This week I went to a wedding at Randlords. The wedding was on Monday, December 19th, which might seem strange. But this is Johannesburg, where a wedding on a Monday evening in late December makes perfect sense.

I recently received an assignment to book a stay on Accommodation Direct, go stay at that place, and write a review of the experience. Accommodation Direct is a new accommodation booking tool and has listings throughout South Africa and a few other southern African countries.

Last week I had lunch at Mamasan, a brand-new restaurant on 7th Street in Melville. (Mamasan is so brand-new that it doesn’t have a website or even a review on Zomato yet. But here is its Zomato page as a placeholder.) It was delicious and I have very high hopes for this joint.

This is a quick post to announce: 1) The first-ever Oriental Plaza Instameet happened on 3 December and it was awesome; and 2) We’ve chosen the winners of the Instameet photography contest.

When I moved from America to South Africa, cars were the most difficult adjustment. Everything about cars and driving is different here: Cars drive on the opposite side of the road, car parts have different names (windshield vs. windscreen, horn vs. hooter, trunk vs. boot, AC vs. aircon), all the cars are manual (which Americans call stick-shift), etc. And don’t even get me started about registering a car in South Africa.

Enough is enough.

Yesterday I went to Maboneng to see an art exhibition that included thousands of pairs of dirty underwear draped over the streets.

I first visited the Oriental Plaza six-and-a-half years ago, on 18 August 2010, 12 days after I moved to Johannesburg. I know this because I wrote a blog post about it the following day.