A Jacaranda Special: Purple Pastries in Westcliff
It’s that time of year again: October in Joburg. Jacaranda trees all over Joburg (and Pretoria, too — more on that in a future post) are exploding with purple blossoms and everything wrong with the world feels right again (mostly). To make matters better,...
Walking Downtown Jozi: A Photo Story
There are many tales of woe in Joburg right now: building fires, exploding streets, absent mayors, water outages, an ever-widening wealth gap, and a general spiral of doom. And these stories aren’t exaggerated. The struggle is real, people…The city is in a...
Asian Food Explorations in Rivonia
I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for weeks but I kept getting distracted by other adventures: a dazzling community light festival, a 2-billion-year-old meteorite crater, and a Heritage Month tour of churches. Now I’m back on track and ready to...
Yola’s: The Place for Koesisters (and Koeksisters?) in Joburg
I’m struggling to figure out how to start writing this post because I’m struggling to figure out how to explain koesisters. A koesister from Yola’s kitchen. The koesister ranks among South Africa’s most iconic foods, right up there with...
A Staycation in Kensington
I’ve always been intrigued by Kensington, a suburb just east of downtown Joburg. Kensington is similar in many ways to Melville, where I used to live, and Brixton, where I live now: An older neighborhood, filled with big trees and houses with pressed-steel...
Heather Mason
I’m an American writer/blogger/photographer living a quirky life in Johannesburg. Follow along as I explore Johannesburg, South Africa, and the rest of the world.