Eleventh in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg.
Vice, a coffee shop next to CNR Café in Craighall Park, has become a semi-regular coffee hangout for me lately. I’ve held off on blogging about it because it’s a tricky place to describe.
A few months ago, I wrote in a blog post that I was finally working on writing my memoir. Like, for real this time.
“I’ve started working on my memoir again, for real. I’ve set myself a strict rule of writing for at least one hour and 500 words per day. It’s a modest goal, to be sure, but in the past five days I’ve written 3801 words. For the first time in a while, I feel truly confident in my ability to complete this book.” -Heather Mason (pretentiously quoting herself), February 2021
Fourth in my “Roadhouses of Gauteng” series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.
Thorsten and I did another roadhouse mission last weekend. This time we headed west, journeying up Ondekkers Road to Uncle Harry’s Roadhouse in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein.
Third in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.
The Johnny Guitar Drive In, a roadhouse in downtown Alberton on Joburg’s East Rand, has a long and complex history. I’ll try to summarize what I know in a few sentences.
I waited until the last minute before deciding where to stay on the last night of the Blogitect Road Trip. The first eight nights of the trip were meticulously planned, but I delayed choosing a stopover town for the ninth night. I wanted to find an unusual town – something interesting and unexpected – off the beaten path but also roughly halfway between the Sunshine Coast and Joburg.
In my recent post about the Chilli Pepper restaurant, I briefly referred to a mine dump at the end of Immink Drive in Diepkloof, Soweto.
Like many Joburgers, I’ve always been both fascinated and appalled by these mountains of golden waste. Mine dumps are massive monuments to human greed, reminders of a time when insatiable hunger for gold drove powerful men to empty the earth beneath Johannesburg, pile it up where it didn’t belong, then leave that poisoned earth to blow dust into the lungs of former mine workers who – like the mine waste itself – got tossed away like garbage once they were no longer useful to the money-making machine.
I’m not sure when I first saw a photo of the Big Pineapple. It might have been in a blog post, or maybe somewhere on Instagram. But I do know one thing for certain: The moment I saw the Big Pineapple, it rocketed to the top of my South African must-see list.