Taking it easy on my first Saturday in Johannesburg
As I mentioned earlier, I woke up today feeling less than perfect. Therefore, I ditched any plans I had to tour the area, opting instead for a “quick” trip to the local mall and then an afternoon resting at the hotel.
Not the world’s most exciting weekend, perhaps. But just what I needed.
In fact, I think I have discovered the root of some of my troubles: I’ve not been drinking enough fluids. So I’m making a concerted effort now to drink more and to make sure I’m getting enough carbs. Because I’m taking my meals in the hotel restaurant — which happens to be a steakhouse — I’m not really getting as many carbs as I need every day.
It’ll be a simple matter of ordering dessert. Problem solved.
Anyway, you’ll recall I parked the Mercedes Friday night to a sleek, sexy black Mercedes:
I came out this morning to discover I was mistaken. It was actually a beaten up, blue Mazda:
My drive to the mall was much more involved than the little one-mile jaunt to work on Friday. This was a trip of maybe eight or ten miles. And, I’m glad to note, it really didn’t take long at all to get the hang of driving on the left side of the road. I had no problems at all.
There were times I would have sworn I’m in Florida — if not for the left-side-of-the-road thing. Many of the buildings on this side of Johannesburg are nice and modern and you see palm trees everywhere:
But then you spot a big hill or mountain and the illusion is shattered. I wanted to shoot a few of them for you, but I couldn’t find a good place to pull over.
When I saw this one, though, I made a U-turn just so I could shoot it. It’s a two-story building. On the top floor is a porno shop and a strip club called “Decadence.”
Below it is a mattress store:
Now, that’s what I call one-stop shopping!
Unfortunately, I didn’t shoot any photos at all of the mall, called Cresta Centre. I’ve been warned not to look like a tourist in this town — local bad guys focus on people carrying cameras, I’ve been told. Cresta looked like any shopping mall in the U.S., except it was very, very busy.
Directly across the street from my hotel is this interesting advertisement plastered to the side of a huge, glass insurance building:
The illusion is that a huge rugby ball has come along and crashed into the side of the building.
Turning around from that same spot, you can see my hotel, the Garden Plaza Milwood, a part of the Southern Sun chain of South Africa. Until just recently, I’m told, this was a Holiday Inn.
I think I showed you my room earlier. This post wouldn’t be complete, though, without a fresh picture:
You may have noticed I’m not showing you daily photos of landmark mountains outside of my window each morning. That’s because the view from my window here isn’t exactly picturesque:
That is some kind of office building, across the way. [UPDATE: In fact, that's the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce. Heh... ] Below that is the gravel-covered roof of the hotel restaurant.
I’m in room 131, which is actually on the second floor. Don’t get me started.
Here’s the hotel restaurant, which specializes in beef dishes. It’s called MacRib:
No, I don’t know how they get away with the name. The lawyers for McDonald’s must have been asleep or something.
Every night — or, at least, every night since Thursday — MacRib features a huge beef buffet. So far, I’ve stuck with the steak. Which has been great so far.
I love MacRib’s business slogan, plastered on the side of its building:
Really? GTFO!
Across the street from the hotel is a large apartment building. Beneath that lie two levels of parking, for residents and for hotel guests:
Everything is labeled here. Everything. For example, whatever would I do without this sign?
I wouldn’t know where to walk!
Across the street and through the parking deck is a set of escalators that take you to a Pick n Pay grocery store:
A funny story: Thursday evening, I decided to walk over to the Pick n Pay to buy some Diet Cokes Coke Lights. I walked through the opening you see here, turned left and went a ways further until I got to the escalator.
Which was shut down. I looked around and realized there were hardly any cars in the area, either. Suddenly, it dawned on me: The store was closed for the night!
I noticed a few unsavory-looking characters eyeballing me. Trying not to look like the terrified bastard that I was, I backtracked quickly to the exit of the parking deck, hoping to get to within eyesight of the hotel itself before terrible things happened to me.
I had been warned repeatedly that Johannesburg can be a rough town. Do not allow youself to be caught out alone, I’ve been told.
Luckily, I made it back just fine. The folks at the front desk told me the Pick n Pay closes at 6 p.m., which strikes me as insanely early. I tried it again Friday morning and didn’t feel unsafe at all.
The front desk of the hotel is always busy. At nearly any time of night or day, you’ll walk by to find guests three- or four-deep, waiting to do business. My advice to these guys, should they want it: Double the desk staff. Especially from, say, 6 to 9 p.m.
It’s a more reasonably-priced place than the fancy-ass place where I stayed in Cape Town last month, but it’s still nicely decorated. I just love this painting, a series of 18 square panels. It reminds me of an aerial photo of islands in the Caribbean:
This one, right around from the main desk, is driving me crazy — I see it every time I return from the restaurant. I have this huge urge to move the middle panel an inch-and-a-half to the left:
The decorators of this place also have a fascination with cactus plants:
They’re everywhere. I’d have to guess these are native to this country:
Overall, I like the hotel very much. I also like the fact that my clients are [I presume] paying much less per night for my stay. I’d rather them put the money into better equipment or salaries for their visuals staff.
I have a few complaints, though. I ran out of toilet paper two times in the first three days. Also, I used up all the tissue paper, blowing all the congestion out of my nose.
My attempts to get them to restock either where futile. So I picked up supplies at the mall:
Then, after I returned, I finally found one of the housekeeping crew. I practically had to steal this off her cart:
Still no explanation yet for the weird bubble phenomenon that struck my bathroom this morning around 7 a.m. The folks at the desk just looked at me as if I had lost my mind. If it happens again, I’ll have to remember to shoot it.
The housekeeping crew is also very stingy with soap. They finally gave me a second tiny bar, but then they took the one I had. So I bought a full-sized bar today at the mall:
When I opened it, I discovered the soap was blue. I guess I’ll spend some time Sunday cheering it up. (Ba-dum-bump!)
I also bought some more pain reliever, some throat/cough medicine and a large glass tumbler:
I finally found the hotel’s ice machine — it’s hidden up on the second floor. Which is actually the third floor. Don’t get me started.
The tumbler is so I can fill it full of ice and then drink the Coke Lights I bought Friday at the grocery store:
Please note the Pringles. If you ever come to South Africa, do not eat the Pringles. They appear to have hardly any salt on them at all. And without salt, Pringles taste a lot like thinly-sliced particle board.
By the way, each of those two-liter Cokes cost me R11.29, which is $1.62 — about what they’d cost in the U.S.
According to my updated-and-handy cheat sheet…
…my trip to Clicks pharmacy today cost:
Rand             U.S.
Toilet tissue………R19.99…………$2.69
Excedrin…………..R13.99…………$1.73
Kleenix…………….R14.99…………$1.86
Soap………………..R4.99…………..$0.67
Glass tumbler…..R11.99………….$1.62
Cough syrup…….R31.99…………$4.31
Plastic bag……….R0.25……………..3.4¢
Total…………..R98.19……..$13.46
That’s about a third to a half of what a similar drug store shopping trip would cost in the U.S.
Oh, and by the way: I’ve been warned not to use the term drug store here. One of my Jo’burg-area friends warned me via Facebook:
Ask for a pharmacy. You might get arrested [if you ask] for a “drugstore.”
In addition, I stopped by CNA bookstore to pick up a road atlas of the greater Johannesburg area:
The area where my hotel is located is there at the bottom left of page 79.
Already, this book has made life easier for me. The cost? R124.95, which is just less than $17. Not bad at all.
In these days of computerized GPS devices, how does one market a spiral-bound map atlas?
With a sticker like this:
I went looking for a section of the book that would address GPS devices and how the book can be used to augment them. But there’s no mention of GPS anywhere in the atlas. Except for this sticker.
Brilliant.
By the time I had walked around the mall and done my pharmacy shopping, I felt quite bad again. I was sweating and I couldn’t stop. I searched for a food court but couldn’t find one.
And then I stumbled across a Wimpy’s hamburger joint. Perfect. I went in and ordered, first, the “bottomless Coke Light” and then a double-burger with bacon and cheese. Plus chips and dessert. In that order.
I don’t know how many Diet Cokes the poor guy ended up bringing me, but it was a lot. By the time I left, I felt stuffed. More than stuffed — I felt terrific.
The total bill, for what it’s worth: R76.35, which is about $12.39. A little more than what I’d pay in a Wendy’s, but here, I had a waiter and a dessert.
I’ve been trying hard not to overtip here like I did in Cape Town. So, looking at my lunch bill, I figured: My bill is about 70 rand. Ten percent of that would be seven rand. The guy took really, really good care of me, so I’ll double that to twenty percent. I left him 15 rand.
But 15 rand, I suddenly realized, is only about $2.02. Feeling guilty for being so damn cheap after getting such great service, I slipped the guy another R20 note as I left the place.
I’ve been trying to tip more in cash this time, too. In Cape Town, I put a lot of tips on my bill and then paid with plastic. Later, that caused me a headache when I tried to peel my tips back out of the expense bills I sent to my client.
I have two rules for expenses on trips like this:
- I don’t normally charge my clients for the gratuities I pay waiters. Unless it’s so far embedded in the bill that I can’t pull it back out later.
- I don’t normally charge my clients for alcohol I drink when I’m not eating. If I have a beer with my dinner, then that’s fair. But if I have a couple of beers at the bar or by the pool, I’ll pay for that myself.
Which brings up another hotel-based headache I’m having this week: Internet service. My clients are paying for the internet service I use in the hotel. Whether I charge it to the room or I hit them up later for reimbursement makes no difference to them. So naturally, I’d rather charge it to the room.
Now, the way this hotel charges for internet service is like this: It’s by time segments. You can buy as little as 40 minutes of service for R40 (about $5.38 or as much as a whole week of service for R525 (about $57.22).
Catch No. 1: If you want to charge it to your room, you have to buy service by the day: 24 hours for R80, or about $10.76. That’s a good three or four dollars more than a typical U.S. hotel.
Catch No. 2: Each level of service has a top-end bandwidth limit. For example, the 24-hour option will allow you only 200 mb of service.
So every day, I have to stand in a long line at the front desk in order to purchase bandwidth. I’m given a voucher that looks like this:
That number is the password to the hotel’s wifi server. It’ll work for 24 hours after I first log in… as long as I don’t exceed 200 mb.
And when you’re uploading photos like I am, plus talking with Sharon via iChat and pulling in files containing large JPG and PDF files, 200 mb goes by fast. Really fast.
In fact, I was in the middle of a chat with Sharon this afternoon (morning for her) when suddenly, my iChat froze up. I had exceeded my 200 mb limit. Six hours earlier than expected.
I’ve gone down to the front desk and asked then: Hey, I’ll be a guest here for the rest of the month. How about cutting me some slack and finding a way to set me up with internet service that doesn’t conk out unexpectedly?
The manager promised to look into it for me. But he didn’t seem hopeful he’d be able to do anything.
This is a good example of a hotel not really having a clue as to the needs of the modern international traveler. When this place is packed next year with Americans and Europeans — then, they’ll understand.
Sigh.
So anyway, I did discover today that my wifi password works anywhere on the premises — not just in my room, but also in the lobby, in the MacRib restaurant and bar and out by the pool.
Here is the view from where I sat as I typed most of this, today:
On the wall behind me is this intriguing sign. Does that mean what I think it does?
Yes, it does! Just one touch of that button is a call for Charity.
Seriously. Her name was Charity. And she was a wonderful waitress. Not only did she keep me supplied with beer, she also took this photo, just for you:
Later this evening, I rambled down to MacRib with my laptop and my camera and had dinner there for the third consecutive night:
It looks deserted in this photo, but in fact, there were maybe a half-dozen folks there and another two dozen crammed into the bar, just off to the left of that picture. They were watching rugby or cricket or something loud.
That’s the dinner buffet, way over on the right, by the way. Again, though, I just ordered steak:
I didn’t take many pictures at the newspaper on Friday. The building there is fabulous. I’ll take some next week, I promise.
This is the desk of Elsolet, who specializes in business graphics. She took off Thursday and Friday, so I worked out of her spot, hijacking her network connection for my laptop:
Behind the glass wall, you can see Anton, toiling away on his big Sunday graphic, showing the second-ever South African-built satellite, launched last month by the Russians:
With most of the artists out last week, I had some time on my hands. So I pitched in to clip a fairly complex path for the outline of the satellite. It saved Anton a lot of time, so what the hell.
You’ll be glad to know the process for proofing graphics here is much like it is in America.
I understood neither the language used in the piece itself nor the language used by Anton and the very nice woman from the copy desk who proofed the piece. But she was very kind to mark up the print and explain her edits to Anton.
My other contribution to the piece occurred when Anton told me the satellite is about the size of a household washing machine. I sketched this out for the bottom of his graphic:
Wisely, of course, Anton chose not to use my sketch. Ah, well.
—
UPDATE:
Here is the finished piece as it appeared in the Sunday paper (click either of the next two pieces for a larger look):
In addition to clipping that path for Anton, I also put together a rather complex timeline piece for the Sunday business section:
This is very difficult to do when you’re working in a language other than your own. They were short-handed Friday, so it was my pleasure to chip in.
It was kind of fun, though, to earn my first byline in a foreign newspaper:
My big regret: I didn’t put the byline on there myself. Had I done so, I’d have included the name of the reporter who compiled and wrote all that information.
—
So, tomorrow is Sunday. Barring any surprises, I plan to hit the Apartheid Museum, just a couple of miles from my hotel. Then, I’ll head back here — boring bastard that I am — in order to write the next week’s worth of birthday posts.
The goal, of course, is to rest up for the coming week of consulting work. If it seems like I didn’t do a lot this weekend, that’s OK. Most likely, I’ll have two or three more weekends to spend exploring Johannesburg before I head back to Cape Town at the end of the month.
And despite the problems I’m having with the folks at the front desk and despite the cold or whatever I’ve picked up, I’m having a great time.
I’m having a great time and I feel like I’m being useful to the folks here. What more could I ask for?