The Ephemeral Life

So, I got into SA Joburg around 4 days ago and it’s been pretty good. A little slow on the actual work side, which was expected on my side as the MC is very busy with transition, the Bridge conference (their NLDS, or National Leadership Development Seminar) and other things, so dealing with us CEEDers has taken a back seat. Nonetheless the stay has been good, overall.

My first day was rather peaceful. I arrived in the airport a little early and got out at an amazing 20 minutes (it took me almost an hour to get out of Heathrow for London) so I spent quite a while waiting for my airport pick up. See, it was a precarious situation, as I landed with no number to call and no address to take a cab too as a last resort. But I kept calm and knew that most people come around 30-60 mins after the flight so I waited patiently. It was funny though, as something I noticed during my flight was that I was the ONLY asian person on there, and I got a lot of looks, something that has continued and will continue for the rest of my stay here in SA. While I was waiting, I got a lot of people coming up to me asking me if I needed help getting to my connecting flight. Obviously they all assumed I was going somewhere else.

Anyways, surely enough, after around 75 minutes after my flight time I saw a man holding a sign with AIESEC written in green marker. I felt a lot easier upon seeing that. I met the man and found out he was Donaldson, MCVPER (Member Committee Vice President External Relations) and the man mentioned oh so much by Emily, the MCP (Member Committee President) of AIESEC Canada. After we met up with the other person who was parking the car, Elrine MCVPTM (MCVP Talent Management {There’s a reason AIESEC has so many acronyms, it’s cuz we’re too lazy to keep writing/typing it all out}).

The car ride back was interesting. Driving through Joburg was…interesting. It was very urban but very sketch at the same time. The air was heavy with dust and everything seemed very…run-down, for the sake of a better word. We had a few stops to make, one was the Department of Labour since they were working out the VISAs of the incoming team who hasn’t arrived in the country yet, the other being the University of Johannesburg since Elrine had to sign up for a class in the upcoming semester. The University of beautiful in every sense. It is everything I wish UofT was campus wise. It was close to the city, yet the campus itself was isolated with plenty of open space. Anyways, after all was done we finally headed up to the MC house. The ride was amazing. All the architecture in the outlying areas of Joburg was beautiful. It was a full mix of arabic, european etc. Living in Mississauga, where all the houses looked the same, this was amazing. Another thing I noticed was that the notion that SA has amazing infrastructure is spot on. The roads are amazingly well planned out. An interesting side note is that after 10pm, traffic lights are optional! This means that they are all treated as stop signs really. Imagine that being the case in Canada.

The rest of the day was fairly slow, but still extremely amazing! The closed community that the MC house is in is very…tropical. Palm trees and other trees that one would expect in a tropical setting was there, and honestly, all it really needs is a beach and it’s complete! But yeah, the house is beautiful, slightly small for the amount of people living inside, but the property outside is huge by Canadian standards. One little disconcerting thing is that the outside walls of the compound is surrounded by an electric fence! Yes, an electric fence, which is then supplemented by various spikes and barbed fences. Makes you feel safe eh? Anyways, the day was spent sleeping on the grass, then some driving around trying to get sponsorships for the conference, watched the foot ball game which was followed by drinking and playing Asshole/Big 2 for a few hours! It was a fun filled day and the days to follow was good too.

Second day in a nutshell was 1) sleeping in till noonish, 2) seeing the MC team off as they had work to do, 3) sleeping again until dinner, 4) going out clubbing till 5am! Yes 5am! It was a long night and once more there was drinking. Also, it seems that the age group of the clubs in this area is catered to the older crowd. The club we went too at first was 23+, which both myself and Collin fell short off. We then moved onto another club which was also technically 23+ but allowed us in. Cover was R100, which is around $14CND because of a “Show” which didn’t start until 4am! It was interesting, was ok but very long as we had a long and early day the following morning.

Anyways, this post has been long enough, I’ll continue some other time!