My last weekend in Pretoria

I. JUMPED. OUT. OF. AN. AIRPLANE. It was awesome.  I can’t explain how exhilarating it was to free-fall from 11,000 feet in the air, then slowly drift down from 5,000 feet.  The folks at the Pretoria Skydiving Club were good instructors, and it was overall a lot of fun.  I was supposed to jump at 11am, but they were running a bit behind so I hung out with other jumpers around the braai, chatted and watched as those queued up in front of me landed.  The view was spectacular; South Africa really is a gorgeous country.  There are more pictures on my Flickr, and a video as well, but I have to wait until I’m somewhere that I’m not paying by the megabyte to upload it.

Saturday was a day of firsts for me–I rented a car to get out to the airfield, so it was also my first time driving on the left hand side of the road.  Not too hard, actually, though it took me quite awhile to stop turning on the windshield wipers whenever I meant to use my turn signal.

Since I had the car, I decided to try to go out to a couple of bars on Saturday night, since I needed to get out of the hotel. (Don’t worry mom, I took it easy and waited a half hour after my last beer before I got back on the road…) First of all, the roads around here are dark at night.  Like…scary dark.  Also, it’s very nervewracking being lost, in the dark, with headlights coming at you from the “wrong” side.  It was BlackBerry to the rescue again; I GPS-ed my way from bar to bar, then back to the hotel.

Today, I wanted to go sightseeing.  I looked at the guide provided by the City of Tshwane, but after driving around for an hour looking for the first thing I wanted to go see–the Mariamman Temple in the township of Marabastad, I gave up.  The maps provided by the city were terrible; not to scale and did not indicate which roads were one-way.  Anyway, eventually I found the temple.  It was closed, so I didn’t go in, but it was impressive from the outside.

From there, I headed back to Menlyn Mall to do some shopping.  I spent quite a bit of time there, just enjoying the surroundings.  The mall was bustling with a very diverse crowd, and everyone was very friendly.  Very different from shopping in the States, especially at places like Tyson’s and Pentagon City.  I got good deals on some clothes, and enjoyed poking around the book, music and electronics stores.

That’s about it for this weekend–tomorrow we head to Johannesburg for two weeks.