Battle of the sexes

This is a post continued from the previous one (because I'm apparently very long winded and waffle a lot), so catch up on that one before reading this.




Right, so assembling IKEA furniture is the perfect arena for the battle of the sexes. When confronted with a box full of parts to put together, penis possessors regress back to their cave-dwelling days, and grab the following in descending rank of importance:

1. Their crotches
2. A beer
3. The remote control (can't put shit together without watching a sporting event at the same time)
4. Their tools (which are still shiny and new, having never been used, even though they NEEDED to have them ten years ago)

Notice that grabbing the instructions to read through them does not feature on their list of priorities.



Which is probably why IKEA did a study and discovered that women are much better at putting their furniture together than men are. Probably because, when confronted with the same task, women will grab:

1. The instructions
2. A bottle of wine (hey, we're good at doing shit, but that doesn't mean we don't get thirsty)
3. The tools. The difference here is that we don't waste an hour looking for them like men do. We just know where shit is.
4. The iPad/computer to look up YouTube videos instructing us further how to best assemble the bed/couch/wine rack.
5. Cell phones so they can contact the store/friends/their fathers to get further assistance. And yes, Dads are men and should fall into the "useless" category, but our Dads are from a different generation of real men who went to the army and stuff. They know how to do manly things. And iron.

So, put a man and a woman together in a room, give them stuff to assemble, throw in some alcohol, and make it a competition (because each of them has a point to prove), and you probably have the makings of a good reality show. Pity the Gladiators didn't have IKEA in ancient Rome - the arena would have been jam-packed with blood-thirsty spectators ready to watch a husband and wife attack each other with screwdrivers.

Which is why, after much thought, we've decided to pay extra for the IKEA assembly service where they do everything for you, and you sit on the newly assembled couch, sipping beers and yelling encouragement.





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When all else fails, follow the instructions

So. We’ve decided to sell everything and start all over again on the other side, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Furnishing your home from scratch allows you to learn from your past decorating mistakes, and so the second time around, you know that:

· You should sit in a chair before you buy it. A chair that looks like a work of art, is likely to be as comfortable as reclining in a termite mound. While naked. And covered in syrup. Which some of you might find appealing, but we do not.
· An oversized couch bought for your oversized husband to relax in (read: sleep and snore loudly in) is not likely to fit through regular doors. Ripping out window panes so you can get furniture inside is not as much fun as it sounds.
· Buying a TV cabinet to accommodate a boxy TV is a stupid thing to do two months before large flat-screen TVs come out. Always consult psychics or ‘Stuff’ magazine before you shop, so you know the life-span of your technology.
· It’s hard to play ping pong on a pool table when you decide you messed up, and would have preferred a table tennis set-up to a snooker one. Hard, but not impossible. Especially when you get extra points for sinking the ping pong ball into the corner pocket.

And since we’re not millionaires, refurnishing means we have to go the IKEA route.




Now, for some people, saying “IKEA” is like that scene in The Lion King when the hyenas say “Mufasa” and shiver with fear. So for those people, I’ll say it again: “IKEA”. If you find yourself trembling, chances are: you’ve put together some IKEA furniture. Which, if you’re a man, means that you’ve spent a fair amount of time sleeping in the spare bedroom.

And the reason for that is that men don’t follow instructions. They believe they know better than those IKEA folks, and were born instinctively knowing how to assemble furniture. Ha!

It reminds me of that scene from Friends, when Ross discovers his wife is a lesbian and has to move out and find a new apartment:




Ross: (squatting and reading the instructions) I'm supposed to attach a brackety thing to the side things, using a bunch of these little worm guys. I have no brackety thing, I see no worm guys whatsoever and- I cannot feel my legs.

To be continued....

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Baggage and other things that drag you down

Yay! We found a place to live! An apartment that isn't a tiny shit hole with pimps as neighbours. Well, we could have pimps for neighbours - you never know - but they'll at least be high class pimps who like animals. We're further north of downtown Toronto than what we initially wanted (10kms to be precise) but compromises must be made for the zoo. Very few places would accept 2 dogs and 2 cats, and we're on the ground floor which means the cats can run amok. Also, Poodle doesn't have to get dressed at 5 am to get Muggle down 10 flights so she can take her morning tinkle in the snow.

I think the Canadian estate agent person now thinks all South Africans are psychopaths because I told her we needed a 2 bedroom place, so our cats could have their own room. *blush* I apologize to all South
Africans for creating this impression. Feel free to call the Canadians up and tell them that it's just Poodle and me who are a few olives short of a martini.

So now that we have a place to stay, we need to turn our attention to furnishing it. When you move 14 610 kms across the world, should you pile all your crap into a big container and schlep it there with you? Or should you sell the lot of it, pack only 2 suitcases each, and start again on the other side?

Tricky, tricky.

You don't want to end up living like a student again. We're on the wrong side of our thirties, so this just won't do:




At the same time, I don't know if you've ever noticed how much absolute junk you can collect in 15 years. I've found things that I never knew we had shoved at the back of cupboards (mostly drunken party guests who never got around to leaving). One whole drawer in the kitchen is filled with peelers, pizza slicing thingies and ice cream scoopers... that I swear I've never seen before! How did they get there? Is there some kind of kitchen utensil exchange program happening in the world that I don't know about? A secret society of gadgets and thingies that take a gap year off after school to travel the world and see other people's cupboards? That would explain why I never have enough teaspoons.

So, we did some research and got a quote on a container to ship all our crap to Canada. We got the quote, vomited a lot at the price, and then decided it would be a very cathartic experience to free ourselves of all the baggage in our lives, and start all over again.

So we'll be setting off with just 2 suitcases each. Oh, and 4 pets. But they won't go in the suitcases, don't worry.

Great Expectations

So one thing you learn quickly when you head into the unknown, is how to lower your expectations. And quickly.

I blame TV shows like Friends that show poor twenty-somethings living in stunning apartments in fabulous cities like New York. They create unrealistic expectations. They make you think that if you throw enough purple and green paint on a wall, and have a waitressing job and a great hairstyle, you can live somewhere that's trendy, large and slap-bang in the centre of a fabulous neighbourhood.

So when you picture your move across the world, you imagine yourself staying somewhere like this:

Which is not too shabby at all.

Or else somewhere like this:

I think we could force ourselves to live here too.

So you get in touch with an estate agent, explain that you want to live in one of Toronto's coolest neighbourhoods, find out if they have a Canadian equivalent of Monica and Chander, tell them your budget, and they come up with something like this:

Living next door to:

Then, when you timidly comment that you're worried that all the discarded needles in the crack den might injure one of your four pets, you get told told that the crack den does not accept pets because the pimps are allergic. WTF?

Sigh. So needless to say, we're still looking... with slightly lowered expectations...

Always en route

Some couples meet, fall in love, have children and live happily ever after. We're unfortunately not one of those couples. We met, fell in love, felt no desire at all to reproduce and thus pass on our admittedly superior genes, but we did fall in love again. This time with traveling... And what an expensive passion it has turned out to be.

We may not be funding private school fees, au pairs and occupational therapy, but we have been funding flights, cruises, train trips, snowmobiles, scooters, buses, boats, quadbikes and many, many adventures. And the problem with going on wild adventures? They make you want to go on even wilder adventures in further flung places. All of which can bankrupt you if you're trying to fund them from South Africa on the rand.

As much as we love our very beautiful country and everything (well almost everything) about it, we don't love:

1. Being trapped in planes full of germ-breathing strangers, hunched up in tiny seats for 10-18 hours to get somewhere new and exciting.
2. Constantly having to mentally convert every cent we spend overseas, back to rands just so we can get acid indigestion when we realize we're paying a hundred bucks for a beer.

Also, for two people who really want to live their lives to the absolute limit and experience as much as we possibly can, and see as much of our beautiful planet as we possibly can (before our time or its time runs out because, let's face it, life is damn short), living in Joburg is not ideal. Stephen is up before dawn every week morning so that he can miss the worst of the traffic. He gets home late too. We both work hard, are way too stressed most of the time, and are always counting sleeps until the moment when we manage to save enough to leave Joburg. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

We thought so too.

Which is why we decided to take the terrifying leap and sell our home, quit our jobs, leave all of our (amazing, loving, supportive) friends and family, and sell everything we own in order to move to a city we've never visited, where we don't know a sweet blessed soul, and where we don't have jobs or a home.

All in the name of that elusive yet captivating harlot... adventure.

By starting off our world travels in Toronto, we get to:

1. Live somewhere that isn't Joburg. How sad that we're 36 and have never lived anywhere else. Not even Durban or Cape Town or Pitsonderwater. Okay, I lie... I lived I'm Cartonville as a sprog. Woo hoo!
2. Earn a strong currency to fund our travels.
3. Be an hour and a half from New York (our happy place) and shitloads closer to just about everywhere else.
4. Live in a beautiful country that we'll get to explore extensively.
5. Send many tearful texts and mails to all our wonderful family and friends telling them how much we miss them and begging them to come visit. The begging has apparently worked as we already have 3 confirmed visits to look forward to. Yay!
6. Get to say "ey" at the end of every sentence.
7. Pay with loonies and toonies.

Oh, and don't forget that we now won't just blog three times a year, we'll get to blog every day :-)

As excited as we are about this new adventure, we're also very, very sad. I don't think two people were ever so blessed with having such special people in their lives, and the thought of leaving them is especially painful. So we're not going to think about it for now.

Planning a move across the world is luckily quite time consuming, so we'll focus on the logistics of that instead. The next three months of blogging will focus on the planning and preparations (the agony and ecstasy), and then on the 2nd of July, the adventure will begin.

Damn, but we love being en route :-)






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