We made it!

The last leg of our journey, the flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg, was almost 11 hours long, but it was smooth and easy.  It seems like they kept on feeding us on the plane, so we just finished eating something when they brought us something new.  Most of us tried to sleep, and some of us even managed to get a few good hours of sleep in.  Going through passport control and getting our luggage was fairly quick, and we all managed to change some money in the airport.  We met our guide, Joe, an older man who has been working as a guide for 16 years.  He got us on the bus to our hotel, where they had some sandwiches for us--egg salad and tomato with butter.  The hotel is in a suburban neighborhood, Benoni, just outside of Johannesburg.  This area is gated and fenced, and is mainly residential, with charming houses and lovely landscaping and gardens, with palm trees lining the avenues.  And of course, each yard has a very high fence, many topped with razor wire.  This was a relatively wealthy white-only neighborhood during the apartheid years, and there are still quite a few visual reminder of that legacy.  Our hotel was once a grand house, built around quite a large pool area.  I'm not sure it will be warm enough to swim while we're here, but hopefully we'll have some nice sun around the pool tomorrow afternoon.

We start early tomorrow, spending the day in Soweto, the famous and important township that was home to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and was the scene of so much of the resistance to the apartheid state.  Hopefully everyone is going to be able to get into this time zone quickly and get some decent sleep tonight.  As I write this, it's quite late, and I'm hearing plenty of laughter from the rooms near mine...