Monthly Archives: February 2008

Blythe and Brad’s Braai! – Luanda – Day 12

So, Blythe and Brad have one sleep left. Blythe is the DD Project Manager at BP, and is responsible for all new projects from DD’s perspective. Brad is the A/V VC guy DD onsite (Audio/Visual Video Conference), and my one house mate. Well, both of them are looking really forward to getting outta here, even if it is only for a week for Brad. Blythe has 2 weeks leave. Lucky for him. Guess that’s what working in Luanda for an extended period does to you. 🙂

Day 12 - Satelites

Satellite City! Luanda’s Roof Top View!

Well, the braai was pretty good. Brad cooked, and Blythe supervised, as any good Project Manager would! And Sly and I just chatted about everything. Blythe however was a bit quick off the mark, especially with regards to the heat, and insisted we take the meat off early, which resulted in us putting it back on a few minutes more after we were half way through dinner! 🙂 Nice dude.

So, the satellite dishes are quite an interesting and amazing sight to me. Having grown up in South Africa, first Johannesburg then Cape Town, you never really saw satellite dishes there, unless they were on buildings, and even then not too many. Back in the day before DSTV it was a very uncommon site. If you had a dish back then it would typically be one the bigger ones, and that was a sure sign that you were absolutely loaded. Now days you see loads of smaller white dishes around as a lot of people have satellite reception and it is far more affordable. You still don’t see many big dishes around in South Africa, if any.

However in Luanda, you see loads of the small white dishes, but you also see hundreds of these bigger ones littering the skyline and roof tops of many a building. We have 2 fairly large ones behind us. It is just weird to think that what in South Africa is perceived as a luxury and a sign of wealth and elitism, is seen so commonly here. Whether the average person here is using the dish, or it is a communal one I am not too sure, but it is really interesting to see. And the funny thing, they all point in different directions. Obviously different services. We do get Multichoice/DSTV up here and also another provider called CaboTV, which runs a multitude of channels, quite a few from DSTV in fact, but others too, a lot in fact in Portuguese. Surprise Surprise!

Anyway, it was a good evening, and signified a good beginning of the end of the week. 🙂

Tomorrow is Friday . . . Yay!!

Click.

Nunnsby

Easy Going Guy 😉