Jake's final salute to the World Cup standing outside of Soccer City in Johannesburg where we sadly never got to watch a match. Impressive nonetheless.
It was now time to leave South Africa. We packed up our stuff and headed to Johannesburg for a a tour of the South African Breweries World of Beer Tour. This is labeled the #1 tourist attraction in South Africa. After extensive research of this facility we have come up with the following advice: DO NOT GO. Save you money, sanity, and 90 minutes of your life. This was the most boring, lamest, fakest, built up, waste of money tour I have ever been on. If you are into going into multiple rooms and watching beer propaganda films then this may the tour for you. At one point we watched a movie with topless native village women talking about how it was their responsibility as women to make beer for the men and then watch them drink it. If they drank more it was considered a compliment, durrr.
After watching this video we were told that when visiting similar rural villages, refusing to accept the home made beer from the beer master was an insult and you had to drink it. The guide then turned to the back of the room (as if we were in a rural village) and grabbed an open pot filled with "local village brewed beer" that had been sitting their since we entered the room. They then handed it to one person in our tour and pretty much implied that this was a village so they had to drink it. We were all then instructed to drink from the same gross pot and pass it on. I wish i could say this was the low point of the tour but it was all pretty horrible.
We ended up staying for lunch because we were so friggin hungry. I ordered some ostrich dish and received this weird pot of goo and, well, an ostrich vertebrae. WTF. There were two tiny chunks of meat on the two vertebrae I received. Wow really? Again do not go here. Mid meal we were approached by our waiter saying he had some top notch Biltong (which is South African beef jerky). We asked if we could just add it to our check but apparently this sale was under the table. Classy. Upon leaving we find that somehow we had left Jake's cell phone back in Pretoria. We didn't have time to go back and get it so we head to the airport.
Doesn't that look tasty! Nothing like some Ostrich spinal column to kick start your day!
Impressive visual effects on the beer tour
One part of the tour involved a 3d segment! You can see how excited we are!
Finally, my 'free' beer on the tour that I paid for that in retrospect you could not have paid me to go on.
On our way to the airport the GPS decided freeways were not efficient enough so we got to go through the whole city of Jozi again. Here are some interesting things about downtown Joberg.
Red light, green light red light. Oh I get it! Many lights made no sense. There were red lights right next to green lights we just waited to see what other drivers did... very odd.
Some fine examples of how they are fighting Aids through Art.. Go to the full size version and look closely to find the floating condoms in the mural!
Once we got to the airport everything seemed to be moving rather smoothly which was a nice break from the hectic experiences we have had with airports/rental car facilities/border crossings. We returned the car, got our tickets, and made it through customs with no trouble. Then South Africa decided to be awesome just one more time and the power went out in the entire airport. It was pitch black and completely silent. It was quite creepy. After a few seconds the generators kicked in. When i say generators i mean those of the shops. The airport itself did not have any backup power, just the shops, makes sense right?
After the power outage everything was closed or delayed...We weren't sure if we'd ever leave
And another fine prevention specimen in the airport. This time they used soccer to get their message across. Very nice and timely.
It turns out our flight was late enough that we did not experience any delays/cancellations. We were onto Dubai and did not know what to expect. Stay tuned...
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