Change

Barak Obama has put the beginning of his legislation under this motto. In fact many things have changed since then - and there are already big arguments about whether this change is good or bad. Don’t worry, I won’t do any political analysis here, but I realized this is a good title to put on top of this blog post.

After the 18 mostly interesting blog posts about South Africa in the past year, I thought this is the way to write blogs. But this format only worked well for a fairly unknown country, and it doesn’t work for the United States. You can see how life here is in general in most Hollywood films and I think there is almost no international television news program that won’t tell you the latest (more or less important) news from the U.S.

Therefore I decided to change how I write posts for this blog. Instead of writing long texts I’ll try to tell rather short stories about life here. Things that are perhaps not so obvious to the outside spectator, but that make life here different and thus also interesting.

To finish the diary part of this blog, just a few words about the past three and a half months since my last post: after having found the apartment, I had to get a car. My dream was a Toyota Prius and I got a Prius - but a used one with 80,000 miles. The reason why I couldn’t get a new one, was my credit score, but more about that in a future post. Since then it was rather calm in my private life, but because things were quite busy and exciting at the office, I didn’t mind having some time to relax in the evening when I came home. Now I not only had about ten to eleven months of summer (which is still less than 500 days ;-), but also only two weeks of Christmas vacation and since then not a single day off - if you don’t count the very few public holidays and the two days I spent flying from Johannesburg to Los Angeles. But I won’t complain: I have a job and I’m happy with it - and I can live and work in beautiful Southern California!