The Massive Amounts of Garbage Lining the Streets of Johannesburg

   

This was a picture (which I have since cropped) of the new South Africa flag of the post-apartheid era. I actually took this one at the apartheid museum, as this was the final display, if you will, of the museum, the symbol of the emergence of a "new South Africa."

The visit to Johannesburg was not quite as pleasant as I had hoped.

Admittedly, my expectations were not especially high. Jo'burg was a "boom town" after gold was discovered. It just continued to grow and grow, until it became a great huge metropolis, one of the largest cities in Africa, and the largest in South Africa.

However, while I kept hearing about how certain cities like Cape Town and Durban were quite blessed with tremendous natural beauty, and Pretoria definitely had nice spots and points of interest, Johannesburg was simply the biggest city. That was it's claim to fame. Sure enough, there was not all that much of interest for a visitor from out of town in that city.

Yet, it was worse than my not overly high expectation, even. It was very chaotic, for one. There were many people crossed streets at various points on a typical block, and the drivers (including mine) would just barely miss them by a few feet at most. What was more, nobody seemed even to notice, to pay the least attention. In my own lawsuit crazed country, I am almost positive that it might have resulted in law suits. Here, it seemed like the norm.

Another thing that was more than a little disappointing was the amount of garbage, literally, that was lining the streets. It was everywhere, lining the streets, and that is no exaggeration. 

This I found depressing, and at the time, I made a point of not getting any of this in the pictures that I took. It only occurred to me afterwards that, well, that was part of my experience visiting Johannesburg (and to a lesser extent, Pretoria), and that maybe I should have documented this.

In any case, I found this video clip of a news story about it from just a few months ago. It seemed worth sharing here, because this is real, and made my actual visit to central, or downtown, Johannesburg actively unpleasant at times. 

Uncollected rubbish in Joburg is fast becoming a health hazard