More Expats

Since I've come down here, three more consultants have transferred down here from the US. It's nice to have a few familiar faces around - I knew them from the Cambridge and New York offices from work I've done there. It's also a few more people I can make American pop culture references with, and speaking fast-paced East Coast American English, which is not the same English they speak down in South Africa.

It's great to not be the new guy around here anymore - I'm actually a credible, useful source of information now! Seeing people who have just transferred down here also makes me more cognizant of how much I've learned since coming down myself - about Jo'burg and the office, but also about living in a new area / country / continent. Turns out I've adjusted pretty well - I don't even end up on the wrong side of the road anymore!

Home Sweet Home Pt V: My Gym

One nice thing about living at The Splice is having a gym in the building. When I heard about it, I feared the worst. As a veteran of hotel gyms, I know they usually include the bare minimum - a treadmill, an elliptical machine, and a TV, all built roughly 20 years ago. But, the gym at the Splice is actually really nice - new-ish equipment, free weights, decent ventilation - what more can you ask for? Maybe a TV that doesn't blare VH1 whenever I'm there. And no, it's not the VH1 I'm used to - it's British VH1. So it has music that was popular in the UK in the 80's and early 90's. Just awful.

Elliptical

Machines

Free weights


One problem though is converting weight from lbs to kgs - it's only 2.2x, but still it's hard to do all the time! Lifting is difficult enough without dragging arithmetic into it. Also, for some reason, I just feel much less manly benching 70 of something rather than 155 of something. More than feet or ounces or miles, I miss pounds.

AIDS

Aside from all of the assault- and murder-related danger, there's also AIDS. The overall prevalence here is a little over 30%, which is staggering. 31% for Gauteng, which is the province I'm in. 39% for ages 25-29, which is the age bracket I'm in. Over 600,000 people died from AIDS in 2006, which is A LOT for a country with a total population of only 45 million. Average life expectancy in the country is falling because of AIDS.


There are references to AIDS in a lot of places, like on this mural in Soweto. However, it hasn't been as omnipresent as an epidemic could be. Due to herculean efforts, some of the stigma has been worn away over the past few years, but sadly a lot of it still remains. And in reality, there is still even a lot of work to be done in the US. But here they don't have the infrastructure, the funding, or the skills to implement the things we have in the US. Prevalence is somewhat stabilizing here, and they'll have access to medical breakthroughs some other parts of the world, but still - nearly 1 in 3 people here has HIV/AIDS and the near future prospects aren't great. That all to me is a little scarier than the murder rate.

(Another) New Car!!!!

Apparently Avis has a policy where they rent cars with less than 11 months / 30,000 km on them. My Honda Jazz/Fit had passed that mark, so they just came to give me a new car - a Mercedes A170! It's still tiny, but it's pretty nice. It's not as luxurious as the C170 I drove when I first got here, but it still comes with the same status symbol - the Mercedes key chain.

Soweto Uprising

The Soweto uprising was a big event in the march to the end of Apartheid - basically Kent State with younger kids and 100x as many of them. It was a series of clashes on June 16, 1976 between black youths and the South African authorities that grew out of protests against the policies of the National Party government - namely one that mandated that half of the black children's classes would be tought in Afrikaans, the old language of the white people. We went to the Hector Pieterson museum on our Soweto tour - the museum was similar in layout and effect to the Apartheid Museum. Hector was the first student shot and killed in the uprising - we has 13 at the time - and was immortalized in this photo:

Soweto

Soweto is basically the Chicago of South Africa. It's a set of neighborhoods with a total population around 3 million - some neighborhoods fairly well-off, and some abjectly destitute. The latter is more on the living-under-Wacker-Drive level than the living-on-the-South-Side level. Despite the poverty, there is an omnipresent sense of soul and vitality that you don't feel everywhere these days. Our tour guide / minibus driver said that the crime rate is actually pretty low in Soweto because everyone is basically family - even the nice houses don't have the same high walls / barbed wire / etc as the nice houses in the Northern Jo'burg suburbs.



Here are my pics from the tour - I took the close-up-looking ones with a very long lens from inside the van while it was moving, so I didn't get in people's faces with cameras - trying to balance respectfulness and curiosity. Anyway, click on the slideshow to see it in higher quality in a new window.

Soweto - Preview

"Fulfil Your Dreams"