Pretoria - Post Report Question and Answers
What do you wish you had known about this particular city/country before moving there?
Although things appear to be getting better, power outages were a big challenge for a while. Numerous daily outages really disrupted life in a country that has been built upon the expectation of consistent power. Traffic would be horrendous, food at grocery stores would spoil, you couldn’t make purchases at stores. Now water outages are becoming common. - Oct 2024
That it's kind of suburban and that I really need a car to get around. - Apr 2023
I could not have imagined how much I would love it here. I already feel sad that I will need to leave, even though its months away. - Mar 2023
I wish I had understood the racial divide and dynamics. As a tourist you don't really recognize or understand it. Living and working here, you totally do. I also wish I had asked people how morale was at work. The volume of work is crushing, and in my experience, there is a very negative atmosphere at work. - Jun 2022
How much the crime threat would stress us out. How much bureaucracy surrounds even doing the simplest things. - Jan 2020
Housing is small and poorly-maintained, in my opinion...worse than most other places. - Dec 2019
I hadn’t appreciated the huge disparity between black and white that still exists — both socially and economically. It is jarring at first, and in the end you put up with it and do your part to make things better. - Mar 2019
Everything. I did not realize the level of paperwork required to get one's car registered, get phone, internet, and much more. I really felt as though we were on our own navigating the bureaucracy. I have also felt that there is still much social inequality, and that was very difficult for me to see and live with. This has been a frustrating and emotionally draining experience for me, and I would not personally recommend it, unless one was to live in Durban or Capetown. - Jun 2018
I did not grasp quite how much a headquarters for Afrikaner culture Pretoria is. This is not how it is in the rest of the country. They still have political demos at the universities and schools about preserving the Afrikaans language. - Jan 2018
