Gateway to South Africa

We landed in Johannesburg this morning at about 9 am.   We were both excited to realize that we were actually here after so much planning and a few long days of travel.

Our flight from Toronto to Frankfurt was mostly uneventful with enough turbulence to keep us both up most of the night in spite of the lay flat beds we had.   After landing, we took the train into the main train station and met Rob's friend, Ingo, for the day.  

Ingo had taken a train in from Baden-Baden to meet us.   Even though Rob had lived there for a year, none of us really knew very much about the city.  So, we did what all good tourists with little time do -- we jumped on a hop-on hop-off bus tour.   The tour gave Ingo and I a great background on the city, its history, and the cultural scene that has developed over the years.   Unfortunately, Rob missed out on a lot of the narative as his translation head-phones weren't working very well.  

We followed our tour with a traditional German lunch of sausage, sauekraut, and potatoes.  It was quite good but I wouldn't want to eat it everday.  And then, as most Germans do when they have an afternoon off, we had a few pints of Heffeweiss.

We caught our flight to Johannesberg at 10:45 pm -- on the biggest plane in the world right now, an Airbus 380.  Our seats were on the second story about 10 windows back.  We preceded to have dinner and got to sleep at about 2 am.  We both slept much better on this flight and are in suprising good spirits given that we've had 7-8 hours of sleep over the past two days.    But, we are now on South African time and looking forward to arriving in Cape Town.