Whenever we are in a new place, I always enjoy going shopping. This is very much unlike at home. It is interesting to see the different stores, different products and just see how much things are different and how much they are the same. Especially here in Hoedspruit, I felt like just going to the local supermarket would be a bit of an adventure.
Hoedspruit is a small town -- basically just a cross roads. There is one main intersection (just stop signs -- no traffic lights) with shopping plazas on either side of the road. On the drive in from the airport, Jacobus and Kobus pointed out the local supermarket and best place to buy produce.
We have use of their car while we're here so this morning we headed out to the shops. They are only a few miles away, about 1/2 of it just making our way out of the reserve. Not to sound like a broken record, but on the way out we saw a couple giraffes getting a drink of water, a herd of nyala and some monkeys swinging through the trees. Once on the main road, we need to remember to keep left -- they drive on the wrong side here.
We hit Le Bamba produce market and Pick N Pay supermarket -- they were not small stores (probably comparable to a Trader Joe's size in the US) with a good assortment of everything and lots of friendly, helpful staff. We took our time walking up and down the aisles. We saw pretty much the usual stuff -- nothing too exotic. There were fewer varieties of everything - but nothing huge was missing. Dara was bummed that there was no frozen fruit for her smoothies - we'll have to freeze it ourselves. But, they did have men's tissues (3-ply) and regular tissues (2-ply). I guess men blow their noses harder than women so need stronger tissues. In the big scheme of things, not really much of an adventure. We found everything we were looking for and picked up a few items for Flora, the housekeeper.
South Africa has 11 different official languages recognized in its constitution. The most commonly spoken language is Zulu and that is the first language of less than a quarter of the population. Some of the languages are pretty similar -- such as Zulu and Xhosa -- but many are very different such as English and Afrikaans. Everyone here speaks more than 1 language. Our porter at the airport said he spoke 9 of the 11 fluently. I have enough trouble with just 1!
Flora, the housekeeper, speaks Sotho and understands Afrikaans. Unfortunately, we don't speak Sotho or Afrikaans and the translator app that Dara found doesn't seem to help. So far we've been able to communicate with a little English that Flora knows and a lot of gesturing. By the way, there is an amendment to the constitution pending that would add sign language as the 12th official language - it's used a lot here so that makes sense.
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