Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Aparteid museum

We started the day with an awesome Coke Light from Mickey D's drive-thru. Notice Erik driving on the right side and the drive-thru window all backwards!!
We then headed off to the Aparteid Museum. We learned that Europeans "discovered" South Africa and its gold. Quickly the country was a leader in the Gold business bringing people from all over to South Africa. The current inhabitants of South Africa, the Bushman, were quickly pushed out of the way. One cool statement was made by a native of South Africa- "When the Europeans arrived we had the land and they had the Bible, now we have the Bible and they have the land." It is amazing what greed will do to the best of intentions!! After many hundreds of years of fighting over the land a political party was elected to office in 1948 that established "Aparteid"- basically segregation. People were given different identification cards based on their race and that card would determine where you could live and go in South Africa. The "non-europeans (black)" Africans were pushed out of the good lands and made to live far apart from the "european (white)" Africans. Finally Nelson Mandela became President and ended Aparteid. We left the museum in a downer mood. A lot of the pictures we saw from the 50's and 60's in South Africa are still going on in Zambia, the way the people live, survive, the skinny babies.

We went to the African Market and had fun bartering with all the "salemen". They would ask where we were from- when we said "Zambia" all the sudden we were given the "African" price vs. the American price:)
We went Monte Casino as we heard it was really cool inside and had some great food and shopping. Well, we ended up in the game room for the majority of our time. The kids ran into a walking Christmas tree.

We ended our day with Yo Sushi- we sat at a rotating sushi bar. We ate 10 plates of sushi then headed home for a good nights sleep.

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