Found art

This weekend I visited a botanical garden-like garden centre where they talked me into buying enormous pots for my purchases "because the plants will grow a lot" and I checked out Nelson Mandela Square - which turned out to be an extension of Sandton City Mall - a giant statue of Nelson looks out over another contemporary urban piazza surrounded by eateries, including one called The Butcher (best meat in Johannesburg, apparently; although there's another one called The Carnivore which offers zebra steak, lion chops, and crocodile ragout, which must be a serious contender). It still seems very strange to me that the city's public spaces - or at least the ones that are considered safe to visit - are all in commercial centres. Perhaps I'll get used to it. Or perhaps not. I'm looking forward to the holidays, when I'll get out of this surreal elitist enclave and see what the real country's like.

In the house I left I found some abandoned paintings - I liked two of them very much, so I cleaned them up and brought them with me (actually I got permission from the previous owners, who didn't want them any more); see above. They bigger one has been framed so badly that the painter's signature is nearly completely covered over; the green one is signed "Rubuni". I found the wooden giraffe, on the other hand, signed by "Misheck", in one of the African art shops in Sandton. I think he's wonderful - a very wise and ironic looking giraffe.