Look before you walk

July 7 001
Originally uploaded by BK 14

This is a graphic warning to anyone thinking about walking around in downtown Johannesburg expecting not to fall into an uncovered manhole.

Well, that's a little dramatic; it's not as if the downtown core is littered with gaping holes in the middle of the street. I think it was mostly a lucky coincidence for me.

Yeah, so as I briefly blogged about this earlier, I guess I'll elaborate on the fateful Saturday afternoon when I almost became a South African Ninja Turtle

... So I was heading to the Johannesburg Art Gallery to see the Africa Remix (I will post photos right after this) exhibit and, as usual, I was lost downtown. In my defense, public transportation is pretty sketchy, so you sometimes find yourself out of the kumbi and immediately lost. It doesn't help that rarely will a venue provide a map on their website. So most of the time I find myself wandering.

Anyway, it's Saturday afternoon and downtown Jo'burg is bustling with street vendors and tons of people. The streets and sidewalks are completely swamped. But despite the intense busyness and human congestion, I'm the only white person I can see, so any efforts I make to "blend in" are pretty much useless.

So like I said, I'm in Central Jo'burg and it's pretty crazy and I'm trying to find my way to Joubert Park, where the gallery is, without accidentally making a wrong turn into Hillbrow or Yeoville. I try to navigate around a slow-moving crowd on the sidewalk by taking one step into the street when all of a sudden ...

... the street is gone and I've fallen waist-deep into a hole. It seems that nobody saw a problem with leaving a giant hole (about two feet wide by two or three feet long) completely uncovered about half a foot away from the curb.

Upon later inspection, the hole had to be at least 15 feet deep.

It's a good thing I was walking kind of fast (as I tend to do when I'm walking around downtown) because my momentum propelled my upper body forward and allowed my hands to stop myself from falling in.

In the end, I came away relatively unscathed, with only a charlie horse (see fig. 1), banged up knee and rapidly beating heart.

The funniest part: hardly anyone seemed to notice. The only people that seemed notice my fall were the two who were sitting on the curb right next to the hole. All they said was, "Ohh" and "Shame."

I made it to the gallery eventually and had a great time.

And then later that night I heard gunshots coming from the neighbourhood just north of mine, which is, coincidentally (at least for the GTA'ers in the audience), called Malvern. There's not much of a story there except that it gave my heart another jolt.

I promise that there really is a real introduction coming eventually. It just seems that I've left it so long now I don't know where to begin.

BK