Tag Archives: Pretoria

Okapi

Adventures, drc, South Africa, ,

The DRC trip keeps returning to my mind. Everything keeps drifting in that direction. Kinshasa and Goma, Bunia and Beni come up in conversations, in news feeds, in humanitarian debate wormholes down which I have fallen.

Last weekend I went to the zoo. I was with three well-traveled, cosmopolitan friends; the kind of friends with whom half an hour’s conversation can move easily through three different continents and several decades of history. A zoo trip is a great opportunity to take a long walk through pleasant surroundings with plenty of conversation-starting animal sightings. This trip was to the Pretoria Zoo. We chose this zoo for a very particular reason: Okapi.

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One step nearer

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Well, perhaps more than one. I now have flights. This is certainly a whole lot nearer than I have ever been before. I am still not assuming that it will all go well. In fact, I am trying to cultivate a healthy cynicism about the prospect. Regardless of this, I went through this morning (thanks to some marvelous friends) to Pretoria to complete the visa application process. Applying for a teacher’s (E-2) visa for Korea involves sending a whole bunch of crucial and hard-to-obtain documents to Korea where the school will start the process and then, once you’ve received a visa issuance number/visa certificate from them, applying at the local consulate or embassy – which, by the way, are in different places in the South African case.

It was a beautiful day for a drive to Pretoria. For those who have never done the drive, the trip between South Africa’s economic hub and her capital, is generally less than pleasant for the driver. There used to be miles and miles of open space and quiet road between the two cities. These days most of that has been filled with cluster-housing developments and the quiet roads have morphed into raging, over-subscribed highways. One of the reasons for the development of SA’s Gautrain is to try and deal with the congestion on the N1 and related routes between Joburg and Pretoria.

Anyway, the drive, for a passanger, is quite enjoyable when the winter sun is shining from a clear blue sky and the company is good. The trip doesn’t take all that long. In fact I think we probably spent more time wandering around Menlyn Park shopping centre (which is huge and definitely designed to confuse) than driving through. At least it felt like it, but that may just have been the result of an innate dislike of shopping centres, even when they’re pleasantly empty on a Monday morning.

Eventually heading off to find the Korean consulate, we spent a slightly nerve-wracking little while following various roads, almost (but not quite) certain we were going in the right direction. Eventually we drove past the address listed in my guide-book as where to find the Korean Embassy. Isn’t it inevitable that you will always drive past the place you need to be. When we turned back and reached the Embassy, we were informed that the consulate was around the block and down the road.

We ultimately found the consulate and handed in all the documents. Which was remarkably easy. I am torn between joy at the lack of bureaucractic hoops to jump through and fear that this may simply indicate that everything will now go pear-shaped and fall apart again. I am hoping for the former and trying not to think to much about it.

Instead I’m focusing on how lovely a day it is in Gauteng. And it really is. A slight breeze, pale blue sky, stunning sunshine and dry winter grass. It really is lovely to be able to spend a little bit of time here before, all things being equal, I head off into the sun… rise, actually… and summer.