On Saturday, some friends and I went to downtown Durban to see the Jima mosque, the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere apparently. It’s really huge, it spans the entire area of a city block. It can hold 5,000 people and has multiple floors. It was really nice to leave the bustle and noise of downtown Durban and step into complete peace and tranquility. The outside was slightly disappointing because it rents all of its outdoor space to shopkeepers, so you can’t even really tell where the mosque is from the outside. The entrance is an unobtrusive little gate that we missed the first time we walked by. It was pretty, but I think it’s best feature was that it was so big. Otherwise, nothing really spectacular about it.
Afterwards we went to get chicken tikka at an Indian restaurant where we waited, as usual, about an hour for our food to arrive. Seriously, food service here is SO slow. I’ve gotten used to it, but the first time I ate at a restaurant here I thought something had to have gone wrong in the kitchen for it to be taking so long. I had chicken tikka masala which was delicious, and then lots and lots of fresh naan sooooooooo good.
Probably the most exciting part of our journey was taking the taxi there and back. We took minibus taxis, which are white minivans essentially that go along certain routes throughout the city. They have no markings on them and there is actually no way to distinguish between them, so you have to somehow magically know exactly where each taxi is going. So us figuring out which taxi to take home from downtown was interesting. We got a lot of strange looks, as were literally the only white(ish) people in the entire downtown area that day. And then the 9 of us squished into a minibus taxi along with 6 other africans and got into a taxi that turns out took us to the wrong part of our neighborhood. so we asked him to take us to the right part and he couldn’t, because there is intense taxi warfare among the managers that own the different taxi routes and he would get in very much trouble if he strayed from his route. The government actually has a taxi patrol (men in uniform with guns) to keep an eye on the taxi owners and to keep violence between taxi gangs under control.
but don’t worry, we got home safely..we just walked from the closest point our driver could drop us off. also, the 15 minute ride cost us 5 rand each, which is about 75 cents. so not bad.
I can’t put pictures up yet, because the internet here can’t handle it, but next time I go to an internet cafe, I promise to put up pictures so everyone can see.
0 Responses to “latest update”