Time flies. The time working in joburg has been totally eye-opening and a refreshing break from my Beijing work routine! I took Duncan to my favourite vendor stall for breakfast this morning and we had pap – African maize meal porridge - for the first time topped with homemade chicken curry – boy was it delicious. Washed the whole lot down with coffee for me and rooibos tea for Duncan sitting streetside under the morning sun. We watched the England-South Africa test match cricket this afternoon and I really needed to pair up cricket terminology with baseball ones to understand what it was all about: bowler is pitcher; bowl is a pitch; batsman is batter; a six is like a home run…and that stump looks more like a stick….you get the idea. And I finally understood why they call the England-Australia Ashes game – that little bit of bale at the top of the sticks….we watched Invictus and absolutely recommend it!!

By the way, Cape Town was magnificent – a younger feel than Nice, less ritzy than Monaco, reminds me of San Francisco in some places and definitely more Beverly Hills than anything South Africa or Africa. It is a very tourist friendly city and the sights and ocean are spectacular – we made it down to the cape of good hope but whale watching season had ended so we didn’t get on a boat during our short weekend getaway.

And for the record, joburg is alright. Yes the high walls suck but it’s not as scary as it had seemed before I got here.

OK so this is about 2 weeks late.

Last week quite busy – actually every day goes by at a good clip, even weekends. But the thing was my colleague and I had back-to-back interviews with Africa’s two largest banks in one day and you can’t beat copy like that. I’m learning to tell at least one African language apart from all the 6-7 others – Xhosa, which is the heritage of Nelson Mandela. There is a soft clicking sound to make every time one encounters the letter ‘X’ so one of the bank CEOs we chatted with was Mr. Nxasana - *click*aasana would be how to pronounce his name.

My colleague and I are off to Gaborone – pronounced Haborone – tomorrow to cram in a slew of interviews with the likes of De Beers, SABMiller, a Shanghai-based private Chinese enterprise and the country’s state power utility to discuss everything from the diamond industry to China-Africa ties to the power crisis facing southern Africa and Africa in general. Neither of us have ever been and we are still a bit puzzled at exactly how spread out Gaborone as that will affect our timeliness from one meeting to the next. Google map isn’t very definitive and I guess it doesn’t help when addresses in the city are listed under plot numbers. Well I guess we lay the best plans possible and the rest we shall just have to fly by the seat of our pants. We come back to Joburg on Wednesday evening.

Funny thing is there are so many cafes and restaurants around where I am but I’ve yet to really have an African meal – though I will say a Castle Lager is great; as are the generous helpings of 1 glass of house wine; as are the spectacular 7pm thunder and electric lightning storms in Joburg that occur like clockwork regularly.

The local cabs – technically minivans – remain mysterious. The ones the locals ride are hailed by how one points one’s hand and the only one I’ve learned is sticking the forefinger up to mean Joburg. But it is different hand signals if you want to go to Sandton or Soweto or Pretoria or any local neighborhood and the only way to learn the hand signals is to ask passengers in the cab – and I have yet to see a non-black passenger crammed in these cabs that can hold 15 people at a time with no seatbelts. And giving the taxi fare is also a collective process whereby the onus is the the persons sitting closest to the front of the cab that has to collect the fare, organize change, and hand over the correct sum to the driver – of course this I learned from the cabs I take – plush cars prearranged by a hotel that are really eating into my budget but are a necessity for staying safe.

Sandton, where our office is, is perhaps the richest square mile in Africa I’ve been told. It is so modern – of course not as shiny new as Beijing’s central business districts – and one could be deceived in thinking the rest of Joburg, or South Africa - and if you are really not thinking about it Africa overall – is this way. It’s fairly fine to walk around during the day, though it is hot in summer. When you see the inner city of Joburg and also Pretoria it is as bad, and at times worse, than the baddest city blocks of Los Angeles or New York. Contrast that with the suburbs here further afield than Sandton and it feels like Green Valley in Las Vegas or middle Missouri – it’s pretty flat around the city – and some of the neighborhoods are like a Desperate-Housewives-but-with-kids feel when you see designer mums out for brunch with their little ones in enclosed communities and huge-ass houses – and why are most kids I see around all barefoot!

Arrival day in Joburg – too late, too dark

First day – clear blue sky, early summer comfortable temperature; spent the entire day at a conference at a local academic institution hearing about the China-Africa relationship from many Africans. V refreshing views that one doesn’t get in Beijing – that being, the onus for addressing/resolving some of the concerns cropping up in the bilateral relationship is on the African countries, not necessarily all on China. I start to notice how there’s so much walls all around the local landscape and how offices are situated behind the walls, rather than just residential housing that one associates with such walls.

Second day – stepped into office for the first time in the afternoon. Reminds me of the old foreign correspondent days of working out of a cramped hovel littered with too much paper, coffee and newspapers. Apparently we are moving the office, but in the meantime the sole correspondent for us in Joburg – only one of just three full-time reporters we have on the entire continent – is doing his best to co-exist with the other people who are in sales and selling stuff that has nothing to do with our main news gathering content. My colleague tells me that at an older office before this one, someone got shot in the stairwell and there were a few bad incidents. The ladies room near the current office is via a stairwell and I wonder how sound proof it is from the offices and elevators. My colleague gives me a lift at the end of the day and he says Joburg is one of the ugliest cities he’s lived in – the constant need to drive is terrible. I asked my colleague if Joburg could be considered a hardship posting.

Third day – full day in the office and still trying to deal with IT problems. I found out it is walkable to the office from my hotel and I try it though not before I split my credit cards, ID and cash between my shoulder bag and my pants pocket. It’s a lovely walk and I stop at a local street stall – Lindy’s Fast Food hand painted on its front – and buy a simple egg and cheese sandwich from the three plump African matrons behind the counter frying and cooking in kerchiefs. A local comes up and gets what looks like three portions of mashed potato blobbed together with gravy, but I think the matrons tell me it is the local mealies. What I do find is I smile a lot more because the hotel staff and cabbies all smile at me and ask how am I doing – and I don’t think it is just about them being good about customer service. And of course some local shouted Ni Hao! at me.

I went to my first braai tonight. The host was an American reporter based in Joburg. He became a single dad when he adopted his son at 4 months old in Thailand. He met his partner out there too and both with the adopted son moved to Joburg together – Tommy, his Thai partner, barbequed fabulously; the son is 4 years old now. The reporter’s brother and sister-in-law (Vietnamese American) live in Houston but from a small town in New Orleans. Another couple – she Thai American (with a Mum in Las Vegas!), and he French – came with their 18-month-old daughter, while a lady came with her half-Zim son. Two African ladies also joined the party with their nearly 4 year old daughter.

So much still to absorb and tomorrow is only Day 4!

Last Wednesday was my 6th and final lesson as part of an Italian cookery course held at Barolo in the Ritz Carlton Beijing. Over the past 6 months I have learned to cook a selection of dishes under the expert tutelage of Barolo’s resident Italian chef. We started with minestrone and carpaccio followed by pasta, ravioli, veal, fish and, this final lesson was for dessert which of course had to be tiramisu.

Tiramisu literally translates to ‘pick me up’ ‘pull me up’ and this refers to coffee and sugar content of the dish. Basically, tiramisu consists of layers of a custard cream (made with mascarpone, cream, egg yolks, sugar and a little Marsala wine) and biscuits soaked in strong coffee all topped off with cocoa powder. Not a dish for those watching their weight or cholesterol, but it does taste amazing.

Each lesson is rounded off with a dinner in the restaurant consisting of the chef’s version of whatever dish we learned that day plus wine pairing. All in all an excellent afternoon and evening which will be sadly missed.

www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Properties/Beijing/Dining/Barolo/Default.htm

On Friday we got invited to a leaving party for a friend of mine who is moving back to the UK today. After 6 years in Beijing he finally felt it was time to return to the UK and a new job. The party was held in a new bar right in the Worker’s Stadium, called Fubar. It is a curious place as there are no signs and you have to walk into a hot dog shop, go into the bathroom at the back and press a button. The wall then moves revealing the bar. More info can be had at http://www.fubarpeking.com and http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/listings/nightlife/bars/has/fubar

The bar itself is quite small and cosy with a kind of prohibition style. Drinks are well priced for Beijing and the mixed drinks are large! The hot dog place is part of the bar and serves up 3 kinds of sausage with up to 14 different ‘fixings’. Both bar and hot dog place were excellent.

So, for the last two weeks I have been away: 5 days golfing in Thailand followed by 3 days work in Xuzhou. In between I was home and we met up with some friends for dim sum one Sunday lunch time.

Dim sum literally means ‘to touch the heart’ in Cantonese and is part of the yum cha or ‘tea drinking’ ritual popular in the south of China. Basically dim sum is a series of small steamed or fried snacks eaten in the morning. In Beijing dim sum has become an extremely popular lunch time meal with dozens of hotels and restaurants specialising in it. We chose a small restaurant close to the Lufthansa centre called Tao Zhu Gong Guan. It was very good and as a bonus, they were running a half price Sunday offer.

We sampled a selection of fairly standard types of dim sum which included steamed prawn dumplings, BBQ pork buns, radish cakes,  pork and prawn dumplings and egg custard buns. I have included general picture below which shows the prawn dumplings (left), egg custard buns (centre) and the pork and prawn dumplings (right).

Today is the Mid Autumn Festival or Moon Festival. It is the day, or rather night, when the moon shines at its brightest for the whole year. In the lunar calendar this day falls on the 15th day of the 8th month. Traditionally this is the time when families get together to feast, view the moon and eat mooncakes. While baked goods are a common feature at most Chinese celebrations, mooncakes are inextricably linked with the Moon festival. One type of traditional mooncake is filled with lotus seed paste (see photo). Roughly the size of a human hand, these mooncakes are quite filling and are meant to be cut diagonally in quarters and passed around. There is usually a salty yolk in the middle, representing the full moon, which can be an acquired taste.

Mooncakes are big business in China with hotels and restaurants producing elaborately packaged cakes which they sell from about July onwards. These packages are given out to family, friends and business contacts as goodwill gifts.

The nearest Western equivalent is probably the Harvest Festival or perhaps Thanksgiving.

Today, we spent the day with some old friends who have a daughter a similar age to our youngest. The kids played and much food and drink was consumed by all including, mooncakes.

This is a play by play blog from the actual day. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2009/09/30/live-blogging-the-national-day-parade