A Manly Birthday

My 22nd birthday started out with something every guy needs to experience at some point in his life: A South African mining expo. My boss Nick picked me up from Lloyd's mansion and drove me over to the Nasrec exhibition center, which is adjacent to the Soccer City stadium used for the final of the world cup. That brought back good memories, except this time instead of thousands of crazy, colorful, international soccer fans there were thousands of crazy, Afrikaaner, international mining fans. If you like engineering marvels, tires the size of a house, 147 different types of steel cable, flash lights brighter than the sun, overzealous sales people, the shameless use of scantily-clad women to hand out brochures, and free beer, then this was your place.

Nick used to run a small engineering business for a while so he was enamoured with all of the space-age milling equipment and 85-micron processing screens (WOW!), and while a lot of it was cool to look at, I was a bit disappointed with the representation for the geology side of mining at the expo. But if you're shopping around Chinese mining cable dealers, let me know because I have a few good contacts for you.

After the big day of flexing the man muscle at the expo, Nick took me to the local watering hole for a drink with his brother and son, who is 18. The bar was an Irish pub called O'Hagans. Where isn't there an Irish pub!? I enjoyed the drink and got to talking about music and the local social scene in Pretoria and Joburg with Nick's son Jonathan while sipping on my Heineken, you know that famous Irish beer. Seems like everyone is definitely into their house music and the dreaded dub-step here. I'm sorry but if you don't know what dub-step is, please don't bother trying to find out.

Naturally, the next place to go to sustain my testosterone levels was an ice hockey match. Now, I know what you're thinking, ice hockey in South Africa? Funnily enough, Lloyd's entire family are huge ice hockey nuts. Lloyd plays, his daughter plays, his son has even been to Michigan trying to break into the semi-pro leagues there. Tonight was the first game in a round-robin tournament that featured Lloyd's team (he's the coach), led by who else but the coach's son, against a team from Johannesburg. I've been to some NHL games and I have to say, the quality of the play was pretty darn good. There were great goals and some biiiiiiiiig hits, which are always nice to see in a hockey game.

After Lloyd's Jaguars thumped the visiting Scorpions 6-1, we headed across the street to a Spur Steakranch for dinner. I find Spur hilarious, and here is why: Each Spur Steakranch is heavily themed with a Native American motif running throughout the place. Each restaurant is separately named after an old American tribe, like Navajo or Shashone. They take it to the extreme with different little Native American sayings and words of wisdom on all the place mats. And in true South African style, the portions are huge and if you don't want an enormous hunk of meat on your plate you might as well leave. Despite my begging, I was also treated to a classic themed-restaurant birthday song with a sparkler and a balloon. A lot of it was in Sesotho, one of the local dialects, so I couldn't understand it (to be honest I was half-expecting some sort of Native American chant that they forced their employees to learn), but it was a sufficiently rousing and embarrassing spectacle. I enjoyed my chicken quesadillas (ha found something on the menu that wasn't red meat, in your face Spur) and a pint of beer to cap of a very South African and very manly birthday celebration. If only I was back at the mine, I could go off-roading while shooting a crocodile with a shot-gun (JOKE!).