Charles Apple

The other day, my old friend Aric West in Des Moines asked me via Facebook:

What’s a typical breakfast in SA?

…which reminds me that I’ve not really blogged much about what my typical day has been like. A little more than halfway through my two-month stay here in South Africa, it’s time I do.

My alarm clock is set for 6:15 a.m., although I’ve been known to shut it off and sleep an hour or so later. Generally, though, I’m up, showered and downstairs for breakfast by 7:30.

Occasionally, however, I’ll want to sleep a little later. Especially if I’ve been up late the night before, iChatting with Sharon.

What I’ve discovered is that sleeping late here can be a real problem. If I’m not out of my room by, say, 8 a.m., the housekeeping crew bangs on my door, wanting to clean my room.

And they bang and they bang and they bang. And then they try to open the door. Naturally, I have it double-latched. But then they keep trying to force it — as if they’ve never before encountered a latched door. And then, ten seconds later, they try it again.

I’ve had a little luck using my “do not disturb” sign. But only a little luck. It’s only a real problem on weekends, when I like sleeping very late — until 9 a.m. or so.

Breakfast here at the Garden Court Milpark is free with a night’s stay. It’s buffet style.

The place doesn’t look very busy in that photo and, indeed, it wasn’t. But with all the soccer teams we had staying here over the past month, things got a little nuts at times. In fact, I gave up on the place for a while and bought a couple of Egg McMuffins up the street at McDonald’s.

The buffet includes a huge assortment of cereals and fruits. Some of which I can’t identify.

The hot foods are more my speed. You’ll find a big vat of potatoes, fried tomatoes and what appears to be pork-and-beans. Until now, I’ve never seen pork-and-beans treated as a breakfast food.

There are also potato cakes, something called “savory mince” — it looks like Brunswick Stew without the corn — and lamb sausage.

Yes, lamb sausage. I’ve not yet had the guts to try it.

On the right here is pork sausage. It’s a bit spicy for my tastes, so I usually skip it for the bacon, which you see here on the left:

However, it’s not really what Americans think of as bacon. In fact, it’s what I’d call country-style ham. But it’s still pretty tasty.

They also have something that appears to be shredded ham. They call it “macon.” I keep meaning to try it, too, but it just doesn’t look all that appetizing.

And besides, I usually avoid foods named after towns in Georgia. With the possible exception of Brunswick Stew.

There are no eggs at all on the buffet. Instead, there is a nice lady who will cook eggs or omelettes to order.

This becomes quite a bottleneck on mornings the breakfast bar is crowded. I usually ask for three eggs, scrambled.

And the eggs are pretty good, too — the highlight of the meal, in fact. My only complaint: They need a little more salt and pepper. More about that in a moment.

While I like the ham and eggs, I’m not so keen on the coffee. One big reason for that are the troublesome twin R2-D2 units that make our coffee for us.

First, you have to walk up to the coffee machine itself. Which, this particular day, was no problem. But when the place is crowded, there grows quite a line in front of the coffee machines. Especially since the unit on the right is often not working.

So you put your mug down on the tray and select what kind of drink you want. There are a number of beverages available, including hot chocolate. Naturally, I choose “coffee with milk.”

The machine dispenses the milk first, which fascinates me. I always thought you’re supposed to put the milk in last. I’m not a huge coffee drinker anyway, so perhaps I’m wrong.

In that picture — and in the one below — you can see the other problem with this process. Yes, this particular R2 unit has the same approximate aim as a three-year-old at a urinal.

With coffee and milk dripping down the side of my mug, the helpful little droid cheerfully tells me my drink is finished.

Gee. Thanks, Artoo.

I carry the mess back to my table where I have to a) add my own sweetener, and b) find a spoon. For some reason, spoons seem to be in short supply in this establishment. I keep expecting a black market to develop for freakin’ spoons.

They don’t use Sweet ‘n Low here in South Africa. Artificial sweetener comes in these long, thin plastic packages that look less like American sweeteners and more like Pixy Stix on steroids.

Once I’ve sweetened my coffee and mopped up the side of my mug, I’m ready to eat. Those are three scrambled eggs, four pieces of bacon — actually, grilled ham — and two slices of toast.

Lurking behind the toast, here, is butter. It has a slight flavor to it, though, that I can’t quite place. The label identifies the stuff as salted butter, which I find odd. It doesn’t really taste salted at all.

Which brings up my next point: If I want to tweak the flavoring of my food, I’d be hard-pressed to do it with salt and pepper. As far as I can tell, South African salt has no real flavor at all. My American taste buds don’t seem capable of even detecting South African salt. One of these days, I’m going to have to look into this to find out why.

There are lots of other options available, though. Tobasco sauce, for example. Or ketchup — which, here, they call tomato sauce.

These guys just love their tomato sauce.

Despite my struggles with coffee droids, crowds and condiments, the biggest obstacle to my breakfast routine is remembering to take my damn pills.

That’s Metformin, which helps me control my diabetes. I have to take two pills in the morning and two more in the evening.

With food. If I take my Metformin with no food, the result is a very, very rumbly tummy. And I think we’re all agreed we don’t want that.

But I keep running off to dinner with my friends, leaving my handy pill carrier in my room or in my briefcase. It’s OK if I miss a dose or two, but if I miss a lot of pills over several days, my blood sugar will rise out of control and I’ll get quite ill. We don’t want that, either.

So it’s a challenge to remember to take my pills. But I’ve done OK. The proof is that I’m still getting around just fine and my brain is functioning normallszcxo esx elyysle exyes.

We don’t really have waitresses here in the breakfast club. There are a few women, however, who run around, restocking the coffee droids and hide chase down spoons for diners.

Some days, they wear native African dresses. They were kind enough Sunday morning to pose for me.

Although I’ve not yet tried it, the breakfast restaurant has wifi. For what it’s worth.

Once my face is sufficiently stuffed, it’s time to go to work. I’ll head back up to my room, turn off the lights and open the curtains a bit. The view outside my window is of this huge concrete slab.

In fact, that is the headquarters building of the Greater Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce.

I have a bit of a moisture problem in my room — especially after I’ve taken my morning shower. There is no exhaust fan in the bathroom, so the humidity tends to hang around for hours. It gets quite stuffy and uncomfortable at times.

I might could fix it by opening my window, but because there is easy access from the rooftop in front of my window — that gravel area you see above is the roof of the hotel restaurant, MacRib — I worry about someone breaking in. So I keep it closed.

On Thursdays, I take down my laundry. I brought only enough clothes to get by for eight or nine days, max. As long as I drag my dirty clothes down to the front desk by 9 a.m. or so, I get everything back, clean, starched and pressed, by 7 p.m. that evening.

Among the items I pack for my day at the newspaper: plenty of cough drops.

I was stricken with hay fever not long after I arrived in Johannesburg. Like a complete dumbass, I had left my own medications at home. It just didn’t occur to me that I’d need them.

Once I used up nearly off the throat lozenges I brought with me, I went out in search for South African brands. The two shown above have worked best for me. The ones on the right work better but taste awful. The ones on the left taste better but aren’t quite as effective. So I alternate.

The downside: I buy so many of these that the folks at the local pharmacy have begun to wonder. Last weekend, the cashier literally dropped what he was doing and opened every single box. I presume he was wondering if I had hidden something in them.

The other downside: I’m probably rotting my teeth with these cough drops. But the cough-inducing irritation on the back of my throat is constant and has been for weeks. Sigh…

So I pack up my cough drops and my laptop, and hop back onto the elevator.

Then, I walk across the street to the parking deck, where my Mercedes waits patiently for me.

Oh, how I’ve grown to love the Mercedes. When I get home in December, I’m going to have to ask Sharon if she’ll let me dump my PT Cruiser and buy a Mercedes. What a car.

Now would be a good time to tell you about driving in South Africa. Man, I was terrified at the thought of renting a car and driving on the left side of the road.

It really hasn’t been a problem, though. I made a couple of minor right-side-of-the-road blunders my first day or so, but they were very minor. I find I have to concentrate on basic things — like staying in my damn lane — a little more than I do back home. But I adapted to South African streets pretty quickly.

The biggest driving issue for me hasn’t been the left-side-of-the-road thing. The biggest issue has been reading the road signs. I might know to turn right on 17th Street, for example, but that does me no good if I can’t see a sign that says “17th Street.”

There are a couple of other interesting things about driving in South Africa that you might find interesting — things that are peculiar to this country, I’m told.

The first are parking lot attendants. They’re everywhere you might need to park your car: At shopping centers and especially on the sides of the streets in downtown areas.

They’ll motion for you to come park in their spot. And then they’ll watch your car for you while you’re gone. When it’s time to leave, they’ll stand behind you and help you back out.

All they ask in return is to be tipped. Just a few coins will do. I try to tip at least five rand (about 70 or 80 U.S. cents).

I don’t mind the parking attendants. They come in very handy, actually, when it’s time to parallel park. I’ve even seen them helping old ladies load groceries into their cars.

What I do mind, however, are the street beggars and vendors you find at many intersections in the city. A few hand out leaflets or advertising flyers. A few more sell toys or knick-knacks.

But most are simply begging for money. Some intersections are infested with four or five of these folks, walking among the cars lined up at the stoplights, insisting we give them money.

Admittedly, that’s a crappy photo. But because I’m pretty adamant about not giving them money, I don’t like to impose by shooting pictures of these folks.

They step out in front of moving cars. They get very, very close to cars. One guy I pass regularly — he hangs out in front of McDonald’s –sits on the curb with his legs out in the road, where I’m trying to drive.

I don’t know how they keep from getting hit.

There is this one guy — not far from my hotel — who spends each Saturday in the median of Empire Road selling SpongeBob items. He walks around piled up with so many toys that he actually looks like he’s being attached by evil SpongeBob dolls that have suddenly come to life.

I have to get a picture of this guy one day.

As much as I dislike the streetside beggars, I like the minivan taxis even less.

Everywhere you drive in Johannesburg, you see these taxi buses. Most are painted white. Many are overstuffed with people. They prowl around town, honking at every pedestrian.

That’s their call: Beep, beep! Want a ride?

The reason I hate these guys is that they don’t seem to observe any of the traffic laws by which the rest of us abide. They stop smack in the middle of the road. They block multiple lanes of traffic. If you try to pass one, they’re prone to suddenly peeling out and cutting you off.

I’ve come very close to being clocked in an intersection by taxis running red lights. I’ve been sitting at a stop light, in the right turn lane. Suddenly, the taxi — to my left, in the no-turn lane — leaps into the intersection and zips to the right, in front of me. While the light was red.

Just amazing. And I’ve not seen the police do anything about these jokers. Perhaps for good reason. As far as I can tell, taxi vans outnumber police in this town, about ten-to-one.

One more quick driving note — you’ll see I’ve mentioned “stop lights” a time or two today. South Africans don’t call them stop lights, however. South Africans all them robots.

Please pause for a moment here to insert your own wisecracks.

OK, so enough about driving. Let’s get back on the way to work…

Here is Kingsway Avenue in front of MediaPark, the home of my South African clients. The construction you see here on the left is yet another driving hazard for someone not accustomed to driving on this side of the road. Some days the workers move those yellow barricades awfully far out in the road, pushing me closer to the white line.

Behind that white fence you see on the right is MediaPark itself.

A giant sign out front lists all of Media24’s publications. There are a lot of papers published from this facility.

At the top of the sign is Beeld, the big Afrikaans-language daily distributed here in the greater Johannesburg area. Rapport is the Afrikaans-language Sunday paper distributed nationwide. That’s the one that launched a spiffy new Peter Ong redesign two weekends ago.

The third paper on the sign is CityPress, an English-language Sunday paper. In fact, the very day I wrote most of this post — Wednesday evening — I gave my Art of Being Brilliant presentation to the entire staff of CityPress.

I’m unsure of what, exactly, are My Week and City Vision. Sake24 is the name of the business section inserted into Beeld, Rapport and the company’s other products. And the Sun is a daily tabloid very much like London-based tabs. They, too, publish in English.

Despite the fact that I’ve been here a month, the guards are kind enough to allow me access to the very best parking spots, just steps away from the front door.

The building itself is huge. And impressive. It opened ten or eleven years ago, I’m told.

The place is three stories tall. Here’s the foyer, from the second floor balcony. Normally, it’s a hive of activity. Not wanting to alarm anyone, however, I took many of these photos last Saturday when the place was mostly empty.

I’m just fascinated by the architecture of the place. As far as I can make out, the building itself is a big hollow shell, containing smaller buildings and rooms arranged in clumps.

The clumps are connected by various catwalks and stairwells. The overall feel is a lot like being inside CNN Center in Atlanta.

Yet, it all makes sense. The architect of this place must have been wicked smart.

So let’s pass through security, travel up one floor and turn right. We’ll come to the offices of Rapport, the aforementioned Sunday national paper.

That’s their main entrance. See the white cage-looking room to the right, suspended over their lower-level door? That’s the office of the news editor. What a view that woman has from her desk.

All the nooks and crannies in this building create lots and lots of rooms with amazing vistas, either of outside or of the building’s interior spaces.

Passing through that door, turning right and walking a way takes us to the main newsroom of Rapport. I showed you this photo last weekend, but here it is again:

Again, most of the room is empty. This was on Saturday. Only the copy desk and designers were still at work.

As we wander through Rapport’s spaces, we find areas like this:

Those are catwalks suspended over the first floor open space. Below is some kind of break area. To the upper left is an enclosed smoking area. The main newsroom is off to the right.

OK, so let’s leave Rapport and walk back over to see the rest of the building. As we walk back past the elevators, we see this long, curved wall on the right.

I love walking past this wall. It makes me feel like I’m strolling the long, curved corridors of the USS Enterprise. All we need now are the color-coded blue, red and gold turtlenecks.

Not far past the elevators are the offices of City Press, the English-language Sunday paper.

I’ve not actually been inside their offices. I’m sure they’re similar to the other spaces, however, with one difference: The cow out front.

I’m still looking for someone who can tell me the story behind the cow.

As you walk down the hallway, you see catwalks over your head, stretching in ways that suggest they lead nowhere.

But if you get curious enough to follow them, you discover that each part of the building has its own function. That particular walkway, for example, leads to one of the building’s several terraced decks, where folks can enjoy lunch or a cigarette or just a few minutes of fresh air.

Every staircase in the building, though, is adorned with a sign like this:

I’m not sure the visual is matching the message:

CAUTION! If you sit on these stairs,
we’ll break your left forearm.

OK, so we finally come to an entryway that parallels what we saw on the other side. Beeld is the daily paper. Sake24 is the business department that serves both Rapport and Beeld. Plus, sports is in this area as well — just through the door and to the right, in fact.

Lining the halls of Beeld are famous front pages. Like the day Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president of South Africa.

It’s a nice enough page. I kind of laugh each time I see it, however. Did the designer really need three South African national flags above the fold?

This page is even more interesting. A major trial was underway. A verdict was expected within a couple of hours of Beeld hitting the streets. Other than putting out a special extra edition, how do you handle a situation like that?

They wrote two separate articles and headlines that spun the story forward: Guilty or Acquitted. Complete with double nameplates and appropriately smiling or scowling mug shots of the accused. No matter which verdict the jury returned, news vendors were covered.

Here, we suddenly run into a couple of executives from U.S. newspaper corporations:

Oops, they’re just dummies. My mistake.

I was amazed by the elaborate frosted-glass walls containing the business department’s conference room.

Next door is a smoking room that serves sports, biz and Beeld.

And on the other side of that is this nice break room:

See that little white refrigerator there? That’s where they keep milk for the coffee machine, but employees also keep drinks and lunches there.

This has been a huge convenience for me. It’s not often the folks in the downstairs snack bar have Coke Light or Coke Zero, but when they do, I’ll buy a huge handful and then stash them in this fridge.

Heh. You can tell who the Americans are in the building. We’re the ones buying four Cokes at a time. Plus, an order of French fries — or chips, they call them here — to go.

Here is the Sake24 newsroom. Looks pretty much like any newsroom, except it’s empty. Again, I shot this Saturday during the big rugby game. No one works in biz on Saturdays.

If we walk all the way to the back corner of the room, you’ll find this little doorway. Through the opening and to the left is the old photo department, now empty. But to the right you’ll find the two-room suite where the three graphic artists plus myself call home.

The offices occupy a corner spot in one of the buildings, as you can see from this aerial from Google Maps…

…meaning we have windows on two sides. Over here on the right, facing the wing where Beeld is located…

…And over here in the other room, behind the chair where I’ve been sitting, facing west.

And the view outside my window is spectacular at times. As I was shooting these pictures on Saturday, for example, I captured this image of the setting sun:

Gorgeous.

Yeah, in order to keep everyone’s discomfort to a minimum, I set up shop there on the corner of Anton Vermeulen’s desk.

The IT department set up a network cable which allows me internet access. I have to crawl under Anton’s desk to plug in my power cord, but that’s not really a problem. Especially since I can usually sweet-talk Anton into doing it for me.

Knowing of my fondness for toys on my desk, Anton loaned me this tiny runabout model from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 to make me feel at home:

And other amusements abound. For example, construction workers sprucing up the grounds outside my window set up this sign the other day:

Please do NOT walk on the floor. Walk on the wall or the damn ceiling instead.

I’m still not sure what MLB stands for. Probably not Major League Baseball, like it does in the States.

Because I hate showing you their desks on a day when they’re not at work, here are photos of Anton, the artist for Rapport…

Elsolet Joubert, the business graphics and design specialist for Sake24…

And Salomé Nourse, the artist for Beeld:

And that’s where we spend our day. Working on graphics and interacting with editors and reporters to develop the best ways of telling stories graphically.

Occasionally, I’ll teach a session that requires me to set up my laptop with a projector and address a larger group. We had more than 30 in my Art of Being Brilliant session on Wednesday, for example.

The highlight of each day, perhaps, is lunch. The company maintains an elaborate cafeteria, where one may buy a hamburger, fries chips or any of a selection of healthier foods like salads, vegetarian meals and so on.

A couple of weeks ago, I had roast beef and broccoli — and it was delicious. Today — when I took these cafeteria shots — I had fried chicken breast and, again, broccoli.

For the most part, I’ve eaten meat, fish and potatoes for the past month. This newfound broccoli, most likely, is all that’s keeping me from contracting scurvy.

The man serving me my food today became very excited when he saw my camera. He insisted I take a picture to show all my friends in the U.S. In fact, he pointed out his name — McDonald — with great pride.

Therefore, I can tell you with honesty that lunch today came from McDonald’s menu.

There is a wonderful open-air seating area with grass, trees and picnic tables. The only place I’ve seen anything similar to this is at USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va.

Also please note the pigeons. They’re so well-fed and so tame that they’re quite aggressive in their begging for food. I expect, very shortly, to see some of them out working Johannesburg’s street corners. Or perhaps driving taxi vans.

Here, I share a patio table with — from right to left — Anton the Rapport artist, Jacques, a sub-editor for several of the papers here and a huge, huge film buff and Janice, a reporter for Beeld.

Earlier, I mentioned the downstairs snack bar, located just outside the cafeteria door. They have a selection of snacks, candy and cold drinks.

There’s one vending machine in the building that I know of. So this is what folks here visit daily, in lieu of a bank of Coke or Pepsi machines.

I might add that the ladies you see here are very, very friendly. Whenever I come down in search of Coke Light and they don’t have any, they seem to feel worse than I do about it.

Usually around 5 or 6 p.m., it’s time to head “home” to the hotel, about a mile away. For the first week or so I was here, I insisted on driving only during daylight hours. Once I got used to driving in Johannesburg, however, I found it easy enough to drive in the dark.

During the relaunch week for Rapport, I left quite late most evenings. But now, things have settled back into a more normal routine. Here, I’ve pulled out the front gate of MediaPark and I’m sitting at the stoplight robot, waiting to make a left turn.

I found out the hard way that South Africa doesn’t allow left-on-red turns. I didn’t have an accident or get a traffic ticket. But I damn near gave a heart attack to the poor kid in the car with me that day. Heh…

Here, I’m headed East on Kingsway Avenue, toward the hotel.

I bear left onto Empire Road, where even more construction mars the landscape and the street.

You’ll also notice the sun has suddenly sprung back into the sky and the rain has evaporated. That’s because these three photos were taken Sunday afternoon. Most of the others were taken over the past two or three evenings after work.

After we pass the big ugly mound of dirt, we find my hotel, peeking out behind the big apartment building on the right.

Ah. Home, sweet home.

In order to park my car, however, I have to drive past the hotel, turn at the next robot, loop around the Chamber of Commerce building and then thread my way through this alley populated with illegally-parked vehicles.

It’s an adventure every night, let me tell you. Kind of like playing a video game.

I kiss my Mercedes good night and I walk into the hotel…

…where the friendly front desk staff always has a nice smile for me. The kind of greeting you get when you stay in a hotel for eight weeks.

They’re all smiles unless I ask for an internet voucher.

Every day, you see, I have to get a new password in order to log on to the hotel’s wifi network. I can pay for this out of my pocket, but I’d rather charge it to my room. But the only way they’ll let me do that is if I buy 24 hours of access at a time. And that requires extensive paperwork.

I know it’s a hassle, but it’s their hopelessly complicated procedure, not mine. All I want is to get online. The manager finally got smart and allowed his team to sell me five 24-hour vouchers at a time.

Which has helped a bit. From the point of view of everyone but the poor desk employee who gets stuck with processing my request.

I run up to my room on the second floor to freshen up and to take out my contact lenses. The room is nice and minty-fresh — especially compared to how humid and heavy it felt when I left in the morning.

You’ll notice I use the second bed as storage. I suspect this drives my housekeeping crew crazy. I wish they’d offer a room with only one bed and an extra cabinet. Or perhaps a couch and coffee table.

Then it’s time to head back downstairs again to MacRib, the steakhouse restaurant located on the ground floor of the hotel.

By now, the waitresses know me by name and they know the first thing I’ll do is log into the hotel’s wifi system and order myself a Castle draught.

Mmmm. Cold beer…

Castle’s not necessarily the best beer I’ve ever had. But I like drinking the local brands when I travel. And besides, Castle is what’s on tap here. So Castle it is.

I usually order the beef filet, medium, with chips. This particular day, I tried the baked potato, which turned out to be rather small. So small, in fact, they gave me two of them. Together, they were about half the size of a potato from an American steak house.

If I’m low on carbs for the day — and I usually am — I’ll have cheesecake for dessert, with whipped cream instead of ice cream. There are no carbs at all, hardly, in whipped cream. Whipped cream is mostly air.

And while I eat, I take care of my online business. I’ll answer e-mail. I’ll even blog.

I’ll usually sit in MacRib for three or four hours. Depending on my mood, I’ll have anywhere from two to five beers before I call it an evening.

Granted, when my friends from Cape Town are visiting, staying in the same hotel — or when Peter’s in town — we’ll often go out someplace else for dinner. But for the most part, this has been my routine for the past month.

Every other night or so, I’ll call Sharon and Elizabeth via iChat.

The ability to see each other and to call as frequently as we want to — for free — is perhaps the only reason I’ve not become any more homesick than I have. Usually, I place this call from my room, but I’ve done it a couple of times at MacRib.

I’ve discovered, however, that I sometimes draw a crowd when I iChat from MacRib. The manager and the waitresses seem fascinated by the fact I can sit in their restaurant, drinking a beer and talk to my wife and daughter, 8,000 miles away. It is kind of amazing, when you think about it.

I’m usually in bed by midnight or shortly after.

And that’s my day. If it sounds boring, it kind of is, after a while. But I’m here to prod visual thinking, to support the goals of Peter’s redesign and to help pull the artists together into a cohesive unit. And, if necessary, to pitch in and build graphics. I feel like I’ve been effective in doing all those things. And while this is by no means a glamorous existence, I get out enough on the weekends to see the cool sights around Johannesburg. Believe me, I’m not complaining a bit.

I’ll be here in Jo’burg through Saturday. Then I’ll fly to Cape Town for a week of meetings, coaching sessions with the graphics folks and an ambitious schedule of presentations.

The following Sunday, I’ll return to this same hotel — the Garden Park Milpark — for two more weeks.

We had considered flying me back home the Saturday Nov. 28, but we suddenly realized that would have me changing planes in Dulles the Sunday after Thanksgiving — one of the biggest travel days of the year in the U.S. And that’s not good.

Therefore, the current plan is for me to stay over that weekend and depart on the 30th. I’ll be back in Virginia Beach on Dec. 1.

The big question then will be: How will I adapt to driving on the right side of the road?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 7:07 am and is filed under Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.