Being in South Africa twice in a month I can say was absolutely unexpected. When we decided to come back to attend the Wonderware X-Change 2012 and to add some days of vacation just before it we could only hope to live the great experience we finally lived.
We landed in Cape Town the Easter Day and reached the hotel in a cloudy, foggy, rainy day. Looking at the Table Mountain from the room window was almost the same experience of looking out of the window in a typical November morning in the “Pianura Padana”: almost only fog. We tried to walk around the city following an itinerary suggested by our guide. Missing the right way almost immediately we had the opportunity to walk around in places we were not expected to go, like the train station or the minibus station. It was probably more interesting that following the guide. Looking at the real people, at how they do live is more inspiring than seeing the official touristic stuff. Walking in the minibus station under an heavy rain, all the minibus lines with at least 10 cm of water in the ground, people screaming all around and moving fast to catch the right bus, people cooking and selling meals between a line and the other: that was interesting. That was being thrown in a real life completely different from our, without elements to really understand it, but only with the possibility to look at ita s a spectator that tries to understand something that is to far from his domain of knowledge. But especially for this reason it was a way to start to look at things in a different way and to start to better understand the South Africa planet.
The day after, visiting Robben Island, that immersion in the actual society became a way to actualize what almost a century of history, of which Robben Island is one of the key points, has created. Robben Island was closed only few decades ago. It’s very strange to think that those things were happening while we were going to school (in our perception only few years ago) and becoming aware that they are still happening around the world. Man doesn’t really learns enough from his history, not enough to avoid to repeat the same mistakes again and again.