A Morning in Noordgesig

12 October 2023

I recently connected with Fabian and Lavinia Otto during a Johannesburg Heritage Foundation tour of Coronationville and Bosmont. Fabian and Lavinia were our guides for the Coronationville/Bosmont tour but they actually live in Noordgesig, a historically coloured township on the northeastern edge of Soweto.

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Joburg Heritage: Churches of Coronationville and Bosmont

21 September 2023

Apologies to everyone who received this post in their inbox last week and has now received (and opened) it again. My site experienced a problem this week and the original version of the post was deleted, so I had to reload it. The text and images in the post are the same as before, so please don’t reread it unless you feel like refreshing your memory.

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Vredefort Dome: The Ultimate Weekend Getaway Guide

30 August 2023

People of Joburg: Pay attention because I’m about to let you in on a seriously good travel secret.

Most of you have probably heard of the Vredefort Dome. But if you’re anything like me (up until a few days ago), you have only a vague idea of what it is.

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A Quick Tour of Brixton Monuments

25 August 2023

Regular readers of this blog know that my boyfriend, Thorsten, is an architect. You might not know that he is also an artist, and he recently created a beautiful series of prints portraying historic monuments in our home suburb of Brixton.

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Art Blooms Inside Johannesburg's Drill Hall

27 July 2023

A few days ago I walked into the Drill Hall, in the frenetic center of downtown Joburg, and went through a wormhole into an alternate universe.

Art work outside the Drill Hall
Outside the Drill Hall – a hint of what’s to come.
Hallway inside the Drill Hall in downtown Johannesburg
Inside the Hall, where every found object – a chunk of carpet padding, a cracked toilet, a rubber boot, a plastic bottle, an avocado pit, a discarded wallet, a dead palm frond, a mannequin leg, a sheep skull, or any other thrown-away thing – becomes art and/or a vessel for life.
The back of the Drill Hall. I didn’t get a photo of the front of the building; it’s across the street from one of Joburg’s largest taxi ranks and rather chaotic on that side.
Midday traffic at the Noord Street taxi rank.
This is normal, midday traffic (not even rush-hour) at the Noord Taxi Rank – shot from the Drill Hall’s first floor balcony.

I’ve spent the last three days pondering this one-hour visit and how to present it on the blog. I wasn’t at the Drill Hall long enough to take it all in – I would need to hang out there for at least a week to properly document this place and what’s happening there. But I’m impatient and I really want to share my pictures now, so here is a quick summary.

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Four Days in Rhode Island, America's Smallest State

04 May 2023

I’m back in Joburg after a month-long trip to the U.S. – my second American journey in 2023. I spent most of this trip dealing with administrative and family issues, spending time in the same places I normally go: Maryland (and a little time in Washington, D.C.), South Carolina, and New York. But I also squeezed in a short trip to Rhode Island with my sister.

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