Jozi

Johannesburg is known as Jozi, and is a behemoth. I read a fact in the South African Airways inflight magazine (perhaps not impartial) that Gauteng Province in which Johannesburg sits is responsible for 10% of the GDP of the entire African continent. That’s rather insane when you process it.

If I had not wanted to capture the city’s glitz, I would have struggled a little for blopportunities (blip opportunities) today. There’s a strong mall culture in South Africa, which was fine for my first relatively free Sunday in a month, as I wanted to stock up on things that are harder to find and more expensive in Mozambique.

I bought a smart suit jacket at the South African equivalent of Marks and Spencer, which is called Woolworths. The absence of tacky toys and pic ‘n’ mix reveal it’s not the same as the defunct UK version. At the cash desk, I hummed along to Broken Wings with the cashier and it was a magical moment.

At the pharmacy, I bought peri-peri flavoured biltong before realising it’s a strange item to be sold in a pharmacy. At the checkout I liked the volunteer who was blocking the line asking shoppers to pay for packets of sanitary towels with their regular purchases. They were for a girls’ home that struggles to provide them. I feel that people often only partake in charity when opportunities are rammed down their throat, so she’d positioned herself extremely well, and the donation bin after the tills was pleasingly overflowing with sanitary pads.