SA Lingo

People in South Africa have a completely different vocabulary than we do back home. There are lots of commonly used words that I say, that people have never heard of here. For instance, the word ‘traffic light’ are called ‘robots’ here, and if you ever mention ‘traffic lights’ to somebody, they will have no idea what you’re talking about. So the first time I asked for directions, somebody told me, “Go to the corner, and turn left at the robot”. So I went walking – fully believing that I’d eventually run into a little metal man that would tell me where to go. Needless to say, I got very lost. Here’s some other South African words that I’ve picked up while living here:

1.)Cozzie or Costume – a swimming suit
2.)Yebo – yes
3.)Slops – sandals, flip flops
4.)Takies – tennis shoes
5.)Chips – French fries
6.)Crisps – potato chips
7.)Mealies – corn on the cob
8.)Chunder – throw up, vomit
9.)Jersey – any type of jacket, sweatshirt
10.) Chow face – kiss, make out
11.) Lou – bathroom
12.) Bunny Chow – bread with curry (a very popular Zulu dish)
13.) Braii – barbeque
14.) Biltong – dried meat, jerky
15.) Sangoma – a doctor
16.) Salbona – hello
17.) Howzit – how are you?
18.) Sharp Sharp – cool, good
19.) Dawnie – an early morning class

Some other interesting things: All fruit juice here is 100% fruit. They don’t have any nasty preservatives, corn syrup, artificial flavoring or even sugar in them. So if you buy mango, guava or orange juice – it’s just squeezed fruit. The bad thing about it though is that there are no preservatives in anything, so food goes bad VERY fast. Also, the cost of living is a lot cheaper than back home. A loaf of bread is 40 cents. A pack of 10 Lithium batteries are $4. Haircuts are $5. A movie ticket at the theatre is $1 (although movies come to theatres about 2 months later than in the US... Benjamin Button JUST got here). Lets see…. A lot of people here listen to “house music” which is a lot like techno. On Sundays, everyone blasts Gospel music from their rooms in the res(people here are a lot more religious than back home). There’s a ton more things I wanted to write, but that’s all I could think of right now. I’ll post some more later :)