South Africa 2010

It was time to leave Johannesburg, but we still had some hours left before our plane left. Our hotel (Balalaika) had a great breakfast-buffet with everything one could crave
. Even after this we had more time left, so we headed for a huge shopping center 5 minutes away. This was the Nelson Mandela Square Sandton city, which even had a Apple store (no, they didn’t sell iPads yet)
. We mostly window-shopped, and only arrived back to the hotel with some new magazines. The hotel had a great deal with some local taxi drivers, so we got there in 15-20 minutes for a handful of silly-money
. It was still 2-3 hours until check-in, so we might have gone a bit early, but we didn’t mind. We were moving along to Port Elizabeth on the south cost, which was a plane-ride that took about two hours. When we arrived it was already dark, so we looked forward to get a GPS for our Rental car. Too bad that Avis themselves did not rent out gps devices, neither did any of the shops on the airport sell such devices. We could have relied on our phones (and expected unholy data-traffic bills) but instead we did it the old fashioned way by looking at maps and road-signs. This of course was a huge let-down for the IT-people amongst the crowd.

Thinh was the first one to try out SA driving, and it took him about 2 minutes to run down an innocent orange traffic-cone. When we finally managed to get out of the parking-lot, we got lost pretty quick
. Switching over to left-hand driving does not happen in a heartbeat, so we had our cute little moments where everyone was screaming “WRONG SIDE!” and “LEFT SIDE LEFT SIDE”. At one point we went head-on to a bus, but we wont go into any details (GO LEFT! LEEEFT!). Shortly after we found ourselves in the center of Port Elizabeth, where our “don’t book anything just be spontaneous and things will work it self out” -plan started to crack

. We had issues finding a place of our liking, but ended up in a pretty nice hotel right next to the Boardwalk.

Naturally, this was where we went after checking in. We found a nice sushi-place, but managed to walk into the wrong restaurant. We were suddenly sitting in a Chinese restaurant, still wanting sushi. It wasn’t a big problem though, since even the waiter recommended that we went next-door to the Japanese restaurant we originally wanted to go to. After a huge amount of sushi at the oriental gardens, we covered ourselves with some more clothes, and went further along the boardwalk. Suddenly we found ourselves inside a somewhat big casino (The Boardwalk Casino & Entertainment World) and were ready to loose the rental car in a shady poker-game. Gambling is fun, loosing isn’t. The Group tried Blackjack, with mixed results. Thinh had apparently done this before, bringing home – R50, whilst Sveta had a whopping – R100. Bjorn somehow came back with a chip worth R12.50, which is pretty strange since they only used chips worth R25 and up. The jackpot-machines were confusing, but made us somewhat happy. It was a nice evening, and we went home early to have some energy for the next day. Strangely enough, no pictures were taken.