DAY 124

Today was my day off, so I didn’t go to the zoo. Instead I met up with Marnie and this other volunteer, Jenny. Voluntours has a handful of projects around South Africa. Jenny was on the project that the volunteers work at this primary school in this rural town a couple hours outside Johannesburg. She had spent the night at Marnie and Jeremy’s house last night, since she was going back to the UK this evening. Well just because she was leaving tonight didn’t mean that she couldn’t do anything in the morning. She wanted to get a couple last minute souvenirs for some family before leaving, so since I didn’t have anything to do today and they were going to go to Sandton City to do this, I went with them. Sandton City is its own city, and actually quite large, but is still considered part of Jo’burg. After parking the car we went to meet Jeremy at work. Well not exactly, Jeremy’s main job is a real estate agent and they were having to some of showing in the Nelson Mandela Square. It was this big tent with pictures and info about every property that they were selling. Plus most of the real estate agents who were selling them were there. So basically it was a slight mad house. While waiting for Marnie to get what ever she needed to get from Jeremy I looked at some of the properties that were up. Since this was the best and one of the most prestigious real estate agents in the country they had some really nice houses, though they still had there fair share of the average houses there were some NIICCCEE… houses. Like there was this one property that was this large house with quite a bit of land, a 6 stall stable an outside ring and a small pasture, and some other small building, and all this for like 6.2 million Rands. But the even cooler thing about it is is because of the exchange rate that price is only a couple thousand above 8 hundred thousand, so basically not even a mil. We then left and went to Rosebank Local Market. Which is located in the 2 story covered garage of some mall. Every Sunday the parking garage becomes a place were local artists, etc… can come and sell their things. Before going to the market we had to stop in the mall and go to the pharmacy, I had gotten some fever blisters on my lips and they were getting bad enough to need real drugs, the ones that you have to go to the pharmacist for. We then headed out to the parking garage and walked around looking at all the different things that people are selling for a couple of hours. They range from beaded artwork, woodwork, jewelry; things made from jade, etc… all that come from indigenous South African tribes. By then it was time for lunch and I was getting kind of hungry. On our way over to the food area part of the market we passed this man who had made guitars out of used oilcans and were now selling them. They sounded exactly like a normal guitar and they were really cool looking. After listening to him for a couple minutes we continued on our way to the food were we stopped one more time before getting there. This was because this one particular stall was selling random memorabilia and they had some US license plates for sale. One of them was a Florida plate so of course I had to take a picture. For lunch I decided I wanted Thai, which was a good choice, one thing that I did really like from my lunch was these fried banana pieces with poppy seeds, that you dipped in a coconut syrup thing. It was sooooooo good. I then got a fresh fruit smoothie from this other stand before we continued on our adventure though the craft market. After spending the whole afternoon at Rosebank we went back to Marnie’s and had dinner there. Before it got to late, Jeremy drove me back to Guinea Fowl Lodge.


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