ROY BUS

I haven't posted in a few days due to a family emergency that is resolving itself, but still took a lot out of us.

Amid all the rushing around, I found a new thing to add to my list of a few of my favourite things. It's not new to many people. It's been popular here for a few years, and it's been a traditional drink in Africa since long before the Afrikaners gave it its name , but I had not tried rooibos (Afrikaners for red bush) tea until a few nights ago. I was expecting it to taste like a strong herb drink, or perhaps very close to black tea, but it really has a nice floral, slightly medicinal taste. Some people think it tastes nutty, but I didn't really pick that up. Of course, the devoted tea drinkers in our family dislike it. It's close enough to a traditional tea to taste odd to them.

After my first few sips, I thought I had found the answer to my "tea drinking problem". The water here is very hard and can smell funny. I still drink a lot of water, but I can understand why I am the only one that drinks much of it straight from the tap. Yet, I am not a big tea drinker. I am really sensitive to tannins (I can't drink most red wines without having strong stomach pains). Once in a while I will have a cup of Darjeeling, green, or white tea. I just am not that into it. I love my coffee, but I cannot replace water with coffee. Buying bottled water is really out of the question.

So, trying not to get my hopes up too much, I looked into what could be the effects of drinking a lot of rooibos. I stumbled upon a very interesting story to a pretty amazing plant.

The Cederberg Mountains aren't hospitable to most plants. It's dry, the soil is poor, and it's hot in the summer. The rooibos plant (a type of legume) thrives here, due in part to its extremely long taproot. However, it seems that rooibos is perfectly adapted to this region, because all attempts to cultivate this plant outside this region have failed.

The Khoisan drank a tea from the needles of the rooibos plant, and when the Dutch settled in the area, they adopted this infusion to avoid the high price of imported black tea. However, its use wasn't very widespread until a Russian immigrant named Benjamin Ginsberg decided to try to market the drink more widely in the region. This eventually lead to the Eleven O'Clock brand of red bush tea.

During his attempts to cultivate the plant, Ginsberg inadvertently lead to the reduction in the size of the seed of the plant, making it very difficult find seeds to replant the crops. The price soon soared to over £80 for a pound of the sand-like seeds. One woman seemed to consistently deliver large quantities of the seeds, and Ginsberg finally convinced her to reveal her source. She had found that ants would take the seeds to their nests, and by breaking into these nests, she could find large quantities of seeds in one place. The seeds are now collected through a mechanical process.

Rooibos has been used in South Africa to treat skin conditions, allergies, colic, and asthma. Due to its high anti-oxidant content, it may be shown to help slow or stop cancer growth. There's a whole laundry list of diseases that may be treated with this plant (depression, headaches, insomnia, urinary system problems, stomach spasms), and as of yet, no adverse effects have been shown.

If you're really used to and attached to black tea, this tea might be a bit hard to adapt to having as a replacement. In South Africa, it's prepared with milk and sweetener (and that's how I make it), but in other parts of the world, it's usually consumed black and with or without sweetener. It has a natural sweetness that might be enough for some people. Overall, I find it to be a nice, comforting drink, and I urge you to give it a try.

The brief rundown of an undocumented period

There's really been a lot happening in my life, and unfortunately, I haven't seen to it to document it here. I am not sure why. Perhaps laziness and frustration or even just forgetfulness.

I love England and London. I had a lot of preconceived notions about what it would be like to live here and the people I would meet here. I don't really think it's unusual to have these. I am pretty sure every person I've spoken with from North America has their own preconceptions. I don't even think these can be dispelled through a short visit. I learn more about my new home the longer I am here, and unlearn what I thought I knew about both the country of my birth and the country of my choice.

We've done some sightseeing. I see Big Ben and the London Eye on such a routine basis, it does indeed sometimes become routine. But I still get awed, even by these sights that are now common to me if I stop and reflect for a moment. Or if I see them from a different viewpoint. I think people who have lived here all their lives still get that awe.

When I used to live in one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the last American city I lived in, I'd often try to think about what the buildings were like 100 years ago. What the avenues looked like at night before it became lit by street lights. What it felt like to travel from one community to the next well before these smaller settlements became eaten up by the growth of the city and they became just different neighbourhoods (a journey that now takes less than 10 minutes by car). I'd find ruminants of this past in the old wrought iron gates that had spaces for lamps to light the paths and carriageways. Or where there was a stepping stone to mount your horse more easily. Or a boot scraper still embedded to the stoop in the older houses.

If you try to do that in London, it becomes overwhelming. Even when you pick things apart to the place where you can place things in their respective eras, you have to remember that so many times the city was renewed after a great destruction. Yet, you can still visit the Roman wall that dates from almost 2 millennia ago.

So every trip here's an adventure to me. We've done a lot of exploring, but I doubt I will see even a fraction of the UK, even if we live here the rest of our lives.

I'm adjusting to living with an extended family. Christmas was fun, but I felt a bit detached from what was going on. Financial stress in the larger family didn't help things. After the holidays, we decided to readopt a whole foods, no grains, sugars, or starch way of eating, and it's going well. Once we meet our health goals, we may move more towards "Nourishing Traditions" but haven't totally decided.

I miss a lot of my friends and family from the US. It's not even that I saw many of them often. It's just that even calling them is a little difficult due to time zone differences. Dad's also not doing well...even the mention of that makes tears well up. But I am committed to this, and I do not regret my move one bit. I think I was meant to live here, even sticking out so much with my broad accent and, when it comes down to it, yank values. By this I do not mean political conservatism, consumerism, focus on self-interest, or anything else that we like to see as critiques of the US and her citizens in general (believe me, we aren't exclusive owners of those traits, and we didn't invent them). I am talking more along the lines of the hypersensitive sense of justice, expectation of fairness, frankness, and general extroversion. But again, I don't think we own exclusive rights to these things, nor did I realise how powerful the culture we were raised in could be.

I finally got my auto-drip coffee pot. Hot damn, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe whenever I want! I am totally off black tea now. It's funny, I used to drink black or green tea a couple times a week. In fact, I went about 6 months just drinking tea in place of coffee. But somehow, I got so sick of tea (our family drinks it instead of water), that I won't touch it. At least for now anyway. I am a bit addicted to a few Twinings herb teas. Yum.

Smoke-free for about 3 months. I didn't bother writing the date down because I guess I didn't think I'd stick to it.

We're planning a possible trip to another EU country this year. I am really looking forward to it. In the next few weeks, we might take a trip to the coast.