Bulawayo - in town

City Hall

Bulawayo Public Library

Central Post Office Building

Haddon & Sly - formerly one of the finest department stores in southern Africa

The Bulawayo Club

Cape to Cairo Restaurant

Fazak's Gift Centre (great souvenir store!). This is the street in front of the store.
The streets are so wide that two rows of parking fit in the middle of the road.

Street market

"Bend Over Bazaar", where you'll find piles of second-hand clothes being sold
at $1 a piece

Bulawayo airport

After three days of traveling (including one night stay in Doha and one night stay in Johannesburg), we finally arrived in Bulawayo.  Alhamdulillah.

Now, I don't generally consider airports to be very interesting (at least not worth a whole blog post of pictures), but the Bulawayo airport is not like any other airport I've ever been to.

Actually, I should correct myself.  It wasn't the proper airport that I went to.  It was the "Temporary Terminal" (which has functioned as the airport for well over a decade -- probably closer to two).

Now, that was not like any other airport or terminal I've ever been to.

To be fair, here is the official, new airport building, which, I've been told, is due to open very soon:

Here's the building that you actually go into after getting off the plane and taking a short bus ride:

Don't you love how they label the doors "Domestic Departure" and "International Departure"?  There's a third door for arrivals as well -- I just wasn't able to get a picture of it from where I was in the bus.

This is a view of the airport building from the parking lot:

This is what it looks like from the inside:

And you know those doors labeled "International Departure" and "Domestic Departure"?  I thought it was a typo that 'departure' was written singular instead of plural.  But, I stand corrected.  You see, here's the information board with incoming and outgoing flights:

It says there are exactly two arrivals and two departures every day.  One plane is supposed to arrive from Johannesburg and then leave about an hour later (International Departure) and another is supposed to come from Harare and then leave a little while later (Domestic Departure).

Inside those little wooden drawers near the bottom, there are extra plastic letters and numbers that you would use to change the information on the board.  Now, seeing as there is actually only one flight that comes in and out of that airport every day (i.e. the Johannesburg flight), they clearly don't update this board very frequently.   On the other hand, seeing as everyone knows that the Harare flight no longer comes in and out of here, I guess there's no need to update the board.

This was also the only airport I've been to where your boarding pass and luggage tags are handwritten.  You have to be quite vigilant when they're writing your luggage tags, though, because it's easy to get these airport and flight codes mixed up.  On my flight out of Bulawayo towards Jakarta, the first luggage tag they gave me had my bags going from Bulawayo to Johannesburg to Doha and back to Johannesburg.  Luckily, Aunty caught that mistake, had them rewrite my luggage tag, and my luggage traveled safely to Jakarta.

And just a couple more pictures:

Customs and Immigration

Airport car rentals

Airplane food!

Not exactly a seasoned business class traveler, I did what any respectable and sophisticated professional first-time-passenger would do -- take dozens of pictures of everything from the seat to the tray table to the seat control panel and stop the stewardesses to take pictures of me as well.

Unfortunately, many of those pictures turned out rather foolish looking,  so I'll just share the pictures of the lovely food.

The first pre-meal "Indulgence"

The table setting (they do this before every meal)

Appetizer - seafood salad

Main course - pasta arrabiata

Dessert - vanilla ice cream with berries

Fruit plate

Breakfast - blueberry pancakes

Pre-meal "Indulgence" on Doha - Johannesburg flight

Breakfast omelettes (Qatar Airlines serves only halal)

Travel Pictures - Summer 2012

And now for something completely different...

Posted by popular demand, here are pictures from my trip to Zimbabwe. 

We start with the pictures looking out from the window of the plane.

Approaching our first landing, in Montreal

Doha

Mount Kilimanjaro

Our plane's shadow as we approach Oliver Tambo airport (Johannesburg)

View of Johannesburg as we fly towards Bulawayo

Can you push me?

I don't usually like being pushed -- unless I'm on the swings perhaps.  I always thought that I knew what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.  And that a push was an intrusion from someone else, from somewhere else, taking me off my chosen path.

My mind is changing on this now.  When I think back on it, many (if not most) of things I've done in the past few years have been done through someone else's pushing...the Community Family Lunch program (for which we'll be celebrating our 4th anniversary this month inshaAllah), the PhD, Project Downtown...

My friend Rahima reminded me of this last week when she pushed me to start writing on this blog again. 

So Rahima, this one's for you!

Who says you can't?

There's a lot of work to do out there.  Lots of problems to solve.  Lots of issues to think through.  Big problems.  Big issues.  There's a growing disparity between the rich and the poor, marginalization of various groups of people in our society, juvenile delinquency, pollution, global warming, declining fish stocks, unsustainable and inhumane ways of raising livestock... I could go on... 

Faced with such problems, it's easy to throw up our hands and give up.  Who are we to address these issues?  We're not experts.  We didn't spend our lives studying this in school.  We're not qualified.

Then, I remember something that Dr. Abdal Hakim Jackson said at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit Convention 2011.  He said:

The people who started Harvard University 

were not graduates of Harvard University.

It's so obvious and yet so brilliant.

The definitive cure

This past week, I attended the Reviving the Islamic Spirit Knowledge Retreat.  There's so much I want to write about it.  But this morning, as I was trying to put something together, I was stuck.  Again.

It's the same wall that I've hit before.  I don't want to write something until I can write it just right.  (I'm just recognizing now the arrogance in that statement -- the assumption that I can and should only write things that are 'just right'.  As if anything else would not be worthy of me.  Ouch.)  Then, if I can't formulate the complete, fully formed thought from the beginning and middle to the end, I don't even start writing.  And I'm stuck.

This reminded me of one of the things we learned in the retreat about purifying and refining the self.  Dr. Abdal Hakim Jackson was teaching from Taj Al Arus by Ibn Ata Illah.  It's a collection of aphorisms regarding refinement of the self.  With regards to fixing bad character traits that one finds in oneself (such as arrogance, for example), there was one line in the book that said:

Do not be like the sick person who says, 
'I will not treat my illness until I find the definitive cure.'

You will not find the definitive cure until you treat your illness.

It's just another reminder to take the step and make the effort -- even if you're not certain that the first step will take you where you want to go.  Because what is certain, is that without taking any steps, you're not going to get anywhere.