South Africa - A Beginning

I arrived without knowing quite what to expect.
The first thing I noticed was the light. It was stronger and heavier than I had imagined, and distances seemed greater than they had looked on a map.

For the first few days, I found myself trying too hard to understand what I was seeing. I looked for significance in small things and tried to connect them to what I had read before coming to South Africa. Eventually, I stopped doing that.

I began to walk more slowly and pay attention to what was actually in front of me.

That change became the starting point for this journal. I do not want it to be simply a record of where I went. I want to remember what I saw, what I misunderstood, and what became clearer only after I had spent some time there.