Arrival in South Africa and IBM SA

Slowly but surely I'm getting the hang of this blog. I now realize that to get the pictures in the order that I want the pictures in, I have to upload them backwards.

The trip to SA was somewhat eventful. Ended up calling a cab to pick me up from the house and then took the metro north down to GCT. From there, I inquired about a bus which would have cost $15, since I'm lazy, I ended up taking a taxi. From GCT to LGA was about $40 in traffic, so not horrible. The funny thing is that the program only covers $25 each way transportation to the airport, so really my one trip to the airport more than ate up my cost. Oh well, I'm expecting a lot of out of pocket expenses on this trip, so might as well start early.

LGA - ATL wasn't a problem. Had a lot of time in the airport there. The only big event that happened was the naked old man in the bathroom. And this wasn't really big, just shocking. I walk into the men's room, and standing facing me, between the toilets and the sink is an old man with his pants down using papertowels to do something below the waist. I'm not sure what. Either way, it was clearly "stall" behavior, so counting the Hangover, I have now seen more old man derrier in the last week than I have in my lifetime.

Trip to Jo-burg wasn't bad, just long. Longer because it took us 2 hours to get out of Atlanta since the ground crew had to replace a broken fuel pump. Nothing like mechanical issues to make you look forward to a long flight over the ocean where a plane just recently crashed. Read about 300 pages of Kaffir boy, recommended to me by one of the participants last time and enjoyed it quite a bit. Definitely helped set me up for the Apartheid museum. Also enjoyed my newly purchased PSP, highly recommended.

The south African airport was pretty cool, they had all of the south african flag colors on the floor, which I had plenty of time to look at because we had a small luggage problem with one of the people on our team and flight. (There were three of us on the plane from Atlanta). About an hour and a half later, we finally got the luggage, thankfully it wasn't lost, and we made our way out to find a sign with our names on it. Turns out we had another teammate that had been waiting for us since 5pm, which is when our flight was supposed to be in. Didn't leave the airport for the hotel until almost 9pm.

We dropped our stuff off and then four of us headed out to eat at a "Pub/Restaurant" which turned out to be more like a loud college bar. The food was good though, I had spicy mini burgers and a Chill Cucumber Smoothie. Let me say that again, a Chilli Cucumber Smoothie, which tasted like dill, cucumber, mint, with a spicy aftertaste. I'm not going to say it was delicious, but I definitely don't regret ordering it.

The hotel room was pretty basic, tv, two twin beds, reasonably sized bathroom with shower, and internet in the lobby and bar. Can't really ask for much more than that.

The next morning we all met at 8:45 and headed over to the IBM South Africa site where we met with the General Manager of South Africa and some of his team. They also had several of the local CSC members chosen for the program who had either already gone or were going to be going in the next phase which was cool. Had a good overview of the country/company and then had an excellent SA history lesson given by Nathi, one of the local employees.

We gathered outside the building, which was quite nice, as we waited for our shuttles to take us on a little tour of Jo-burg, including the Apartheid museum.

I went through the museum pretty quickly, entirely on my own. Somehow I managed to lose my group within two minutes of going into the museum, so I moved quicker than I probably otherwise would have and made it out about 40 minutes before the rest of the group. This turned out to be nice since I was able to sit on a bench in the sun and reflect on what I had just seen, the tough times that SA went through, and just in general relax. I find the times when I'm free to think fewer and fewer these days; always seems there's something to distract me, whether it's driving, working, tv, video games, Terra, cell phone, etc. Sitting there with nothing to do but relax was nicer than I would have expected. It'll be interesting to see how much of that I get on this trip.

After this we went on a little bus ride of the surrounding area. We had SA IBMers with us, but unfortunately we were in two different vans, and all of them got into one van (not the one I was in) so while the other group got a nice tour, we had to make it up. Fortunately I had read up a bit, so realized as we pulled into Soweto, that this was where the riots all started that would eventually end apartheid. Believe it or not, the picture to the left is better conditions that it used to be back then, when there were miles and and miles of shantytowns throughout Soweto and Alexandra (the setting for Kaffir Boy).

A preview of future souvenir purchases perhaps?

A view of Jo-burg on the way back to the hotel. There's quite a "downtown" area although we haven't really seen it yet. Tonight we're going out to some kind of restaurant or other with the ever gracious local IBMers. Speaking of, my faith is once again affirmed as it seems that everyone I have met so far on the program is what I would call "good people" and IBMer is an IBMer round the world.