Fresh Earth Food Store — soul food comes to Jo'burg

Fresh Earth Food Store

I'm sit­ting at a wooden table in an alcove amidst the buzz of the café that lies to one side of the food store cum health shop that is the Fresh Earth Food Store, exclaim­ing over my break­fast. I can count on one hand the num­ber of eat­er­ies* where I can hope to find some­thing on the menu, like my choice of French Toast on wheat-free bread, with 'real' free-range eggs and real maple syrup (the Canadian kind not cheap, fla­voured syrup).

This par­tic­u­lar dish also comes with huge slices of haloumi cheese. You have no idea how good it was. Heart-warming stuff. Add to that the African-brewed organic  and Fair Trade decaf cof­fee (Bean There Coffee) that I'm enjoy­ing with, I have no doubt, 'real' milk (not the kind full of hor­mones and other stuff, because the cows are fed so badly) with a choice of rice or soy milk if you do not do dairy, or are vegan. Continued

Top things to do in Jo'burg — residents give insider tips

Mandela Bridge

Whether you call it Jozie, Jo'burg, or just plain Johannesburg, if you live here you love it, whilst the rest of the coun­try talks about it in hushed tones as a place riddled with crime and best avoided, espe­cially at peak hour, which is most of the day. A visit to Jo'burg is a crash course in stay­ing aware, all the time. But if you want to exper­i­ence a real met­ro­pol­itan buzz then you can't beat it. Time speeds up. So does the traffic, the num­ber of advert­ising bill­boards, the speed at which traffic does (and some­times doesn't) get around. Continued

Johannesburg — musings of a former resident returned

Welcome to Jozi

Johannesburg is covered in rain. Outside there is a deluge. Inside the car, we are fight­ing to nav­ig­ate the M1 – the east­ern bypass around the city some people liken to New York (won­der if the Big Apple could func­tion without any road mark­ings?) — whilst the wind­screen soon begins to mist over. We crank up the heater and lean for­ward in a bid to make some sense of the mess in which the M1 finds itself.

It's around 60 days and count­ing to the World Cup and Johannesburg, like most of the other major cit­ies of South Africa, is reel­ing. Continued

Mandela Square

Mandela Square

Situated in the heart of Sandton Central, in Johannesburg, the Nelson Mandela Square is sur­roun­ded by world-class hotels and res­taur­ants. The pop­u­lar Sandton City Shopping Centre is adja­cent to the Square and is a shopper’s paradise.

Sandton Square made head­lines in 2004 when, as com­mem­or­at­ing South Africa’s first dec­ade of demo­cracy, a spe­cially donated six metre bronze statue of Nelson Mandela was unveiled, and the square aptly renamed Nelson Mandela Square at Sandton City. The statue was sculp­ted by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane and weighs over 2.5 tons meas­ur­ing 2.3 metres from elbow to elbow. The shoulders of the statue are 1.7 metres in width and the shoes are 1 metre in length. Continued

What to Do this Weekend

If you haven’t made any plans yet for the week­end and are won­der­ing what to do, here are a few sug­ges­tions of events to attend, places to go and things to do … Continued