Pretoria

We then were on our way to Pretoria. Pretoria, if you aren’t familiar, is the capital city of South Africa. It is also a major tourist city and we took advantage of it. After going to bed and sleeping for 16 hours we made our way to downtown Pretoria. We ate at a local restaurant and went through a mall area to see what the shops were like. Stores have a much shorter schedule here as they are only open from 9-5:30. After realizing that stores weren’t open so late we headed to the last and most exciting part of the Pretoria tour: the capital building. Considering that we hadn’t seen any national capital building in our lives this was a pretty big deal. The courtyard in front of the capital was almost as magnificent as the building itself. We would stay there for about a half an hour taking it all in and then headed back to our hostel.




The Capital Building



That night we acquainted ourselves with the other guests at the hostel. There were maybe three of them—the three who ran the hostel—who were from South Africa. Other than that they were from all different parts of the world; some were from Norway, Ireland, Australia, Slovakia, the U.S., Turkey, England, and many more. We drank African beer and wine while chatting with all the guests. It was great.  Pretoria was quite the experience and the one place in the Gauteng province that we would go back to.