Sorry Americans. I’ll Stop Judging You Now.

Back in the good old 2000s, I spent my early internet days trawling DeviantArt, responding to forum posts and speaking to strangers on MSN. And like every other South African kid, I had a favorite type of person to flame.

Stupid American kids.

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow Americans got it into their heads that South Africa was a rural village. “Africa” meant riding lions to school, dodging Zebra’s in the park, and fighting off crocodiles on the weekends. Sounds pretty cool, but my home town was pretty normal. The only lions we had were the rescues at the sanctuary an hour from the city.

This is Cape Town, South Africa’s most photogenic city and where I used to live. See? No lions.

Is this what we told the Americans?

Nope.

The entirety of South Africa banded together through some cosmic mental link and uniformly did their utmost to convince America that we did, in fact, ride Aslan-the-lion barefoot on the way to school. It was glorious. Ahh, the jokes we made. And it wasn’t just my little group of sadistic teenagers, no, everyone I met was saying the same thing.

Looking back, it's no wonder they thought South Africa was a rural safari ^^’.