Randy and I are settling into life here on the southern end of the African continent. This is a fascinating place full of the
excitement, joys, frustrations and complexity of any major world class city. . But, Jo'burg has the added complications of being one of a handful of truly developed cities on this continent, of continuing to confront the legacy of apartheid, and now of learning how to be a united multi-racial, mutli-lingual society. No small challenge for any groups of people and one needs only look at the US to know how difficult united can be. Of late, the country has also been hit by power failures (long-predicted) due to seemingly ineffective planning by the government. Senior engineers and officials wrote a white-paper back in 1998 warning the government that if no new power plants were built and the economy continued to expand, the country would face energy shortages. Now unfortunately these shortages have become a reality and they present a real threat to the development which to date has continued to fuel this economy.
On the plus side, one of the many delights of this place is the physical beauty of the area. Johannesburg is an incredibly green city, made up of neighborhoods. They ring the central business district on all sides. These neighborhoods present different faces and in that way the city reminds Randy and me of Chicago. For new comers there are two prominent features of these neighborhoods, the trees and the walls.
Jo'burg is very green with trees lining most roads and beautiful parks everywhere. The Johannesburg Botanic Garden is very close to our house and is a wonderful place for an afternoon walk. On weekends the place is full of people (families, kids, couples, singles). While the rose garden is just about past for the season, everything else is still green and bright.
The walls are the other defining feature of the city. Apart from the main commercial streets, many of the roads are lined with walls around the residential buildings behind them. In some neighborhoods, these are short walls that merely define the property, but in most cases you see the kind of walls pictured above. Houses have six or eight foot walls around them with gates at the drives. One of the difficulties which this presents a new comer is that it is easy to get lost in a neighborhood because every street looks more or less the same. The walls can also make for a forbidding presence on the street-scape and making one a bit apprehensive.
The people however are as welcoming as the walls are forbidding. Randy's colleagues at Wits and friends have made us feel at home and while we miss our friends in Cambridge, they are doing their best to make up for that loss. Jo'burgians of all stripes are unfailingly polite. As we go out shopping, we are getting used to this change in demeanor for our accustomed New England "crispness".
Well that is all for my first posting....now I think that it may be time for a bit of a wander....
