Where in the World is Pretoria?

This is another one of my new “series” in this blog– a post about some other place in the world that interests me or a place I’d heard of and makes me curious to know more. You, dear reader, get to experience the information I discover! What a deal!

I have come across a few bloggers from South Africa recently. There aren’t too many, which is not surprising. When I think of Africa, I think of wild scrubby savannas full of ranging animals, of tribal leaders in bright red togas running around with spears. Obviously, I have been very influenced by television. :-p

In high school, we had a foreign exchange student in our school for a year. His name was Mauritz, and he was from Pretoria, if I remember correctly. He was Dutch and spoke Afrikaans and English. He was very fair but ruddy. And he wore khaki shirts all the time! It was my first experience with a South African native.

Pretoria is a city in the province of Gauteng. It is one of Gauteng’s three capital cities (their executive, legislative, and judicial capitals are separate). Pretoria is quite a booming city. It has manufacturing businesses, and is a leading academic city. It is a very modern city. People from all over the world take flights to South Africa (people but not me, *sigh*) to see the amazing fossil collection at the Transvaal Museum. I was surprised to read that Pretoria has a zoo. I just figured perhaps you stepped outside and saw all the elephants and tigers… but Pretoria has a beautiful zoo, known as the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa. Now, I’d sure love to see the gardens! Who knew South Africa could be so cosmopolitan and so intriguing. I really need to get out more, lol…