Andie & Africa: Day 2 in Johannesburg

Before I tell you about day 2 in Johannesburg I thought I should give some basic info on some things you might be curious about:
Weather: It is hot during the day and cold at night. Today it was mid 80’s in the sun, but I wore 2 shirts, pants, and a sweater to dinner because the sun goes down around 6 and it gets a lot colder fast. It is also very dry here. I was talking with Janet (one of our community life coordinators- she works for APU and makes sure we have fun on the weekends. She’s South African, from Pietermaritzburg and isn’t much older than us, probably mid 20’s) and she told me that they were going through a dry spell and that the farmers were saying that the rainy season wouldn’t be here until October which is late so it will be dry for a while, although Pietermaritzburg, where we are living, gets rain during the winter so it will be greener. But everything here is dry and brown and the dust is pretty bad.
Hotel: Is certainly decent by American standards- it’s pretty generic looking, like any motel chain in America. The beds and rooms are smaller and breakfast is better (they offer potted meat here! Not being sarcastic though- the breakfast is good) but other than that it is pretty much the same. And there were soccer ball stickers in our room when we got here.
Johannesburg: From the highway downtown looks like an older version of LA’s fashion district. None of the buildings are very tall, and everything is old and squat and brown. I think the downtown itself is mostly businesses because the upper class lives in the nicer suburbs and the lower class lives in Soweto.

Today we visited the Apartheid Museum and took a tour through Soweto, a very large township south west of Johannesburg. The Apartheid Museum was set up well which made it even more interesting to explore. You entered the museum with a ticket that said either white or non-white, which determined which entrance you took into the museum. I entered the white door and the walls were covered in identification cards of white South Africans and quotes from the white leaders and from legal documents and laws from the Apartheid era. We then joined the non-white group and walked through the rest of the museum, which explained the rise and fall of Apartheid in South Africa, which was explained through pictures and personal stories, and accompanying memory boxes, which was interesting. There was also a Mandela exhibit going on which I got the chance to walk through which was a lot of reading but good background for our history course because I really know so little about South African history and Mandela’s role in it. I accidentally walked through his lifetime timeline backwards which didn’t help to make things less confusing, but it definitely made things more interesting. Something interesting for all the Methodists reading- Mandela was baptized a Methodist by his mother and attended a Methodist school and in a stack of his school books that were on display there was a book titled Minutes from the Methodist South African Annual Conference of 1948. After the museum we picked up our tour guide, a friend of one of the men in charge of us for these next three months and she took our bus through Soweto her hometown. Soweto is a mix of squatter camps, state housing, the homes of upper middle class families that drive BMWs, churches, schools, the largest hospital in the southern hemisphere and in all of Africa, and all the other things you need to accommodate 3 million people. We did about half of our tour and then stopped at our guide’s restaurant, which is a restaurant by day and her home the rest of the time. I really have no idea what we had for lunch- I know I had hake, beets, something like cole slaw, something like pico de gallo, bread, mashed potatoes, rice with a spicy red salsa, a beef stew, and a couple of other things that were generally unidentifiable. Desert was vanilla ice cream and something like pound cake and homemade vanilla custard, which was probably my favorite part of the meal. The vanilla is different here, it is much sweeter and much richer which made for a very heavy desert after a large lunch, but it was good. Waiters brought us our drinks and we served ourselves buffet style. My table was right next to the kitchen so I could see the women preparing our food, which was interesting. After lunch we got back on the bus and went to a memorial for the youth that lost their lives, that were sent into exile, or that went missing during the student protests, specifically a 13 year old boy that was caught in the cross fire, Hector Peterson. We actually met the nephew of one of the youth the memorial specifically honored- a few of the family members of those honored work in the museum, which is pretty cool. We got back on the bus and drove by Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s houses, which are right next to each other in a nicer middle class area of the city, and then we visited a square that held the Freedom Charter Memorial- a rotunda that houses the 10 pillars of the Freedom Charter Memorial which are the foundation of the South African constitution. After that we finished up our tour and headed to our guides neighborhood to drop her off and on the way she taught us the 3 clicks in the Zulu language and then attempted to teach us a sentence in Zulu that was very strange and had to do with back pimples. It was also extremely difficult to get the clicks in there right- Zulu is going to be very challenging till we get that figured out. After that we dropped her off, drove past the soccer stadium built for the world cup and headed back to the hotel. The kids were getting out of school as we drove around after lunch so everything was really active and it was fun to see kids everywhere walking home and hanging out with their friends. All of the kids walk home regardless of age unless they go to school in a formerly white area and their parents pay a driver to take them back and forth because it is too far to walk. Once we got back to the hotel we napped and then headed out for dinner at the same restaurant we went to last night, the Harvard Room which is actually adjacent to a small airport so you can watch the planes take off and land while you eat. The food is American/Italian with an African spin, which made some things a little dubious, but overall everything was good. Tomorrow we will catch our final flight to Durban and then drive to our new home at AE in Pietermaritzburg.