Out of the way

The main reason for the trip was the Mobile Web Africa conference. I had originally worried that it would just be another "chance to network with people who have too much money to spend on conferences so they don't have to work" event. But when I met the organiser in another conference in the UK (where I spent the last birthday of the 30s) I decided that it would at least be reasonable in all probability.

It turned out to be very good. Attended in high degree by folks from Cape Town and Kenya, I am not sure that it needed to be in Johannesburg after all, but that's the way things go ...

I realised that South Africa is one of the places that I hadn't visited when I wrote about toilets, so for the sake of colleting knowledge in related places, they have the custom of filling urinals with ice (at least in the fancier places). I think it should be considered where the ice can be picked up from the ground outside.

Thanks to the University of Johannesburg, who organised a short talk for me (made shorter by the fact that I had to attend a two-hour teleconference at what they had planned to be the middle of the talk), and the W3C office at Meraka Institute.

There are some things that are good, and some not so not good in South Africa. Contrary to what some people say, it is reasonably safe to walk around a lot of the country, even alone, even at night. There is a real reason to beware of crime, because there really is a lot of it. There is also a high degree of paranoia, and unreasonable fear that everything is worse than it really is. And there is a lot that works, whether at an advanced or just a basic level.

If you do walk alone at night, you generally run across the odd other person who does it too. But around some fancy areas of the capital, I ran into a number of women offering an old-style business transaction. That's not so shocking, as it happens all over the world, but when some of them are clearly not yet 15, in a country that used to be considered very modern (admittedly that was under apartheid, and only when not considering the non-white population at all), it reminds me that the world has a lot to figure out still.

Africa is a place I find interesting, vast (of course), that challenges preconceptions I have, and then challenges the new ones I replace them with. And I have only poked a bit at the very ends. I wonder what really happens in the middle.