Just before Christmas, my food-blogger friend Tim and I started a blog series called Jozi Pizza Wars. Our goal is to try as many of Joburg’s independently owned pizza places (no big franchises) as possible and rate them on a variety of factors. Eventually we’ll compile our scores and come up with a list of the ten best pizzas in Jozi.

I passionately love my old Domke camera bag, which I inherited more than four years ago from Jon. It’s the strongest, trustiest bag I’ve ever owned. But it’s been hovering on the verge of death for a long time now.

One of the best parts of traveling, in my opinion, is observing domesticated animals in different places around the world. (See my post on cats in Ghana.)

Brazil has a particularly interesting animal culture and my sister and I spent a lot of time instagramming the animals we came across on our recent trip there. Here are a few highlights.

Just before the holidays, JHBlive.com asked me to do a review of Kaldi’s Coffee in Newtown. (Read the JHBlive review here.) I’m really glad I did that review, because I’ve been overlooking Kaldi’s for years and now I know that it’s one of Newtown’s gems.

As I said in my previous post, I spent about a week in Zimbabwe with my boyfriend’s family last month. Ray’s mother grew up in Zimbabwe and Ray visited often when he was a kid. We took many trips down memory lane during our visit, which I found interesting as a newcomer to the family (and the country).

Last month I traveled to Zim with Ray’s family to celebrate his grandmother’s 90th birthday. We spent a couple of days in Harare (the capital) and then four days in Nyanga, in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. The whole family stayed together in Nyanga, in a rambling mountain holiday house.

I remembered how I was feeling at this time last year. (Here’s the post I wrote the day after he died.) Then I remembered that after Mandela died, I took a whole bunch of photos of a new graffiti mural that was painted in his honor. I’ve been meaning all year to do a blog post about it but never did. So, now is the time.