The Cohen-Frankel Safari: Joburg and our first mini safari

Most of the first week is now a blur (borrowing our friend's car, trips to the embassy, trips to the grocery store, two trips to the mall to get me a cell phone, etc.). A few highlights:

A trip to Joburg

On New Years day, we took our first drive down to Johannesburg for a party thrown by friends from NICD. It was a largely South African crowd which made it interesting after hanging out with expats for the week. (I could even understand most of what they were saying.) JB seems much more urban than where we're living in Pretoria (which is essentially the suburbs even though we're not far from the city center). Our friends' neighborhood reminded me of our old 'hood in Seattle - eclectic houses close together on a shady street. One big difference: all the houses (even the most modest) have walls with gates and usually electrified fences above the walls. Another difference: design-wise, there's a much more fluid line between indoor and outdoor space. The weather is temperate enough that you can spend a lot of time outdoors, so houses are more integrated with the yard: multiple doors out; designated outdoor eating areas, often with large overhangs (but no side walls); built-in barbecue pits (called "braais") for grilling the wildebeest you caught on the way home from the office, etc. At risk of getting all fancy here, the combination of high walls and permeable indoor/outdoor boundaries creates a greater sense of intimacy within one's homestead. It's like all this space is mine and no one on the outside can see what I do back here. This, along with the predominance of built-in maids quarters (a future blog post) and the funny accents, often makes me think I'm in some kind of upstairs/downstairs, British manor house melodrama.

Enough talk. What about some photos?
After the party, we took a walk with the hosts over to Zoo Lake, a large public park in Joburg. Lucy had a great time at its playground. These metal jungle gyms are very common here (and likely would not pass code in the US).

Our first mini-safari

The next weekend, we had a picnic with our friend Blake at the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, only 20 minutes from Pretoria. (Don't worry... the picnic area has an electrified fence around it. Is that to keep us safe or make it easier for the animals to find us?) It's the kind of place you just drive around and look for animals. It was late in the day and relatively hot, so most of them were at Starbucks, I mean sleeping out of sight. But we managed to see zebras and rhinos, and a lot of crazy looking birds. (Will try to find a photo of these. They were the size of sparrows with tails literally twice as long and black like an old fashioned bookmark. Apparently SA is a bird lovers paradise.)