south africa, hooray!

I am now in South Africa and one thing that has stuck out is how much it looks like America. i was pretty shocked to spend $30 on a single taxi ride. there are no goats in the middle of the road. no deteriorating sedans blasting music with steering wheels at a 45 degree angle to keep the car straight. no men sleeping under trees on the side of a busy road. if these hints of what i had known as africa exist here, i haven’t seen them amongst the malls and neatly trimmed hedges.

the cost of living is undoubtedly higher. it feels different to converse with africans who are accustomed to paying $1 for a soda or a mini-bus ride. or those that spend $20 to go to SeaWorld and see a seal show. There is certainly segregation and I am sure my Lonely Planet is not guiding me into impoverished areas on purpose. I am just noticing differences. It’s like I’m in America, but I’m still in Africa.

I arrived in the morning to Johannesburg and took my (pricey) taxi to an area of town called Melville. I dropped my stuff and went to the Apartheid Museum and wandered through apartheid history, jogging my memory of my Politics of South Africa class in college. I splurged and had the best hot water shower and night’s sleep in a long while at a very nice B&B. I then taxied into Soweto, the large township responsible for the Soweto student Uprising in 1976 and housing Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu on the same street. OMG. I napped. (I forgot to check the weather, and South Africa is approaching winter, so Johannesburg was 50 degrees and raining, felt like a Seattle winter = naps). I also finished Our Time to Eat, which was quite good.

I then wandered out of my awesome hostel and walked to the famous Vilakazi street. The area of Soweto I walked around in felt like a neighborhood to be canvassed by the Obama campaign: low income, young men hanging in small groups on the street, chatty old ladies on their porches. Everyone was friendly. I walked and read all about the fascinating history. I was reading one sign about a South African liberation song that was sung by students as a form of protest and low and behold two 5-year old boys showed up just at that moment to sing the song for me. They wanted money, which i sadly didn’t have, but they sang anyway in their stained t-shirts. I walked more, looking foolish in my socks and Toms, and found the “Koppie” which was a rock and look-out for student groups where meetings were held and police were chased away. Now, it’s covered in plastic bags. I would have taken a picture of the ironic beauty, but alas I forgot my camera. I wandered back to the hostel, hung out at the “beach bar” with the only other guest, a nice Irish guy, and went to bed by 9pm.

I arrived the next morning two hours early for my bus. I tried to nap but a man yelled at me that I was not allowed to sleep. And then Jehovah Witnesses came around to our seating area. They had a binder FULL of literature in dozens of languages. How come Kingdom Hall can find a way to translate literature and it takes us public health people weeks to find a Tingrinya translation? Freezing cold at 6:30am led me to Wimpy (the fast-food answer to S. Africa), which was full, so I sat in the “smoking room” and ate my eggs and toast with an older, shaky white lady who chained smoked. I regretted that decision, but appreciated the warmth. The 8-hour bus ride that followed was pretty uneventful.

My taxi drivers got lost in Durban trying to find the hostel, so I laughed from the backseat while they studied the map in the Lonely Planet. We found the hostel, I pounded through half of Freedom and went to sleep by 10pm (again). The next day, I woke up early and met my dorm mate, a nice girl from Holland and we went in search of the internet and found it! And then ended up at the Durban version of SeaWorld. It was a trip. Durban looks and feels like Miami. The live seal show solidified this judgment for me. Following a brief swim in the ocean, I went to buy a 24-hour bus ticket to Cape Town which was sold out! (things get busy on Easter weekend, apparently) so I now have an additional night in Durban.

There are worse things.

(i also have been taking pictures, but the net is too slow to upload. soon.)