Joburg (aka Johannesburg)

So we arrived Friday night (local time was 7:45 PM) We breezed though customs, got our stamp in our passport. Met up with Illana & Leonard's family. We needed extra cars for all the luggage!
rented a Hyundai H1 bus... and borrowed a 'bakkie' for the luggage.

It seems like a typical international city, although they drive on the wrong side of the road. Luckily Leonard has been driving. It looks a little like northern California in winter, or the hills of Texas. We haven’t been in ‘downtown’ Johannesburg, but all around it. The biggest difference is all the gates & fences. Crime is very high here and most people take lots of precautions. You have to be very careful driving & make sure the doors are locked, windows up & nothing of value showing. And definitely, no parking on the street.

Besides the fences, every house seems to have a braai (barbecue). They grill all the time: Lamb, ribs, boerewors (sausage)…Delicious!

While we were here for the first few days of our stay in South Africa, we went to a Braai, Golf Reef City & a Lippanzzer stallion show and Pretoria & the Voortrekker museum.

GOLD REEF CITY

Johannesburg was created because of gold. Back in the late 1800’s gold was discovered here & mines where created & the city was built around it. Now there is museum/amusement park called Gold Reef City that we visited. We went down into an unused mine about 550 feet and walked around the tunnels. To go from the top of the mine to the bottom shafts, it would take a worker 2 hours. How’s that for a commute! Then they would have to spend 8 hours down there in the hot, noisy, grimy cave and then take another 2 hours to come back up! No thanks! For every ton of rocks that they mined they would expect to get 4oz of gold. And then the gold would have to be processed to remove all the impurities. The kids favorite part, of course, was all the rides. The park was pretty empty, but I kept forgetting that it is winter here & the kids are all in school. People dress much nicer here; no “pants on the ground”, no ripped clothes, no obnoxious sayings on shirts. They are also so polite, so gracious. Everyone speaks English in businesses but most everyone we’ve met converses in Africaans. Still haven’t learned much of that. Except bakkie, which means pickup truck, which we needed to bring all of our luggage home from the airport!