In our attempt to keep up with blog posts, we both wrote some whilst the other showered. As our plans to use the internet yesterday were thwarted we set off early for Spur, right next to the free Internet place, for breakfast. Unfortunately our cunning plan to enjoy a meal and use free Internet backfired as the Internet was not working! I tried to ring Mum on Skype too while in the car but the connection was terrible and we could only get a few words across. It was incredibly frustrating for me because I found out that our wedding photographs had been uploaded by the extremely talented Heather Steyn, but I couldn't see them!
One thing I had been very adamant about doing whilst we were in Swaziland was going to the Ngwenya glass factory. I have always grown up with pieces of Ngwenya glass around our home, and I wanted to take Dan there and have a look at how they made everything. The word Ngwenya means crocodile, as the valley that the factory sits in looks like the back of a crocodile. The glass items are made out of recycled bottles from all over Swaziland, and for some people collecting the glasses is their only income. On our way there, we drive behind a man who had his left indicator on the entire time! We flashed him a few times but he didn't see us, so it remained on. As we passed Mbabane on the highway, we literally drove into a cloud. We could see the edges of the cloud over the mountain as we sailed into it, it looked like the mountain had a hat on. The mist was so thick that we drove at around 50kms per hour whilst we went through it, not being able to see more than 50m in front of us.
Ngwenya glass was only about 30 minutes away from where we were staying, so we got there quite early in the morning. I had a great wander around the shop imagining all the things I would love to but if I had unlimited money, and in reality I was choosing the few things I wanted that we could afford. It's not that the products are really expensive, it's just that there are so many of them that I want that it starts to become expensive if you chose them all. Before we made any decisions on what we wanted we walked up to the observation deck to see how the items are made. They have a huge furnace on the left had side of the room that one guy shovels glass into, nd then long poles are dipped into the molten glass and twisted aroind to get a blob of it to work with. We watched one man blow that blob into a cocktail glass mold, pass it to the next guy who scored the top of the glass to be broken off the pole later and shape the stem of the glass. He then passed it to the guy behind him who put a blob of molten glass from another guy onto the bottom of the stem to make the base of the glass. A final man would them take the piece and pit it into a conveyer belt type machine that we presume would cool the glass down at a rate that would not crack it.
After a few hours in that machine the glass is taken out and the top piece cracked off. A lady then sands down the top of the glass to make it even and it is put onto a round conveyer belt under a hot flame, to melt the very top of the glass so that it is no longer sharp. I was glad to be able to watch them make the cocktail glasses, but I would have also loved to watch an animal being made. Ngwenya glass makes hippos, elephants, warthogs, lions and cheetahs out of molten glass, the elephants are my favourite. Have a look on google if you are interested, they are really beautiful! After watching them for a long while we went back into the shop to chose our items. The main one we chose was a water jug, and the handle of the jug is a giraffes head, that curves and dips over the top of the jug, for R200. We also got two huge R25 champagne glasses! I would have bought more of the glasses but the logistics of getting them home would have been impossible.
We walked around the rest of the shops next to the glass factory, but didn't buy anything else. If I had have had space I would have bought a woven clock, with these beautiful woven flowers all around it! Alas, we have no space and no house! We did however buy some chocolates from a tiny artisan chocolate shop, am Dan let me get a R7 shot glass of melted milk chocolate, it was divine!! There was an Ngwenya glass cafe situated above the shop which had free Internet, so we sat down to have drinks and lunch and hopefully download the wedding photos. Dan was not hungry but I was, so I ordered butternut soup, and we both had drinks. I opened up Heather's blog on the iPad and we waited ages for anything to load! Their Internet was very very slow, so it would only load about a quarter of the photos!
The photos loaded somewhat faster outside, but I gave up eventually! We drove back to Pick and Pay to buy some more castle for Dan, and I sat in the car and finally loaded all of our wedding photos! I was so excited to finally see them! We looked through the entire blog post, and we are both so happy with our photographs :D Heather did such a wonderful job, I cannot wait to see the rest of the photographs on our cd! Once we got back to the lodge Dan started a fire for the braai. We borrowed the Internet code from the lodge and I then proceeded to download every wedding photograph, upload them all again onto Facebook and tag every one! It was brilliant to be bale to finally use the Internet properly in Swaziland, I was finally able to phone my parents on Skype for ha,f an hour without any connection issues. We sat up late and watched the 40 year old virgin before going to sleep.
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