Day 1 in South Africa

Today we visited an elephant sanctuary. This gave us a chance to drive through Johannesburg for the first time since our arrival. The whole city is filled with excitement for the world cup. There are flags from every nation lining the streets and decorating businesses and vehicles. Johannesburg has about 33% unemployment. It was intersting to see hundreds of people walking many many miles to work. A lot of these people have to come up with there own ways of making money. Many of them sell merchandise on the streets. You can't stop at a single traffic light without a person standing in the middle of the lanes selling different things such as newspapers, vuvuzuela's, or scarfs and flags. Another way some of them make some money is by helping you park your car and watching it for you while you shop or eat expecting a tip upon your return. There was even a person collecting people's trash from thier cars while stopped at a light in hopes for 1 or 2 rand(African $). I was amazed at the lengths people would go to earn just a little bit of money. When we got on the freeway the on ramp has about 25 people lined up down it. They get up early and wait there in hopes that somebody might need some work done for them. I guess it is the known spot to hire some workers for a small day job.
Another image which is something new to me was to see how many people you could fit in the back of a pick up truck or a convy(taxi). There taxi's are VW size Toyota vans that have four rows of seats. In one van I counted 16 people packed inside. I also saw several small old Toyota pick up trucks packed full of people headed to work.
Our visit to the Elephant Sanctuary was a fun. We had the opportunity to feed, touch, walk, and even ride on elephants. Our tour guides name was Edmond. The best part of the day was when the elephant gave my dad a kiss and nearly sucked his face off with his trunk. The most disgusting part was taking the elephants for a walk. In order to do this you would have to grab there trunk with two fingers on the inside of the trunk and the others on the outside. It was pretty gross as you could feel the moist warm breathe coming from the trunk. Riding the elephants was fun. It was actually a little scarier than it sounds as we rode them barebacked, so there wasn't anything to sit on or hold onto. Also when the elephant walked the muscles on his back would cause you to rock back and forth which each step, which is scary when you are 10 feet off the ground.
On the way back home from the sactuary we stopped at a market to buy souveniers. It was crazy in there!! You couldn't walk more than a foot or two before you were dragged into a booth and shown every item in it. They wanted to sell you everything and the all claimed that their booth had the best stuff in Africa....and then came the price negotiating. The prices they started out with were ridiculous. They really thought that we had a lot of money and wanted to get as much as they could. But after talking them down to about half of their asking prices we were able to get some really cool souveniers. The funny thing about this experience was that when ever I told one of them that I was from Utah in America they asked about the Utah Jazz. They all knew and loved Karl Malone and John Stockton. Also when talking to them about soccer they all showed a good amount of praise for the U.S. soccer team. They think that they are
playing very well and would like to see them do well.