Talk Like A South African

Private swap with Lori.

Lori reports that at least 4 languages are represented here: English, Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa. South Africa has a total of eleven official languages. (The others are Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, and Venda.)

As some of you know, I am studying speech-language pathology and yesterday I had my first session as a primary clinician. It took me 3.5 hours to write up the results in my SOAP note. It was not a good night.

Today I am better. It only took me 1 hour to write my lesson plan for the next session tomorrow. So I can relax and think about postcards for a little bit. Even language-related ones.

Karnak, Egypt

Some of you may know why I chose Krakow and Egypt for today... it wasn't totally random, that much I will say. And these cards even both start with k, although that isn't why I chose them either, but I guess it fits.



Karnak is the largest ancient religious site in the world - a massive site of ancient Egyptian architecture located about 500km south of Cairo. This area was "the most selected of places" for the gods of the people of Thebes. This card depicts the Hypostyle Hall, a hall containing 134 columns 10 to 21 meters heigh and 3 meters in diameter. The architraves (things on top of the columns) are estimated to weigh 70 tons.

The Hypostyle Hall was visited by Lara Croft in one of the Tomb Raider games, and was the site of the final battle in the Transformers movie.

I dug up this card in the thrift shop inside the building where I work, and as such isn't stamped or written.

Gash-Barka, Eritrea

This card came as a private swap. Eee! It shows a Hidareb woman. Hidareb are one of the nine ethnic groups of Eritrea. They make up 2.5% of the population and inhabit the northwestern valley. Most of them are nomadic and travel great distances in search of pasture. So writes the sender of the card.

I could not find any information on the stamp.

Fort Portal, Uganda

I have to go to bed soon, but since I finally created this blog I've been meaning to for a long time (thanks to Ana's encouragement :), I think I need to post at least one card tonight. This card comes as a private swap with Katja in Kampala, Uganda. Needless to say, this is my first card from Uganda. I'm particularly glad to get this country because my mom lived in Uganda for a while when she was growing up, and I love to hear her stories about "when we lived in Africa."


Top 10 Scenic Places of Uganda
#5 Fort Portal Highland Tea Plantations

I couldn't find much info about this online. Fort Portal is a town nestled in the Rwenzori Mountains in the middle of the Toro Kingdom, about 200 miles west of Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Most of the Google hits seem to be stops on safari tours. According to Wikipedia, most of the Rwenzori Mountains are part of a UNESCO site, but I don't think it stretches to accommodate the tea plantation shown on this card.

And it is stamped and written!
The woman on the stamp is Dorcus Inzikuru, a Ugandan athlete and gold medal winner at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.



When my mom looked at this post, she sent me a link to her sister's online photo album of scanned prints taken when they lived in Africa in 1958-1960. My mom is in the center. Click on the photo to go to the complete gallery.