I'm alive

I may already have the most dangerous part of my Africa experience behind me: walking out of the airport and spending the rest of the day driving a manual on the left side of the road. The left side thing hasn’t been too bad – I did this for 6 weeks in Australia/NZ – but the manual was the part I was worried about. My manual driving experience consisted of “helping daddy shift” when I was 6 and driving a jeep on the ranch, and cows don’t mind if you have to restart your car. Aside from some angry drivers, I came out fine.

There is a guy who transferred from the Dallas office and is finishing his 3rd year; I gave him a call and met him and a couple others at a shopping center nearby to watch the England/Germany game on a jumbotron set up in a plaza.

What does "Eastern Toilets" mean?  Squatty potties, of course.

The area has condos built on top of a mall, all walled in and with controlled access. Ryan pointed out an observation he had made that seems quite right. After Apartheid, the middle/upper class (read: whites) moved out of downtown JOH and resettled in walled, barbed wire homes a little north. (I drove through “downtown” JOH, called the Central Business District, on the way from the airport and it’s pretty decrepit. Sandton is what anyone from the U.S. would think is “downtown.”) They then started moving into walled multi-family compounds, i.e. an apartment complex with shared security. The next iteration has been toward the “private city,” with shopping and living all in a security perimeter so people feel they can freely walk around and live their basic lives there. As you drive north from the JOH CBD past Sandton and on up north you can see this evolution.