This morning I’m writing from Ted's apartment at the V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town. Here I am surrounded by the clanging and banging of new, expensive condos go up. Standing on the veranda, I have a view of the Yacht Club and the huge cranes involved in construction. Outside the building there is a billboard advertising where I’m staying now, "Come see where the other 0.0001% live." Inside, because of the nature of Ted's job, all the windows can be covered with heavy metal blinds to prevent spying. America’s newest living room war is on the TV, reporting to a room full of dark hardwood, red upholstered, “standard issue” embassy furniture. Baghdad is only one hour ahead of us here. I want to know when they’re going to start producing box scores to go with the sportscaster style commentary.

Two nights ago, I went with Ted to his boss’s house for dinner. MB is the Deputy Chief Consular General at the Cape Town consulate. Most of the others there also work in the Consulate. Most of them were women. In fact, the only other two men are there to visit their sister. One of them works for National Geographic and we try to figure out what family the Goldcrest Cape Gooseberry is (Solanaceae it turns out). Talk about the war is mostly tangential. There are about 15 protesters at the consulate participating in a 24 hour protest. MB wishes there were more. “I’d really like a terrorism-snow day,” she said.

In other news, I made a fortuitous discovery yesterday. I’ve been working at the South African musuem, SA’s national museum. They specialize more in beetles and hymenoptera and there collection of Philolche is very small. However, Simon Van Nort, a hymenopterist working there, has done extensive Malaise trap sampling through Africa. It turns out that he has specimens collected from central Africa, in ethanol! This last part makes it possible to extract DNA from the little beasties! So I started going through black and cloudy vials labeled “residue” and “non-hymenoptera.” I spent about 3 hours looking though the microscope at little insect bodies swaying back and forth across my field of view. Lots of spiders, cockroaches, tsetse flies, a few iridescent and strange looking beetles with spikes coming out every which way. In the Gabon samples, I found two individual of Philoliche (Stenophara) gravoti! This is a species I haven’t even seen in dried collections yet.

While working in the museum, I got a call on my cell phone (yes, I’ve got one now!) It was the new Program Officer for the SA Fulbright program. He had a thick accent and his name was Hendrick. He wanted to know how things were going and introduce himself. And he wanted to know how the war was treating me. “We are here to help you,” he said, “And we want to know what your experience is as an American in South Africa… with the war and everything. Has anyone harassed you? Have you been in arguments or confrontations?” “No,” I answered, “people have been very kind to me here.”