Within a Budding Grove

One of my dissertation committee members reminded me that a third of each day of fieldwork should be devoted to "self-care" and encouraged me to break up the routine I had fallen into of research/interviews/manual labor each day and then reading/writing when I returned in the evening.  So yesterday I upped my chocolate intake and watched a really interesting movie, Goodbye Bafana, starring Joseph Fiennes as apartheid prison guard James Gregory and Dennis Haysbert as Nelson Mandela.  It is based on the real relationship that Mandiba formed with the guard and traces Gregory's transformation from believing in the apartheid system to disavowing his earlier actions as a prison censorship/intelligence officer (although he problematically always worked for the prison system).  Joseph Fiennes and Dennis Haysbert also speak Xhosa during parts of the film which was pretty cool.  I spent this morning walking around the Durban Botanic Gardens and even though it is right near city centre, the large gardens drowned out the noise of the city.  There were a lot of birds gathered in groves of trees and searching for small fish in the artificial lake - I'm not sure what kinds of birds I saw so if anyone knows, please comment.

Comments

[Terra]

Those pics are beautiful! I think that kind of bird is an ibis.

[mar]

Terra you're right it is a kind of ibis, in fact, it's the "Sacred Ibis" (once venerated in Egypt): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Ibis