Presents for Africa

We leave on Tuesday morning for South Africa. I'd ordered lots of presents on amazon.com that were going to be shipped last Tuesday, but that then got delayed and they were only scheduled to be sent tomorrow! No good. So I cancelled the order and, being unable to find the gifts in town (I looked quite hard), I went out on a massive shopping spree yesterday. Thankfully, I was quite successful! I have one more present to buy, but I packed up the presents I had for everyone else yesterday and it was a lot of fun! Knowing that I would be devastated if the presents were in a piece of lost luggage, I'm seriously thinking about putting a lot of them in my hand luggage. Packing will start later today.

Anyway, I wanted to show off the fruits of my labors yesterday (see photo below). A note on "presents for Africa" to the non-South Africans who read this: saying "X for Africa" is a phrase meaning a lot of X (kind of like saying "enough food to feed an army"). Not included in the photo are photo albums I made (one for my grandmother, with Genevieve's wedding photos, and the other as a "brag book" (mostly of G's wedding) with copies of photos for those who want them) and some T-shirts (new) that G gave me to distribute to less wealthy people I come across in my travels. And before you think I'm strange for giving kitchen sponges to people, it seems that S. Africans quite like those sponges with a scrubber on one side. And note, too, that a lot of the "bigger" presents are at the back of the bags, hidden from view. They include Microplane graters for my aunts/uncles!

Well, that's all until I return, and I will post an itinerary and a link to my photos then.