South Africa: Johannesburg
South Africa is wonderful country, and visiting it is a lifetime experience.
South Africa has three capitals — Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, but the largest city is Johannesburg.
On arrival at Johannesburg O.R. Tabo international airport, Mr. Oliver Tambo’s statue is greeting everyone at arrival hall.
He has been one of the main activists against Apartheid regime
On all banknotes of South African rands is portrayed Nelson Mandela
There are many many things to see in Johannesburg, for example Soweto township which is now sort of merged into Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela used to live in Soweto.
The highlight of Soweto is the Orlando Towers of former coal power station
There is a bridge in between the towers and now people bungee-jump from the middle of it
another highlight of Johannesburg is Ponte City Apartments, which is a high residential tower of a cylindrical shape i.e it has open inner yard.
The building has the highest rooftop advertisement banner on African continent, but most interestingly is tower’s history.
After the collapse of apartheid regime the building and a lot of surrounding building have been hijacked by local gang groups. and has gone through dark period of its existence, with criminals controlling the building, during which the inner hard has been filled with trash reaching to 6th floor.
Fortunately the situation nowadays is way much better, the building is administered by a company which has returned the order to it, the inner yard has been cleaned up and tourists can go inside with some tours.
there are newer skyscrapers in Johannesburg's Sandton ares, which is known for its safety-wise better situation.
The building looks like a huge play-station 5
Sandton is known for its huge mall and Nelson Mandela’s square in front of it
you’ll find a lot of interesting things in there, e.g. master and student drawing
Generally Johannesburg is super reach with history and cool buildings.
For example this underground safe of former bank
with vandalized but still beautiful lockers
the very center of Johannesburg is Mahatma Gandhi square a historical landmark
the inner Johannesburg is very similar to New York in USA
street sign prohibiting celling on the street
the city has an interesting charm and a lot of super nice buildings
some of them are abandoned but in some of them life is booming, like in this
culinary school in action
most of the mini-buses in South African are Toyota vehicles with typical south african safe decoration waves on the sides
one of the brest coffee shops in central Johannesburg — crammers coffee
there are lot of mining company offices in central Johannesburg and correspondingly a lot of installations dedicated to mining industry
a monument to miner
another interesting building is this one, call the Hanging Building, which is standing in place of demolished Cullinan Building
Cullinan building is known for a place from where the largest diamond in the world has been shipped via regular post to London.
The delivery man arrived here picked up the a box and took it to the post logistics all the way to London. In London the diamond has been cut into three pieces, currently decoration the crown and couple of other things of the Queen.
a monument in front of former stock exchange office
another super cool installation in front of mining giant Anglo-American
the building of Anglo-American
the neighborhood of minig giant is not nice
close to it is the historical lawyer office where Nelson Mandela has been working
nope this is not Muhammed Ali, Nelson Mandela used to train for boxing
most of the trash can look like this in Johannesburg
and unfortunatelly some building are still abondoned
but there is a trend to get it back to life again, some areas of Johannesburg are super live, like in Maboteng, which is main party area of the city
where you can enjoy the sunset and marvelous beer
