Cape Town

Cape Town is a physically astonishingly beautiful but politically and socially troubled. It is clear that life is improving (mostly evident by new building and the maintained infrastructure) but I think it is also clear that it is not improving as fast as the public would like. The upper class is still mostly white. The office workers definitely seemed disproportionately white while service jobs were entirely black. Where I stayed, it was a modern metropolitan area like anywhere in Europe or America, complete with four coffee shops per square block. But outside of town are shack towns of mostly immigrants fleeing bad conditions in other countries.

In my traveling of the world, I have decided there are only two types of places in the world, places people are emigrating from, and the places they are immigrating to. Everywhere falls into one of these two categories. Cape Town is a place people are immigrating to. Many Europeans, experiencing extraordinarily favorable exchange rates and longing the marvelous year-round warm weather, are retiring to Cape Town. Importantly, Cape Town has summer during Europe’s winter, meaning it is a great place for European “snow-birds.”

On the other side is the mass emigration from the rest of Africa. People fleeing social, political, economic or religious problems in their homelands get to Cape Town and learn it is not the panacea. There are so many more immigrants than jobs that many places post in their windows “No Jobs,” meaning they are not hiring and people should not ask. Jobless and penniless, they build shack towns out of debris where there is space, outside of town. Crime is out of control in South Africa, and it is understandable. There is a huge population that is simply hopeless. No money, no jobs, no place to live, no way of feeding themselves, crime seems the only way to survive.

We in California complain and complain about our immigrants. We have no idea how good we have it. In the end, our immigrants can find work and places to live. Imagine having an immigrant population that could not work or find a place to live. People think the immigrants would stop coming, but it would be a decade before they stopped coming. They would simply be a drain on the economy instead of contributing to it. That is the lesson of South Africa. Immigrants who can work, feed themselves and pay for shelter are less of a drain on the social system than immigrants that cannot. The immigrants are coming either way.

The crime has yielded an odd utilitarian art form in South Africa, if you can call it that. I have never seen so many different types of fences that could be described, in a word, as vicious. The fences were designed in two categories: rip you to shreds or impale you. I only saw a couple fences that tried to obscure their purpose with decorative design. I now thoroughly believe, you can judge a place by its fences.

On a completely different note, the hotel I stayed at had the strangest elevator system I have ever encountered. In the elevator, there were no buttons, none. Outside the elevator, there were a lot of buttons. Instead of pressing up or down before boarding the elevator, there was a panel where you pressed the exact floor you wanted to go to. The panel would reply with Elevator A, B or C. If it said Elevator A, when Elevator A arrived, you got on. Once in the elevator, you pressed no buttons (as there were none). The elevator, knowing from the panel which floor you were going to, would stop on the floor you had pressed on the panel. If you changed you mind and wanted to go to a different floor, well you were out of luck. You had to go to your prescribed floor or the floor that someone else had predestined the elevator to stop at prior to their boarding the elevator. The whole idea was just odd.

Cool: The beauty of Cape Town and basic things that are totally different, like elevator controls.
Stupid: How difficult striving for a better life can be.