Daily ramblings while working at the mine

Working every day, there's not a lot to report on. I've seen most of the unusual things in between here and work, and photographed them, though not all.

I was told a story about one of the nearby mines. Apparently every day, the conveyor belt carrying iron ore to the plant would stop. Once someone went out to the control shed and flipped the switch, it would start back up. It was happening at the same time every day, and the cause was baffling the people on site, until one of the engineers hid and watched for hours to see what was happening. Along came a tribe of baboons, doing their daily commute across the valley... the head baboon walked up to the control panel, flicked the switch disabling the conveyor belt, and supervised while the females and young safely made their way across the conveyor belt, before following them over.
I had heard of this before, even recalling photos taken of it happening, but wasn't aware that it was here that it had happened, at the Sishen mine. I did see monkeys sitting on the bridge, about where I was told the baboons traversed each day... maybe it's true?

I walked into one of the tea rooms today, and one of the foremen called out to me, wanting to make a bet over whether the Australians would win rugby against South Africa tomorrow. The foreman looks like Michael Clarke (the big guy from Green Mile and Pulp Fiction). So we agreed on a 750ml bottle of whiskey, depending on who won. For the first time in my life, I'll have a reason to find out what the result of a rugby game was. I don't even like whiskey, and my loathing for rugby is well publicised, but it was an amusing interaction so worth it. People seem to be as much into spectator sports here as they are in Australia.

Training one of the staff at the mine site, and I read out the name of one of the workers, and she seemed shocked... "You read Tswana! That name is in Tswana, how did you know it?"... I just read it as it was written, being used to phonetic spellings of names in the roman alphabet from Japan. She was all excited for a few seconds, which made me realise I should learn some Tswana. Someone approached me in the street later as I was on my way to the gym, and asked me if I had a room he could rent, as he'd only just arrived in town from Cape Town and hadn't found a place to stay yet. I apologised that I'm not from the area and wished him well, and he commented, "that's the first time someone has asked me to speak English. Everyone here wants me to speak in Afrikaan". The politics of language here are interesting, and also a bit sad.

I have been going to the gym semi-regularly, as much as work permits, which hasn't been very often this week. My goal is to lose at least 1kg while on this trip... normally I put on weight due to always eating in restaurants, not being able to plan meals, servings being too large, not having access to my normal workarounds to stuffing myself with food at meal times and not having snacks in between. I weighed myself today, and halfway through this trip my weight hasn't changed at all, but at least I haven't gained any yet, which is something.

I've got the car happily driving around and being tracked, drawing circles on the ground and the camera can work out the angle of the ground and roughly how far the car is away. Now I need to move onto a more challenging problem... identifying more than one region in an image, without identifying too many. It's more challenging than I'd initially given it credit for, which is good, giving me a chance to stretch the brain muscles a little.