How I moved to South Africa and launched a website for travelers
In the first independent trip to Africa I went to a year and a half. In 1991, my naive Soviet parents brought me to Sheremetyevo and put me on a plane to Addis Ababa. My grandmother and grandfather worked there at that moment. The family decided that the beginning of the nineties would be quieter to spend in the tropical thickets of the Russian embassy in Ethiopia. And, in general, they were not mistaken: the first years of my life were associated with riding huge turtles (which, as I found out later, were not so great) and the struggle with the monkeys who constantly tried to steal my food.
When you move to another country, you kind of become a child again who knows little and knows almost nothing
Twenty years passed before the next visit to Africa. Before that, I had two years of life in the USA, four schools, a journalism department at Moscow State University, work in Moscow media and regular business trips from a travel magazine, where I worked as an editor for three years. In addition, I was wintering in Thailand - it all started with her. I met a tall and curly South African with a funny name Fossey in a boat that carried me, my girlfriend, and fifteen of my future friends, who were then just drunk strangers, for a New Year party. A South African, hugging a bucket of vodka and Red Bull, whispered something to me about the full moon, while I was demanding material evidence confirming his African origin. Giving me a green bill with a rhinoceros, which I keep still, Fossey bought me a bucket with Red Bull and kissed me on the countdown. So began our novel at a distance, which in the era before messengers was kept entirely on expensive sms and calls in Skype. A year and a half later, I arrived at the airport in the city of Johannesburg with a single suitcase.
I began to think about moving from Moscow even before the landmark meeting in the boat. I dreamed of a small apartment on a sunny street, in which I would go for coffee in the morning. I tried to find this street in Berlin, where I wanted to study in a magistracy, in Tel Aviv, in which I fell in love at first sight, and in Sydney, where I had never been, but where there are good film schools. I have long wanted to change the written journalism to a more universal profession, which would allow telling stories to a wide audience not limited to one language. With Berlin, Tel Aviv and Sydney did not work out for various reasons, but the desire to do something new in a new place did not disappear. So when Fossey offered to move in with him to Johannesburg and work together on a documentary film that he was shooting as a director, I immediately agreed.
Within a month, I quit the magazine, received a visa for three months, gave a fabulous farewell party, and flew to Africa for the second time. The euphoria of novelty lasted the first two weeks. It quickly became clear that the green area where the beloved lived was quite far from the center and further away from my dream of a sunny street and coffee. Getting around the city without a car is almost impossible because of the huge distances and inconvenient public transport. Despite my good knowledge of the language, to constantly communicate in English turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. My Russian sense of humor was taken for being rude, and making new friends was also not so easy, considering that for the first month I was only with a boyfriend everywhere.
Most of the time I spent in our kindergarten, studying video editing on installation. From time to time I traveled with Fossi on the set and tried myself in many different roles - from the assistant director (read: the person who holds the reflector) to the producer and even the actress. My naive expectations for two months to turn into Russian Sophia Coppola, of course, did not materialize - in the film that filmed Fossey, there was no suitable occupation for me, and we mostly shot music videos for Nigerian pop groups. For example, once I spent the whole night in the woods, where three rappers in caps danced in clouds of smoke. My duties included turning the smoke machine on and off for four hours. About five in the morning I was cut off in the car and failed the task. An obsessive melody from the video sounded in my head for another week.
But the main problem I had to face was myself. Before moving to Johannesburg, where I found myself without my successful career, beloved friends, supporting me around my parents and my hometown, I had no idea that I was a capricious, spoiled child with snob manners and signs of narcissus. To my patient, loving boyfriend, this man appeared in all its glory. When you move to another country, you kind of become a child again, who knows very little and knows almost nothing - in this full zeroing is, in my opinion, the main point of this experience. Left without the usual social support, the ability to joke funny jokes and learn about the best new places in the city before they are discovered, you can find out what you are really worth. You can look into your eyes - look and go nuts from what you see. This is the first step towards working on yourself, which, I suspect, lasts a lifetime.
Handmade meerkat Felix, caves with dinosaur footprints, paradise of Mozambique - what kind of adventures have happened to us
I lived in Johannesburg for three years. Leaving attempts to make a career in cinema, I returned to journalism and decided to open my city online magazine. I worked for them all my life, adored New York Magazine and The Village and suffered from a lack of something like that in Johannesburg. With the help of my boyfriend and friends, I launched a campaign on Kickstarter, which raised the required eight thousand dollars. Together with designer Mitya Sudakov and developer Andrei Starkov, we made a nice site, and a small team of authors and photographers led by me began producing articles, interviews and reviews on cool places in the city. Gummie.co.za started six months later and became a prism through which I explored Johannesburg in particular and South Africa as a whole, created my own social circle and emerged from the vacuum in which I lived the first year of life in a new place.
Since then, my life has turned into a strange and funny adventure with elements of surrealism. For four months, Gummie became the second most visited online magazine in the city, but I could not make money on it: the business model raised questions from investors and partners. After six months of searching, working in an urban bureau, an advertising agency, and one excellent business course, I came up with a new idea - to make a website that not only talks about what to do in the city, but also sells these same classes. Thus was born the second reincarnation of Gummie - a site selling unique adventures in South Africa.
At this point, my boyfriend and I traveled all over the country and a couple of neighbors — I visited places in South Africa that not every local knows about. Handmade meerkat Felix, caves in which dinosaur tracks have been preserved, paradises of Mozambique, life on a yacht on the Indian coast of Africa - what adventures have happened to us.
The best adventure of all was to move to my favorite city in the world - Cape Town. For 26 years of my life I was in 40 countries and even more cities, but Cape Town is not like anything. I fell in love with him at first sight. The mountains from which clouds roll, two oceans, where dolphins and whales are visible at any time of the year, vineyards of incredible beauty, trendy restaurants and an active lifestyle culture - this city continues to conquer my heart every day.
Since I made this decision, everything spun by itself. In one day, I found a wonderful apartment overlooking the ocean, in which I still live. My neighbor called for a haik, where I met my future best friend. Friends began to wind up as before - simple and easy. Business flourished, because Cape Town is the center of tourism in the country. My passion for running reached a peak when I had the opportunity to run along the ocean every morning - six months later I ran my first half marathon. It turned out even that I love nature, although I used to go into hysterics at the sight of a caterpillar. Now I go to the mountains every weekend - the blessing is that they are everywhere, and it is possible to get on the peak of Lion's Head in just an hour before breakfast. And the street on which I go for coffee in the mornings, is exactly as I imagined it.
Photo: Wikipedia (1, 2, 3), Ksenia Mardina