Saturday, June 9, 2007

Apartheid Museum, wine tasting, ostrich fillet

When you arrive at the Apartheid Museum, they give you a pass- if you're colored you get one pass and if you're white you get another. You enter the museum through different entrances based on your color. As was intended, that went against my grain. The museum was a chronological exposition on the history of South Africa, how apartheid came into being, and how it was ended.
I thought the museum's presentations were balanced; they gave enough information to understand the conditions that led to apartheid and how the system persisted for so long (being dismantled completely only in 1994).
Below are some descriptions from the museum. Steve Biko is the person for whom the bioethics center I am doing research at was named for; he was killed because he was denied medical treatment as a prisoner after severe beatings. A photo of Desmund Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner, is also below.
After the museum, Michelle and I ran into our neighbor Carl, a Princeton student here putting together a camp to encourage high school students to go to college. We went to a nearby suburb to meet with some of his co-workers for a drink. We met CJ & Bruno, two MBA students at Cornell & Wharton, respectively, and decided to go to a wine tasting at a nearby Hilton. It was a very good wine tasting- the Shiraz's and Pinotage's were solid.
To cap off the night, we went to Mandela Square for a late meal. I had ostrich fillet- which is more like beef than chicken; it was excellent. However, this Mandela Square was conspicuously extravagant. Although I didn't get a pass, as in the Apartheid Museum, it is true that most of the country can not afford to come to a place like this. On Sunday Michelle and I will go with Eleanor on a tour of Soweto to see what is through the other door. Although the doors no longer have colors as labels, the new doors have income as the criteria.




















No comments: