#Johannesburg

Although I don’t write about it as often as I did earlier in the pandemic, I’m still knitting. I still only know one stitch and I haven’t progressed past knitting in a straight line. I still have to consult YouTube or video-call Fiver each time I start or finish a new scarf. But knitting continues to preserve my sanity.

Fifth in my “Roadhouses of Gauteng” series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

Malvern – a suburb east of downtown Joburg, sandwiched between Kensington and the industrial suburbs of Denver and Cleveland – is rather downtrodden. Jules Street, the main road through Malvern, is populated mainly by chop shops, small factories/warehouses, and dilapidated apartment blocks.

Eleventh in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg.

Vice, a coffee shop next to CNR Café in Craighall Park, has become a semi-regular coffee hangout for me lately. I’ve held off on blogging about it because it’s a tricky place to describe.

Fourth in my “Roadhouses of Gauteng” series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

Thorsten and I did another roadhouse mission last weekend. This time we headed west, journeying up Ondekkers Road to Uncle Harry’s Roadhouse in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein.

Third in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.

The Johnny Guitar Drive In, a roadhouse in downtown Alberton on Joburg’s East Rand, has a long and complex history. I’ll try to summarize what I know in a few sentences.

In my recent post about the Chilli Pepper restaurant, I briefly referred to a mine dump at the end of Immink Drive in Diepkloof, Soweto.

Like many Joburgers, I’ve always been both fascinated and appalled by these mountains of golden waste. Mine dumps are massive monuments to human greed, reminders of a time when insatiable hunger for gold drove powerful men to empty the earth beneath Johannesburg, pile it up where it didn’t belong, then leave that poisoned earth to blow dust into the lungs of former mine workers who – like the mine waste itself – got tossed away like garbage once they were no longer useful to the money-making machine.