A Small Apartheid

Today is my fourth day at work -- my internet connection has finally been set up, which means I have finally joined the rest of the world in productive pursuits: preparing briefings, editing papers, looking up data, and so on, and so forth. I'm living in a backpacker's lodge called Pension Idube for the summer -- at about $20 a night, it's as cheap as a dingy apartment in the states.

I'm often asked the shortest and most complicated of questions: "How's South Africa?" First of all, I can't speak to that -- only to the small corner of Jo'burg in which I live. The easiest way to summarize that existence, for now, is that it's cold -- they don't believe in central heating, here -- and coarse. Things are cheap if you don't mind them dirty, but people are cheaper. Labor of the cheap, unskilled kind can be bought at the rate of $10 a day if you're feeling generous, and quite a bit less if you aren't.

This does not mean that other first-world necessities (such as cab rides) are affordable; the expensiveness of cars and the necessity of background checks for security purposes means that a typical cab ride within the city still runs about $15 USD -- too much. Like all working people, I take the bus.

I lucked out with a roommate from New Jersey, who loves to cook and plan weekend trips. I haven't eaten in a single restaurant since arriving, though I have sunk about $50 in groceries which ought to last us another week at least. (Some of it, like a spur-of-the-moment 10kg bag of rice, will last quite a bit longer.) Other residents of the lodge have included: a Chinese-Australian computer programmer who works for the Communist Party of South Africa and cooks amazing Peri-peri chicken; a silver-blond twentysomething couple from Holland (the husband is beautiful and the wife gravel-toned and fat; the sight cheers me up immensely); a black Swiss academic who is terrified of local xenophobia and blinks rapidly; a smattering of giggly German tourists; and a Canadian mathematics student with a nervous laugh.

Johannesburg, being gritty and real, is not much of a destination; only the programmer and the academic are staying for any length of time. The Hollanders are headed back to Cape Town to play house, the Germans back to their boyfriends in Munich, and I stay here to write memos and draft press statements.