Weekend in Jozi and Soweto

So much to say since I last wrote!

First, last Wednesday afternoon my flatmates and I went to the Pretoria zoo for the afternoon because we have a friend who works there. He gave us free passes and a golf cart tour of the park. It was a pretty area set right in central Pretoria. We saw gorgeous peacocks, 3 huge rhinos, zebras, lions, tigers, elephants, flamingoes, kangaroos, bears, okapi, crocs and alligators, tons of antelope and a bunch of strange fish. One fish didn’t have any eyes, called “cave fish,” and another fish that walked around on the ground. Unfortunately, my camera battery died just after we arrived :(.

Thursday we walked to nearby Church Square after work, also in city center. It has beautiful architecture and a sculpture in the middle. However, most businesses have deserted the city center in both Pretoria and Johannesburg so it is not a very nice area. There is broken glass scattered across the square and a lot of loitering. In the evening I played action cricket with Idasa’s cricket team. It was really fun! Action cricket is an adapted version of cricket played indoors with fewer players. Everyone was really nice and patient teaching me the rules! The game is pretty simple; you have to hit the ball with a bat then sprint across the line before the other team either catches the ball in the air or hits a wicket (little sticks on either end). Your partner in batting has to run in the opposite direction when you hit the ball. After everyone on one team bats, you switch sides.

Friday Anna and I headed to Johannesburg, also known as Jo’burg and Jozi, for the weekend. Jo’burg is about 45 minutes away, but usually longer with traffic. It is one of the major, if not the major, economic hub of Africa. An enormous city, Johannesburg has suburbs sprawling out in all directions with everything from millionaire mansions to squatter camps. Even more so than Pretoria, most of the businesses have moved to the northern suburbs because the city center is notoriously dangerous. The city is also surprisingly segregated with certain areas in which each race dominates.

A girl from work asked her brother to give us a ride down to our hostel, which took an hour and a half in traffic! She pointed out the more famous monuments while her younger brother’s driving terrified me a bit… On the drive up we passed China town in the suburb where our hostel was located—Eastgate. It was definitely a mini-version compared to SanFran but had a large Asian population. We stayed at a hostel called Brown Sugar Backpackers in Eastgate, a southeastern suburb. The hostel was great and so much fun! It was in an old mansion on a hill with a panoramic view of the city (pictures above!). It’s run by a super friendly woman who went out of her way to help out guests. When we first arrived she told us our room was in an outdoor hut with one bed, barely wider than a twin bed and nothing else in the room. The room was probably less than 6ft. by 6ft. Luckily we were able to switch rooms because it would have been freezing outside! She moved us to a room with a larger bed in the main building called the glass room because the ceiling was made of glass. It was an addition to the original mansion, but made for an interesting room! However even this room didn’t have heating. Almost no buildings have central heating in South Africa even though it gets to freezing temperatures, but there were space heaters downstairs.

It was a fun place to hang out in the evenings that felt like a combination of summer camp and college. We ate group meals and cooked food for each other in the morning. There was a lounge with a pool table, couches and games filled with loads of young, interesting people. The first couple I met was from Australia and were in the middle of a year long trip around the world. They had been throughout Southeast Asia (the Philippines beaches was their favorite so far) and had been in South Africa about a month. They rented a minivan and had been driving from hostel to hostel. After South Africa their next stop is Central and South America. We also met a ton of people from the British Isles spending the weekend to go to the Lions vs. Springbok rugby game. The Lions are a rugby team formed every four years of the best players from the British Isles. The team alternates going to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to play a tournament. Apparently this is a huge deal and tons of people fly down to watch the games every four years. We met three Scottish boys, 4 good-humored Irish and an Oxford grad training to be a professional swimmer. I also met a fair number of solo travelers including a woman from Toronto who works in Dubai, an American studying for a semester at University of Cape Town, another working at wild animal refuges and a third working in Zambia. Staying at hostels is great because they are full of young people open to meeting anyone and everyone. There was also a cute, elderly South African man who was filming the scene and each guest left a message on the video.

On Saturday, while the majority of the hostel headed to the rugby game, we walked to the Bruma flea market just a half hour walk down the road. The flea market had lots of cheap clothing, music, sunglasses plus the normal display of African ebony sculptures, scarves and beaded jewelry. At the flea market we met our taxi driver. The best way to get around is to become friends with taxi drivers, then you can get their number and call them whenever you need a lift. After the flea market, we took a taxi to Constitution Hill where we visited the highest courtroom in South Africa and saw the remnants of a prison where leaders from most major liberation groups were held including Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi. From the hill we walked through Braamfontein, got a glance of the University of Witswatersand and crossed the Nelson Mandela Bridge to get to Newtown. My favorite part was the Nelson Mandela bridge because it had a nice view of the city and tons of bright yellow, green and purple trains down below. I couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures—carefully! We had been told Newtown was one of the nicer areas in central Johannesburg, but in reality it was bare and a bit deserted. The restaurant I was looking for had been closed and there were very few people in the plaza. A few craft markets were open near Market Theater and we saw the outside of Museum Africa, but unfortunately it was already closed.

After an early dinner in Newtown, we headed back to the hostel for a much quieter evening hanging out by the heat lamp and playing scrabble. My new Irish friend tried to explain the difference between the British Isles, Ireland, the UK, England etc. but it was a confusing distinction especially when it came to sports. For many sports, but not all, Northern Ireland and Ireland share a team even though Northern Ireland is technically part of Great Britain but for other sports they have separte teams. He also said many people from Northern Ireland describe themselves as Irish despite not actually having Irish citizenship… it makes sense, but is confusing to an outsider! He also explained a bit about the education system. Similar to many European countries and South Africa there is a major exam taken at the end of high school and the score you get determines which careers you can pursue. The test is out of 600 points and to become a doctor, for example, you need to score nearly 600 and to become an electrical engineer at least 200. It was fun to hang out in the hostel, play pool, drink tons of hot tea and mingle with the constantly changing crowd. I also spent a lot of time paging through tourist books about all the sites and hostels across South Africa.

Sunday morning Anna and I took a tour of Soweto and Jo’burg. We were picked up at 9:30 and headed to the township. My first reaction was surprise at the size of Soweto. It sprawled over rolling hills and contained a huge amount of diversity from the direly poor to middle and even upper classes. There was a large shopping mall, a stadium and even a KFC. We began our tour in the upper-class Soweto neighborhoods. It was definitely a surprise to find beautiful homes with sculptures of Greek gods outside and many without any high gates armed with spikes and barbed wire. The township is actually considered safer by many than areas of the city and a lot don’t use walls. Although there were beautiful homes, just a block away from the most expensive homes were tin shacks that looked like outhouses, fires burning piles of trash and stacks of bricks and dirt left as the remains of old buildings. We continued the tour to the middle class neighborhoods and finally to the poorest squatter camps. Soweto was also very segregated, like Johannesburg. Our guide strongly emphasized the point that NO whites live in Soweto, and there are certain colored and Indian townships. Along the way we stopped to visit a woman’s home, Regina Mundi Church, the historic power plant (with the 2 famous graffiti tours), Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s homes and the Hector Pieterson Memorial. Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu still live in Soweto, but Mandela has moved to a wealthier suburb. The Hector Pieterson Memorial and the corner where he was shot were very moving. Hector Pieterson was the youngest person, at only 13, to die in the uprising on June 16, 1976 in which the police opened fire in the township of Orlando, killing many youth. Pieterson was caught in crossfire between the police and students on his way home from school. At the memorial, there was a stone wall commemorating the bodies of those who were never found that died in the uprising and a stream symbolizing the tears shed for those lost. The entire time I could not believe how recently these events had taken place—when my parents were in college!

We had lunch at a buffet style restaurant with traditional African food. I skipped the tripe, but tried most of the rest of it…including the vegetable fat ice cream, which wasn’t too bad. My favorite dish was the bread. It’s hard to describe, but it was fresh and almost doughy, traditionally cooked at home to save money in the township. Our guide Sam said in the village you spend 100 rand a week, in the township 500 rand a week and in town 500 rand a day (divide the rand by 8 to get a dollar). Again, I met interesting people on the tour! There was a young couple who live in Malawi, two British college students and a couple of sisters from Finland. The younger sister is doing an internship with the Finnish embassy in Pretoria. It’s a requirement for her degree to both do an internship AND study abroad. We’re hoping to meet up again soon since she lives nearby.

In the afternoon we went to the Apartheid Museum set next to Gold Reef City, a popular amusement park, just outside the city. The museum was fascinating and sad from the beginning. The exterior is a concrete building with heavy slabs of concrete labeled “democracy,” “freedom,” “equality” etc. rising from the building. There were also copper fences adding to the feeling of being jailed inside the museum. When we entered we were given cards designating our race as “white” or “non-white,” which determined which entrance we took to enter the museum. It was an artsy indoor-outdoor museum with powerful videos and first-hand accounts. There was also a special dedication to Helen Suzman, a white liberal who advocated to end apartheid, and just died on January 1^st, 2009. I also really enjoyed a special Mandela exhibit, which followed his life from childhood to present showing his amazing journey from tribal royalty to a scholar, advocate, prisoner, leader and politician. My favorite part was a wall with many of Mandela’s most famous quotes about everything from courage to justice to love. The museum was small by American museum standards, but I could spend hours in there—every word, film clip and picture told a story.

After a very historical day, we came back to Pretoria on a long, rainy drive. Back to work tomorrow… looking forward to starting a new project this week and having more of my coworkers in GAP back in town!

Hope you’re doing well, I love hearing from you! It feels far away over here!