As of today, South Africa has entered lockdown level 2. South Africans can now buy booze and cigarettes (finally!), we can drink alcohol in restaurants and bars, we can go to the gym, we can visit our friends and family (most of us were already doing so but now it’s official), and we can move freely throughout the country. We still have a 10:00 p.m. curfew, and international travel remains banned.

This is a quick post to announce the Melville Food Program, which I’ve blogged about many times during lockdown (see here and here and here), did its last large-scale food parcel distribution at Heritage Baptist Church today. This amazing group of volunteers, led by Tanya and Sean Gardiner, have given out more than 5,400 food parcels (around 300,000 total meals) to Melville area residents over the past four months.

Other than a brief visit to Hillbrow, I hadn’t gone to downtown Joburg city since before the pandemic started. Also today is the ten-year anniversary of my arrival in Joburg and I wanted to do something special. So I decided to devote the whole day yesterday to Joburg city explorations, and the whole today to blogging about it.

When the pandemic first hit and South Africa locked down, the closure of Emmarentia Dam and the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens (two parks that are essentially one – I will refer to the whole thing as “Emmarentia” going forward) was one of my greatest sources of sadness. Emmarentia is my favorite park to run and walk in, and while several other Joburg parks (Delta Park, the Melville Koppies, James and Ethel Gray) remained unofficially open during Level 4 and Level 3, Emmarentia was firmly closed.

I haven’t blogged about the lockdown for a couple of weeks, and I feel like I’ve built up all these lockdown thoughts and ideas but haven’t been able to share them. So here they are, in no particular order.

Last week I participated in a behind-the-scenes tour of historic Paterson Park, on the border of Norwood and Orange Grove, to check out the public art projects in progress there. The park is undergoing a huge renovation, expected to finish in the next few months.