At this Friday I woke up late, because we were doing some programming yesterday till 1 o’clock in the morning. Manfred had a visit from two other Christians today one from Pretoria and one from Turkey. We went with them to Village Fish Market a real nice restaurant. I had a mild fish curry which was quite delicius. We were here also on Saturday and they really know how to cook fish. And from a German perspective 28 R for Fish and Chips or 38 R (3.06 EUR) for my fish curry are quite cheap.

The photo here on the right shows this fabulous restaurant. Left to the restaurant is burgerperfect, where we went yesterday. I had a salad there which was eatable, but not something I would try again when I can get fish next door :-). The term burgerperfect is obviously to be translated into not perfect in a logical sense, which means it is quite the opposite. It should be a fast food place, but it took them 20 minutes to produce the burgers and the salad, which came all at the same temperature. While this was great for the salad, it was not quite appropriate for the burgers.

That’s why we went to the Village Fish Market today with our two guests. And yes extra for Franzi here is a photo of us four at the table. It is the best out of three, and I’m actually not having my “photo-face” on.

The little bottle on the table is filled with piri-piri sauce, quite tasty actually. The person on the left is Karl, he is from South Africa, Manfred is the guy in the back, and on the right side is Kamil from Turkey.

After lunch we went to Actionville to visit some mosques and a Hindu temple and to actually show me and Kamil the other side of South Africa.

Actionville is populated by Indian and Black people. The major religions are Hindu and Moslems approx. 40% each. Actionville is a poor district and close to it is also a Township, but unfortunately I couldn’t take any pictures of that.

Our first stop was on the road to Actionville at the Masjid-ul-Ansaar mosque. This was quite a impressive building with synthetic marble in the inside. However, we were not allowed to make any pictures inside. Therefore the following pictures must suffice.

The picture on the left shows the road side scenery of the mosque. On the other side of the mosque is a district of houses of wealthy people. I tried to get some good pictures of those, but unfortunately I had to change batteries, so no images of little fortresses here.

We first went to the high way entrance of the mosque, but it was closed. And so we took just a distant picture. Then we went to the gate on the other side, which was open so I could take a photo of the entrance.

After out photo session here we went to Actionville. X found that the state of the houses here is as bad as in Turkey. And he was amazed to see such things in South Africa, because he was until this day only around white people in neat houses. I took a picture of one typical road in Actionville (of the part without the township).

From here we went to another mosque just to see the differences and the to the Hindu temple. A monk showed us the whole place and explained the figures and the way they perform their rituals.

We were even allowed to take pictures in the temple as well. So meet different Hindu gods here.

After the Hindu temple, we went to another mosque in this poor district. The building was quite impressing, but it was locked. While photographing the mosque we took also photos of the houses around us. A local politician and counselor saw us and involved us in a conversation. We told her were we from and that we a just visiting the area to get a better picture of South Africa, she explained us the situation in this district and invited us to a cup of tea.

The counselor, Kamil and me in front of Manfred’s car. In the back, subsidized housing.

The people there are living in small flats with three rooms (including the kitchen). These flats are in arranged in blocks which are four stories high and there are several flats on each level. In the picture on the left you can see the outside of the building. Each window block represents one room.

While we were standing there with the counselor, I could smell burning plastic at low temperature. As we could see later that smell came from a smoldering garbage between the little huts on the right of the outside view. This fire must have been smoldering quite a while because you could smell it everywhere.

Later we saw kinds playing between the wads of smoke. And obviously no one cared about the burning garbage.

The size of the apartments is about 20 square meters including everything. Also the ceiling is approx. 2 meter above the floor, so I had the constant feeling that I cannot stand upright. The second picture shows was taken inside the building. While in Germany only one or two persons would live in such an apartment (if they would live there at all), in ZA whole families live in there. So these flats are really crowded.