#Culture

Kaapsehoop is the (long belated) third stop in my #10SouthAfricanTowns project, for which I’m visiting ten small towns across South Africa. Read about my first stop in Val and my second stop in Kameel.

On Saturday I participated in the first-ever #SpazaShopTour, starting and ending at African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong.

The weather was miraculously perfect for a six-kilometer walk. We wound through Katlehong and Thokoza, visiting spaza shops and street-side cafés and historical sites, chatting with each other and those we met along the way. Bongani, our host, walked us past his family home and explained what it was like to grow up in Katlehong in the early 1990s, when a deadly war broke out as the apartheid regime came to an end.

Remember that time I published a blog post every day for 100 days, and I had nothing to post except flowers and cats but you all enjoyed it anyway? (Or maybe you just read it anyway because you had nothing better to do?)

Zoo Lake, a popular public park in Parkview across Jan Smuts Avenue from the Johannesburg Zoo, is one of the most popular parks in Joburg and less than a ten-minute drive from my house. Yet I have not blogged about Zoo Lake for nearly a decade. (Here’s my post about it from January 2011.) How is this possible?

Many of you may remember my post about the African Accent Spaza Shop in Katlehong, which I visited for the first time in June.

I’ve kept going back, for various reasons. Every time I go I wind up spending hours sitting outside the spaza shop, chatting with my friends Bongani and Nkosikhona about anything and everything. At some point the three of us started talking about organizing a tour.