Charles Apple

We found out this week that the fabulous Kenny Irby of the Poynter Institute has been in South Africa the past few days teaching online journalism techniques.

He had precious little time for leisure activities, but he took a few minutes of his morning to have breakfast with Arlene Prinsloo – the design director of the group of newspapers at which I’m teaching — and myself.

Whenever I’m around people like Kenny, I’m reminded of how far I still have to go before I actually get good at this teaching and consulting thing. Man, this guy is on top of everything and he speaks with such passion and conviction.

I’ve been lucky enough to study at Poynter four times in my career, so I had met Kenny before. Arlene had taken classes with him a couple of times previously as well. Kenny is one of her big heroes, so I offered to bring my camera along and shoot a few photos of them together.

Kenny was kind enough to pose for us.

There was no way I was going to run into Kenny Irby, 8,000 miles from home, and not get a photo with him for myself.

Luckily, he didn’t kiss me.

And, of course, we recruited a hotel employee to take a group shot.

Kenny hit Arlene with a pop quiz: Name the people on his T-shirt. To our amazement, she only knew the guy on the right.

It was only then that Kenny admitted he wasn’t shure who the others were, either. Apparently, the shirt has an accompanying cheat sheet with IDs.

We left Kenny to a tour he had planned today of Soweto. I dropped Arlene off back at the hotel so she could work today — it’ll be the third edition of the new-and-improved Rapport newspaper. And although it was hours before my flight was to depart, I went off in search of O. R. Tambo Airport.

It took only a few minutes to get there. As I had promised Arlene earlier: Piece of cake.

GPS manufacturers of the world: I’m laughing at you.

The folks at the British Airways counter informed me I was overweight. And my luggage was, too. (Ba-dum bump.) So they zapped me with a huge fee. That’s what I get, traveling domestic with two months’ worth of stuff. I guess I should have found someone in Johannesburg who would keep a few items for me for eight days.

Isn’t this a pretty orange plane? The airline is called Mango Airlines.

I parked myself at an English-style pub in the airport concourse, where I caused my waitress great alarm by drinking Coke Light instead of beer. I’ve been a little dehydrated — I have huge cramps in my left leg today, and I’ve not even boarded my plane yet — so I thought it best to avoid alcohol.

Even the cans of Coke here are very friendly.

Well, hello yourself, cutie. Come here often?

So I blogged, answered a few e-mails and I sent off a load of photos to Arlene. I imagine she’ll be posting some to her Facebook account soon.

So after 39 days in Johannesburg, I’ll be on my way to Cape Town in a few minutes. I’ll be there eight days and then I’ll return to Jo’burg for two more weeks.

I return to Virginia Beach Dec. 1.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 6:45 am and is filed under Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.