We'd struggled to find anything to do the first time round in Pretoria and it looked like it would be similar this time round. Unfortunately, Christine's house was full but fortunately, this meant we'd be staying in a backpackers (even if, unfortunately, we'd have to pay for it). Fortunately, I had my legion of infections (the face had since been joined by 2 comrades, one on each leg) as an excuse to not do anything. M jumped on the bandwagon quite happily and we sat around, watched TV, chatted with the various characters around the place. Two Dutch student nurses who worked up in Botswana were nice company, and two women wandering around with Bibles (one of them was an American missionary, the other was South African) had such an innate fear of speaking, it appeared, that I became mystified at the spectacular advances made by Christianity in this part of the world. I can only assume that other missionaries were perhaps more forthcoming with their communicational skills. The American was from Kansas City though, so maybe that's some kind of an excuse.
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We were about half an hour's walk away from Christine's, yet the scenery was very similar. Roads went between large houses as far as the eye could see, the jacarandas were awaiting our departure before they'd start to bloom, and so on. One thing that I noticed last time and forget to write down was something which I can imagine was done just to make Pretoria slightly more interesting for passing motorists or residents. It seems like the city's land has been re-zoned (this according to signs which have been propped up here and there) and so land that used to be one of these long straight roads has now been packaged into something that can be sold off. That means that Soporific Avenue, for example, is now divided into two parts as there's now a large garden in the middle of it. This has two potential consequences – firstly, a drive who wants to get from one end of Soporific Avenue to the other has to take a detour via Snooze Street and Sweetdreams Drive. The other, far more hilarious yet unlikely consequence, is that someone driving down Snooze Street will take a left into Soporific Avenue as he did last time he was here, but then will rather unexpectedly collide with a brick wall a few metres down the road. I didn't manage to see this happen, though, so we called Christine and went ten-pin bowling with her and her guests for the week, which was nearly as fun.
Just before we fell asleep for all eternity but having done such things as laundry and disinfecting infections, we roused ourselves and got moving southwards. The final goal was Soweto although we'd stop at a backpackers for the night closer to the airport to drop off some bags.
T bravely attempts cooking in a Jo'burg blackout 
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