#Graffiti

I recently spent two days in Clarens – a quaint resort town in the mountains of the eastern Free State – as part of the MeetSouthAfrica local blogger trip. I’ve been to Clarens three or four times but never devoted an entire blog post to it, even though I think it’s one of the loveliest towns in South Africa (albeit a bit touristy). You can find reference to Clarens in several of my posts though: see here and here and here and here.

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.

Last week I spent lots of time watching graffiti artists paint during the City of Gold Urban Art Festival. I took tons of pictures and I’ve been struggling to figure out how to organize them, and also how to write about the festival more broadly. In the end, I just decided to pick my ten favorite shots from the week and explain each picture.

The City of Gold Urban Art Festival is happening all week in Joburg. I was planning an epic post at the end of the week with all the highlights, but I just realized that I’ve already taken far too many photos to fit into one post and the week isn’t even over yet. It looks like I’ll be doing a City of Gold Series.

My birthday is on Tuesday. On the actual day I’m going to be in Knysna – a lovely seaside town in the Western Cape – as a guest of the of the Knysna Oyster Festival. I’ll be participating in countless exciting activities in Knysna and I imagine this will be a pretty fun way to spend my birthday. (It’s a big one, by the way.) But of course I am also a little bit sad that I won’t be celebrating in Jozi.

Last weekend I went on a graffiti tour with Past Experiences. I should have done this a long time ago. Graffiti is a huge deal in Joburg and I love photographing it. I haven’t blogged about it enough.