2 weeks to go...

Thinking back to when I landed at Cape Town International last July and saw the countdown sign listing "350 days to go" until the World Cup, it's hard to believe I've finally made it through the endless construction and build-up to the big event and now sit on the doorstep of FIFA 2010. Needless to say, I'm quite excited!

Even so, some interesting logistical issues remain. For one thing, construction still seems to be ubiquitous, and I'm not quite sure how it's all going to get finished before thousands of tourists get here. To top that off, it's getting to be strike season again...which could be a disaster for the provision of certain services usually taken for granted by the type of tourists that will be coming here. Last week the trains weren't running at all. Now workers at Eskom (the big national power company) are threatening blackouts during the World Cup if they don't get a pay raise. I've lived through "scheduled" blackouts (how in the world anyone would actually come across or make sense of any such "schedule" I don't know - this is South Africa, remember!) in Cape Town before, and it was chaotic. Grocery shopping with flashlights, cancelled classes, most restaurants closed, you name it...I really can't imagine the disaster it would be with thousands of tourists trying to navigate South Africa in the dark.

There are also other types of citizen unrest going on. A few days ago the ANC Youth League called on members to destroy a set of public toilets in the townships out of protest of poor services and what they felt amounted to being overlooked by the government. The toilets were supposed to be walled off properly but never were, despite promises, so people didn't have much privacy, needless to say. Then when they erected corrugated metal walls around the toilets a few days ago, people revolted (they wanted the permanent structures they said they were promised) and ripped them all down. Not sure that was the most productive thing to do, but anyway...And then yesterday the ANC Youth League put out a statement calling for youths, especially township youths, "to make Cape Town ungovernable" and destroy lots of public property throughout the city. Nice timing, guys, in terms of being in the international spotlight. I guess we'll see how that goes...

FIFA itself hasn't been the greatest organizer, if you ask my opinion. Far from it in fact. Yeah, it doesn't take that many brain cells to realize things like the fact that a huge majority of South Africans don't have access to the internet or own credit cards and therefore effectively didn't have an opportunity to purchase tickets until a few weeks ago (as opposed to the rest of the world who have had over a year to do so). There also seems to be a lot of people wondering why more non-South African Africans aren't purchasing tickets. Well, that's pretty simple to figure out, too: 1) intra-African plane travel is astronomically expensive and 2) it is exceedingly difficult for other Africans to get visas to South Africa (even m2m has run into huge difficulties getting our employees based on other countries visas for conferences or relocation, etc.) since South Africa, unfortunately, has such xenophobic tendencies and is largely trying to keep other Africans out of the country for economic reasons.

Well anyway, the whole thing should be quite interesting! And despite everything, I am still quite excited!!