{"id":137,"date":"2004-07-01T05:50:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-01T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=137"},"modified":"2004-07-01T05:50:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-01T11:50:00","slug":"kululacom-flight-johannesburg-to-cape-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/kululacom-flight-johannesburg-to-cape-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Kulula.com Flight, Johannesburg to Cape Town"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"date-header\">Thursday, July 01, 2004<\/h2>\n<p><i>Service: * * * 1\/2<br \/>\n<br \/>     Food: N\/A<br \/>\n<br \/>     Ambience: * *<br \/>\n<br \/>     Babe Count: * * * <\/i><b>*<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m on the plane. On an impulse, I&#8217;ve bought a return ticket to completely cement my pact with myself that I really ought to learn to relax. I&#8217;m going to be staying at Leigh&#8217;s house. He&#8217;s my best buddy from school days. We basically grew up together.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll be sleeping on the bottom bunk in Oscar&#8217;s room, and Oscar will see if he can tolerate sleeping in the same room as a snoring, farting adult. Oscar is five-and-a-half, and he&#8217;s an expert at Sony PlayStation 2 games.<\/p>\n<p>Bianca met me for coffee at the airport. It&#8217;s her birthday tomorrow, and I can&#8217;t make it to her party. So I gave her her presents before I left, rather than after.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mysite.mweb.co.za\/residents\/rb000004\/Brian_Kulula.jpg?resize=200%2C266\" alt=\"Brian, an insurance mogul, flying high on Kulula.com, taking a calculated statistical risk that we'll reach Cape Town safely.\" align=\"left\" border=\"0\" height=\"266\" hspace=\"6\" vspace=\"6\" width=\"200\" \/>Right now, I&#8217;m noticing that my knees are touching the seat in front of me. Kulula seems to be packing us in more tightly than ever before. I certainly am not the tallest dude in the world, and if my knees are touching, I can&#8217;t imagine how awful it must be for the taller specimens.<\/p>\n<p>The dude sitting next to me is lanky, and he&#8217;s forced to sit with his legs spread as wide as they can go without encroaching too viciously on my space and the dude beside him.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got the window seat, and a wicked       view of the setting sun on my right all the way to Cape Town. Wild.<\/p>\n<p>The dude beside me hasn&#8217;t noticed that I&#8217;ve been sketching him, even though I&#8217;m literally looking up his nose at his nostril hairs, with long, hard stares every twenty or so seconds. When I finish the picture, I study it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Amazing       machine that,&#8221; he says. &#8220;Can you do everything you need on       that?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yeah,&#8221; I say. &#8220;Writing, email,       sketching.&#8221; I turn the drawing to show him.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Who&#8217;s that?&#8221;       he asks.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s you,&#8221; I say.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hahahahahha!!! Did you do       that now? Right now??&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yup. Would you like me to email it to       you?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d love that,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>I get his email address, and we start chatting. He&#8217;s an insurance dude. Does highly specialised stuff for civil engineering firms. Covering things like walls falling on people, or rain preventing the completion of a shopping mall. Stuff like that.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;September eleven really changed the insurance       industry overnight,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>And then we start talking about God. He&#8217;s a reborn Christian, and we spend a long time on how he came to realise that only God can help him and the whole of humanity. I&#8217;m not a reborn Christian. I&#8217;m more a scurrilous half-Jew with wayward Taoist leanings. But I kinda agree with his position on the whole. Same content, different packaging, I s&#8217;pose. <\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday, July 01, 2004 Service: * * * 1\/2 Food: N\/A Ambience: * * Babe Count: * * * * I&#8217;m on the plane. On an impulse, I&#8217;ve bought a return ticket to completely cement my pact with myself that &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/kululacom-flight-johannesburg-to-cape-town\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Kulula.com Flight, Johannesburg to Cape Town<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-2d","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}