Zulu titles on this sign. Maybe to be replaced by Sotho ones?


Peace Corps volunteers always follow the rules.


Two croc signs near our home town. The big yellow sign is actually next to a beach boardwalk. Danger, indeed. We see crocs in this area every time we visit and tend to avoid this beach.