Congestion at Dubai airport caused the delay in the arrival at Johannesburg. It took long time to get out of airport because of delay in the baggage collection and customs. I reached here 9 PM (00:30 AM Saturday morning in India). SA is 3:30 Hours late.
My flight was via Du-bhai. Dubai airport is like most preferred transit location in international travels. Emirates has 100 aircrafts and flies to 90 international location. 40% of the flights via Dubai are by Emirates. This Dubai government owned company made $700 M in last financial year. Emirates has connectivity to whole of Europe, whole of Asia, Middle East and Africa, but it’s slightly lesser for America (Both north and south).
Duty free shops at Dubai airport has lot to offer. Electronics is damn cheap, just to give example, I got Sony cyber shot DSC-S650 7.2 Mpx camera for around 9000/- in India last month, it was $155 (6600/-) in Dubai. Apparels, leather materials, Hand-wathces, books are costly; chocolates and liquors on the other hand are cheap like anything. I Saw a Porches car which was on free on purchase of 1000 Emirates tickets (each worth $100). I saw some of the hand watches in the range of INR 7–12 Lacs. A leather belt with diamond coating was for INR 12 Lacs.
To South Africa: In Johannesburg – (sometimes written as Joburg):
Things are good here. The working style is a little different than India. Sunrise is at around 5:30 AM. People start commuting as early as 6:30 in the morning, reach office by 7:30 to 8 depending on the distances, work till 4 PM and leave. Weather is pretty cold. Its summer going but still the temperature falls to around 20C in night; it reaches around 26 C in day time.
There are two types of people out here. Africans: Nigers, black people; Afrikans: whites who are settled here for decades. I am still looking for ratio. There is racism to a certain extent but it’s not visible and doesn’t bother us. These people are good with Indians.
We have a wonderful 2-bedroom, very well furnished apartment at 8th floor. There is swimming pool and a jogger’s park in the complex. The special thing is its on 2nd floor above the parking area and its open air. You all can see it in the photographs that I will upload very shortly. There are lots of Indians out here. Some are there in our apartment as well. We have been to couple on Indian restaurants, amazing vegetarian food. My senior has around 5-6 friends who are Indians but shifted to SA for job/work/business, couple of them are married. So I have good company. I am learning to cook from these guys.
The swimming pool and jogging park @ second floor: There are lot of Afrikans (the whites) and foreigners in my building. There are lots of hot babes as well. Every morning, somebody comes to the pool. “Din ki shuruwat acchi ho jati hai”. You know what I mean!!!
We took a car (Nissan Tiida) on rent yesterday. We had Toyota Yaris for two days prior to this. Tiida is amazing. Indian driving license works here. People here use only cars. You hardly find bikes here; I think one of the reasons is weather. All bikes that I saw were racing bikes around 700, 800 CCs. Bikes below 200cc are not allowed on some of the highways. All roads are like express ways even inside city. Everybody follows traffic rules. Traffic moves smoothly without traffic police. Most cars are costly. BMWs, Lexus, Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volkswagen, etc are common here. Right now both of us don’t know driving very well, so we took a Tiida; very soon we will be taking one of the Mercedes/BMW models.
Infrastructure wise it is no different than that of US. There is lot of scope in development in almost all sectors like telecom, infrastructure, construction, automobile, banking, and almost all.
Because of economic imbalance, the rich are real-rich and poor and damn-poor, so the cost of leaving is high and there is a little crime that exists in some of the areas. Walking on roads (even in cities) is not advised, everybody moves in cars only. There are some areas where even police frightens to go but that is normal here. It doesn’t affect your living as such. My apartment is in Sandton city which the most expensive area in whole of Africa. It is referred as “Africa's richest square mile”.
I did a little shopping for around 700 ZAR (3500/-). We get most of the Indian food items including bhidi but they are damn costly. Just to give you an idea, two pencil cell (non rechargeable) costs me 18 ZAR (96/-).
On Saturday night, we went Monte-Casino, the biggest casino in South Africa. It has 1700 slot machines and 70 gaming tables with $600 million turnover. One of us lost around 1000 ZAR (6000/-) in 10 minutes. I will write more about this after my next visit.
We can see mostly all Indian movies in theaters here. To sum up till now I am not finding it to be a lot different than India except that the leaving standard is a little high.
More later.
