Joburg Layover

Sixteen hours.  That's the longest flight either of us has ever taken.  It was brutally long.  Now, in

fairness, it might have felt longer than it actually was because of the annoying old people surrounding us.  At least nobody thought it was a good idea to bring their baby on the flight!

We landed in Joburg around 4:45 p.m. without issue, though the fact that we had to submit to an ebola screening in customs was a little unsettling.  The Intercontinental Hotel, where we're staying, upgraded us to an executive suite, which is pretty great.  We didn't have too much time to explore, so we decided to take the train into Sandton and grab dinner in Nelson Mandela Square.  

Joburg is not a particularly safe city.  We met a number of South Africans while traveling in Eastern Europe back in 2011 and heard a number of horror stories about this place.  For example, two well-to-do twentysomethings we met told us that everyone has iron gates that separate the bedrooms in their houses from everything else, because burglaries are so common.  Or, a doctor from Joburg told us that: (1) nobody stops at red lights for fear of being car-jacked; and (2) the best-selling invention several years ago was an attachment that would shoot flames up the windows of your car if someone touched them while the ignition was on.  I've had no issue walking through the unlit back streets in Istanbul, and I didn't bat an eye traveling through the Eastern Bloc, but something about South Africa scares me.  Yet, despite my concerns, we had a great evening.  I never felt unsafe on our trip, and the South Africans are an incredibly entertaining population of people.  Perhaps the funniest thing that we noticed about them is their obsession with selfies.  

There really isn't any "local" cuisine in South Africa, but the closest they come is Cape Malay, which is very Indian-inspired and curry-based.  We didn't find a Cape Malay restaurant, but we did stumble across a pretty great Indian place.  After a great pinotage and some ostrich tikka, we grabbed some beers from a pop-up bar in the square, and went to catch the train back to the hotel.  However, unbeknownst to us, the trains here shut down around 9:00 p.m., so we had to grab a cab home.  The cabbie was a little sketchy, and definitely wasn't the best at driving a manual transmission, but he got us back to the hotel nevertheless.

Tomorrow we catch a flight to Antananarivo at 9:20 a.m. and we'll spend the afternoon relaxing in the Malagasy countryside.  Almost there!