Joburg

15 Observations/Mini-Stories:

- MoAfrika lodge is awesome! If you visit Joburg, definitely stay there... great tours, great people, great beds, great food, and great big glasses of wine!

- Food is cheap! You can get some really amazing meals for under $10. I had a big portion of fish and chips from the mall for $4!

- Traveling by yourself, however, is not cheap! If another person had not signed up to go, I would not have been able to do a tour to Pretoria because of the cost. It was basically twice as much on my own!

- Gauteng Radio station YFM 99.2 does this really cool 2-minute "Who's Who" spread that gives you the good and bad about certain people. I got some really cool information about Jacob Zuma.

- Pretoria is the official capital; it is well-kept and quite lovely. However, Johannesburg is considered by many to be the actual capital; it's where the wealth of the country is concentrated, but also a city that has trash everywhere and so Not a city you want to hang out in.

- Speaking of wealth, I haven't seen so many audis and beamers since I moved out of Silicon Valley...

- I was scared of every bathroom I went into. (see below)

- I felt safer in Soweto than I did in Johannesburg city. Supposedly, people don't commit crimes in their own town for fear of "township justice," and instead commit the crimes in neighboring Johannesburg, which is part of what makes it so unsafe.

- Typical township food is shebeen, basically a barbecue with typical accompaniments. We got to try it at Mdu's (our guide's) favorite neighborhood spot in Soweto and had really delicious chicken and boerewors (beef sausage) with pap and chakalaka. Yum! Thankfully, we didn't have to choke down any Bantu Beer - traditional African beer that is the color of coffee with cream. Yuck! (I had had it in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town... it's so bad that it would make Bud Light taste amazing even to beer snobs :))

- Apartheid is over, but racism still exists... so too do divisions between black, white, and coloured. Soweto, for example, consists of a majority of black townships, three coloured townships, one indian township, and no white residents.

- I asked Mdu how Asian people were classified in the White-Coloured-Black spectrum: He considered them as Black during Apartheid (and maybe even now...).

- Now, it is fashionable to engage in interracial dating in South Africa.

- In downtown Joburg, I played "spot the white person" because there are just no white people walking around the streets! Our guide said it was something like 1 white in 100 blacks. White people may have to work in the city, but they live in the suburbs outside of it.

- A house in the expensive area of Soweto starts at 650,000 Rand (<$100,000). A house in the middle class area--of formerly government housing--sells starting around 140,000 Rand. Houses are available in the rich area, and very difficult to obtain in the middle-class area. Mdu rents a room in the middle-class area for 500 Rand a month.

- The Apartheid Museum randomly designates each entrant as "white" or "non-white" and makes people go through separate entrances based on their designation. The museum is very moving and definitely a must-visit in Joburg.

So I had a very nice and relaxing time in Joburg and am happy to report that I spent the last four days there without incident. Still, Johannesburg scares me, like really really scares me. I think I've been scared of it since I first came to South Africa in 2007, when I had heard from multiple people that you are almost guaranteed to get robbed or attacked there. I can't shake the disquietude I feel associated with the city and researching Joburg before i got there definitely made it worse. When you look at the Wikitravel page for Johannesburg, it tells you that South Africa is the rape capital of the world. Talking to people, you hear horrible stories about women getting attacked at knife point in restrooms or how women are not required to stop at traffic lights at night because of the likelihood of getting attacked.

I really hate it. I hate it when people scare you about a place to the point where all you think about is the ways in which you are vulnerable. I hate being reminded of the fact that I am especially vulnerable as a woman traveling by herself! I can't shake some of the fear that's just been building up - its with me even now in Swaziland, supposedly a very safe country. So I am being careful, of course. You will be happy to know that, though I hate how unsettled I feel or this wary-of-everything mentality, the fearmongering has made me choose safer/more luxury (and therefore more expensive) accommodation and transportation. As such, I am "stuck" in Swaziland for more days than I had originally planned because the "safe" option from here to Durban is via a once-weekly minibus.

Apart from that little rant, I am actually really looking forward to experiencing some of the Swazi way of life! The protests in Manzini have ended, so no worries there, and maybe the extra time in Swaziland means more chances to spot the King or one of his 13 wives.... So Crazy!