french cuisine, the best farmers' market ever, and a safari

This is probably my last blog entry as I am leaving on Wednesday!

I had a rather unsuccessful day last Thursday at work- it began with me catching a part of my shirt on the bathroom door as I was leaving and literally tearing a huge hole in it in a very…unlucky area. Luckily I had a jacket with me and was able to go buy a new shirt and change in the ladies room at the Women’s Legal Centre before our weekly victim empowerment meeting began.

Another winning moment occurred during the meeting, when my cell phone fell off my lap and exploded on the floor. I bent down under the table to get it and on my way back up I SLAMMED my head into the table (shocker, I know). The meeting came to a screeching halt, and, after a pause, the head of the Women’s Legal Centre said, “and what school did you say you went to again?” Life: 2 points; Cary: 0.

When the meeting was over, I found out that my boss was not going back to the office because she had had to fire her “domestic worker” a week earlier for stealing (this apparently meant she could not stay at work for the full workday). I decided to follow her lead, and instead of going back to the office, I wandered among the stands in Greenmarket Square to buy some last minute souvenirs. While I was shopping I heard the unmistakable voices of Americans, and sort of accosted a group of American tourists like a lost dog starved for human affection. I don’t think they were excited to talk to me as I was to talk to them (me: “YOU’RE FROM CALIFORNIA?? THAT’S AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!”), but after being away from home for 2 months I REALLY miss fellow Americans. After leaving Greenmarket square, I was able to buy a medium sized duffel bag/rolly suitcase from a woman in the street for $23 in order to transport all of these souvenirs back home.

On Thursday night, we went to one of the nicest restaurants in Cape Town, a French place called Aubergine. The food was delectable and I think the ratio of servers to us (Hirsh, David, Jim and me) was about 4:1. From the aperatifs to the amuses-bouches to the dessert (I even had them bring out a special cake for Jim’s birthday), it was really a delightful meal.

Friday was kind of a weird day at work. There was definitely a negative/tense vibe in the air, because the whole office received an email around 11:00 am notifying them that their semi-annual work report was due that very day. So there was a lot of sighing and huffing and whispered conversations going on. Jim and I had a leisurely lunch and then wandered around some of the streets nearby checking out the vendors selling wire art. Wire art, a uniquely South African art form, is very, very popular in Cape Town and you can find it just about anywhere-- it basically involves artists making industrious use of wires, beads, and other scrap metal to make all sorts of cool figurines, keychains, jewelry, etc etc. Jim bought a wire man riding a wire bicycle that had wheels that actually turned. Note to family and friends: you will probably be receiving wire art in some form or another.

Random note about my gym: There have been a few interesting facets of my Cape Town gym-going experience. The other day I was running on the treadmill and my eyes were sort of wandering around in boredom (side note: I can't wait to be back in a place where it is safe and not weird to go running outside early in the morning). My eyes rested on the collection of black birds staring at me from the rafters lining the top of the wall just below the ceiling, and I suddenly realized that it is just not normal for there to be birds in a gym. How did they get there? How are they going to get out? Have they seriously been there this entire time and I'm just now realizing that THIS IS NOT NORMAL??? But I just kept on running and the birds continued to stare at me.

The other hilarious part of this gym is that every time I look through the glass walls into the room where the exercise classes are held, the women in the classes are always doing the most embarrassingly ridiculous-looking things. Sometimes they are doing this kind of angry electric slide dance while moving laterally in a circle, facing each other. Other times they are doing sort of belly-dancing hand motions while flicking their legs out in the front of them Russian-style. One time I saw them actually doing the macarena. This has provided the majority of my gym-time entertainment throughout the summer.

On Friday night, we went to this place called "House of Kink" that we heard had great tapas and drinks. When we got there it was very soon apparent that we were definitely not cool enough to be there-- all the girls had on super trendy clothes and heels and cool jewelry (in stark contrast to my jeans, the weird boots I bought from a street vendor 2 months ago because I could only fit a few pairs of flats into my suitcase, and a pretty ugly gray zip-up hoodie I bought at Pick n' Pay). Also, the cocktails were all named things like "S&M," "The Ben Dover," and the "Family Jewels," and reading their menu was quite the experience. Despite the awkwardness in ordering (which involved me having to ask for an order of their "Dunk the Skank," or chips and tomato-cheese dip), the drinks and food were delicious and we had quite a good time sitting outside on the deck (away from the burlesque show footage being displayed on a large screen across from the bar inside).

On Saturday morning, we all got up early to meet Nick and Dave at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, which is a little village of different markets, one of which is this huge organic food market (the "Neighbourgoods Market"). There are also lots of little craft and interior design stores.


The food market was definitely my favorite part. It was filled with fresh local produce, hand-made cheeses, all sorts of delicious fresh bread, specialty fine foods (think festive little jars of chutney and pesto), and all sorts of stands that cooked food for you right there: crepes, pizzas, thai food, and my favorite, the "Dutch Fryer," who made you delicious little balls of pancakes and then smothered them in butter and sugar.

The Dutch Fryer:


The market:





There was also an enormous bead shop compulsively organized by color. We took pictures in different sections according to our outfits-- here is Nick in front of the blue beads and me in front of the purple beads.



We had planned on hiking table mountain that afternoon, but it was windy and cold and dreary outside, so we nixed that plan. David and I wandered around lower Kloof street and browsed in a variety of antique and craft shops. I bought more wire art, and that was pretty much the extent of it.

Safari

On Sunday morning I got picked up at 6:40 by a small Indian man in a minivan to go to Inverdoorn, a game reserve about 2 and a half hours northeast of Cape Town. The only other people in the van were a French couple. Our route took us through the wine region and then up a very windy road over a mountain. We stopped along the way for a photo op of the gorgeous view at sunrise.



There were beautiful views of a river called "stony river" (logically named because there's barely any water in it and a whole lot of stones) that snaked around the mountain. Our driver kept assuring us that it was "only drunks who accidentally drove off the path" and met their death on the rocks below. I asked him if he was drunk, but he didn't hear me. We saw a few baboons scurrying across the road at one point. After getting over the mountain, we passed "Wolves Gorge," the place where the very last wolf in South Africa was allegedly killed (SO sad :( ).

Our driver took his job VERY seriously, and tended to very suddenly announce self-explanatory things at the top of his lungs into his microphone headset (to the three of us sitting directly behind him in the van). As it was still dark when we headed out of Cape Town, the three of us were still a bit groggy and trying to sleep. Our driver either didn't notice this or didn't care, because he kept SCREAMING things into the headset, like "WE ARE ON THE HIGHWAY" and "WE ARE DRIVING UP A MOUNTAIN." He also really liked to point out unfinished bridges and train tracks that didn't have train cars running on them (there were a lot more of these than you would expect). Sometimes he would say "OK I"M GOING TO BE SHUTS UP NOW" into the headseat, but then just after we had closed our eyes again to try to get back to sleep, he would discover some other extremely urgent thing to tell us and blast us awake again with a booming headset announcement. He also had this really disturbing-looking stuffed animal sitting on the dashboard which appeared to be a giraffe with a baby's face wearing a South African flag as a bandana.

We stopped in Ceres, fruit country, to have breakfast at a Wimpy (kind of like a Wendy's). Our driver made sure to announce (several times) before we stopped that THERE WOULD BE A HIS AND HERS [bathroom] AVAILABLE AT THE WIMPY. We got back in the van and kept driving along the "Forgotten Highway" (called that because there is never anyone on it), and as we got closer to Inverdoorn, trees suddenly disappeared and the pavement turned to gravel, meaning we had entered bush country. Our driver told us that there were a lot of nomadic sheep farmers in the area, and pointed out a lot of houses without roofs because the owners took the roofs with them when they moved to a different place. Then the gravel road turned to dirt, and since we were running a bit late the driver was really hauling ass. There was one point when we went over a sudden declivity and the van was actually flying through the air for a solid three seconds.

We reached Inverdoorn and turned onto a smaller, bumpier dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Our driver announced "WHO WILL BE THE FIRST TO SPOT AN ANIMAL? IT WILL BE ME." About 2 seconds later I saw a bunch of springbok (a smallish kind of antelope that is all over South Africa), and then I kept seeing more as we were driving. Apparently our driver had not seen the springbok because he kept shouting ANY SECOND NOW I WILL FIND SPRINGBOK AND POINT THEM OUT TO YOU. I didn't say anything.

The grounds of the game reserve were really beautiful, and there were all sorts of guesthouses where people stay overnight.

I had some tea and waited around by a large open fire pit until 10:30 when my safari was supposed to start.

Here is the 4x4 we took out:


There was only four of us on the safari- our guide, a youngish South African woman, and a couple from Kentucky. I sat in the very back of the 4x4 because it was the highest seat (also the bumpiest).


We started in the area where the lions are usually found, and after finding fresh lion tracks in a bunch of different places, we finally found a couple of lions lounging in the sun. When we got they got up and moved into the shade, so we could barely see them anymore. They were definitely too far away to take any good pictures of with my camera phone, but they were really cool looking (and giant). (Also, the people from Kentucky whose nice cameras had not been stolen agreed to email me the pictures they took on our safari). We carried on and saw a red lechmere, which I think is a kind of antelope but it's actually mostly a water dwelling creature. Strange. There were springbok all over the place, which we learned can go their lives without ever drinking water- they get some from plants, and the white of their faces absorbs sunlight so they don't overheat from the sun. Damn evolution is cool.

A bunch of springbok:


We found a big group of buffalo, wildebeest, zebras, and ostriches hanging out all together. We got to get really close to them all, even though our guide said she "doesn't trust buffalos a lick." She wouldn't even turn off the 4X4 to be able to talk to us, because she said "knowing her luck it wouldn't start again, and then we would be in trouble." Hm.



A buffalo having a lazy Sunday:


We saw some "orricks," which are a kind of antelope that apparently kill more people than any other animal on the reserve. That's because they lay around a lot to conserve energy, and people who think they are dead, sick or just really docile walk up really close to them and then they jump up and attack. Interesting.

We set out again, and as we were driving we saw a lone giraffe walking slowly and solemnly off in the distance. I was getting really excited about that and trying to take pictures with my camera phone that doesn't zoom in on anything, when I heard someone yell "RHINO!!" I looked ahead of us and ambling along along the path in front of us were two rhinos, a male and a female. They were SO huge and cute and fat! The female rhino had a MUCH longer horn than the male, but they were both equally adorable (I'm sure I wouldn't have thought they were quite as adorable if they had turned around and charged the 4X4 with those horns).



Zoomed in (my camera phone is terrible):


We also saw a lot of "kudu," another kind of antelope.

We were introduced to a plant called "Euphorbia," or "yellow milkweed," which our guide told us had very very poisonous milk inside of it that can a person go blind. I guess people used to take it and smear it on animals' sides in the shape of a brand, which would make the hair fall out and grow back in a different color (better than branding them in the usual fashion!).

We saw more and more giraffes as we kept going. My favorite were these three, just ambling along single file,


and this one, who looked at us extra quizically,


and then ambled away.


Here is my favorite giraffe pic of the day- I love the way the trees look behind him.


We saw holes where aadvarks live (but no aardvarks), and an OWL sitting rather haughtily in a tree we passed. Our guide was really excited about this-- apparently you rarely ever see them. After staring down the owl for about 10 minutes, we moved on to where the cheetahs hang out. Did you know there are only 6,000 cheetahs left IN THE WORLD? I thought this was very sad. The cheetahs didn't look too worried about this though, and they just looked so sleepy and comfortable all curled up in the sunshine on a little mound of dirt. It made me want to go nap with them, but our guide told me I would probably be attacked/killed if I got out of the 4X4. I did not get out of the 4X4.


Back at the ranch, I was served a lovely three-course lunch with my new friends from Kentucky. I was being watched the entire time by the small Indian driver, however, and I gathered from his not too subtle watch-checking and weight-shifting that he was anxious to get back to Cape Town. Since the French couple that had driven up with us was staying the night at Inverdoorn, he was just driving me back to Cape Town. I was REALLY tired from a long day of sun and excitement, and I wanted very badly to just nap on the way back. This, however, was not to be. The driver explained to me about 5 times and in 5 creatively different ways that the route we were taking back to Cape Town this time was less direct, but would take less time. I put on my headphones to try to get some sleep, but I kept noticing the driver reaching for his headset and then starting to speak into it. Since there was no one else in the van except me, I felt very much obligated to listen to whatever he had to say ("IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS I WILL BE ABLE TO ANSWER THEM"; "WE ARE NOW ENTERING A TUNNEL"). Sometimes he would just point at things or gesticulate widely until I realized he was trying to communicate something and gave him my attention. He also had a painfully irritating ring on his cell phone that was the sound of a rooster crowing.

I got back to Cape Town around 6:00 and got a good night's sleep.

Today, Monday, our weekly staff meeting started about an hour late because Alison, the director, didn't show up until 10:30. She called me into her office after the staff meeting and told me that I should print out my report, put it in front of her, and then come back 20 minutes later to force her to give me feedback about it. When I came to get her feedback she was EXTREMELY excited and told me that not only did she want to include my paper in the materials they will eventually be giving to the UN for their victim empowerment research contract, but she also wanted my permission to submit the paper to the Stellenbosch Law Review. I told her she could do whatever her heart desired with my paper, as I currently have no other plans for it.

At 3:30 I left work (a bunch of people from the office were already gone) and I went to the Mount Nelson hotel, the most historic and beautiful hotel in Cape Town. Russell had surprised me with a gift certificate to their spa, the Librisa spa, and I was finally getting a chance to make use of it. The spa was EXTREMELY beautiful- it overlooks gorgeous fountains and a swimming pool, and the interior is very luxurious. I had a great facial and a pedicure and then hung out in their lounge area in a big squishy white robe and slipper-sandals while my nails dried. Quite a relaxing day.

Part of the Mount Nelson hotel:


Tomorrow is my last day of work. The office is having a farewell lunch for Jim and me, and the office coordinator is taking pains to accommodate everyone's dietary preferences (mainly my vegetarianism, and the fact that Mukelani doesn't eat bread). It's also Jim's birthday tomorrow so I'm going to try to pick him up some sort of cake on the way into work. Then I'll be packing tomorrow evening and then I fly out on Wednesday! I can't believe I"m really heading back home. I had an AMAZING summer but I am ready to get back to friends&family, running outside, cooking and having a refrigerator, ketchup that doesn't taste like sugary tomato soup, etc.

In parting, here's a picture taken from my window of Table Mountain and the cloud they call the "tablecloth" (how clever)




A bientot,
Cary.

moonlight lion's head mountain hike and hair straighteners

Moonlight Lion's Head Mountain Hike
Yesterday after work Jim, David and I took a taxi to the base of Lion's Head mountain (2200 ft), the mountain next to the more famous Table Mountain in Cape Town.

Lion's Head, as seen from the top of Table Mountain


At the base of the mountain we met Josh (my old boss), his fiance (who was not very friendly), Adam, another guy we know here who goes to NYU law, and Calleigh, a girl who hangs out with them who goes to Virginia Law. The hike up was pretty cool, medium difficulty, and took about an hour and a half. It got steeper and steeper as we went up, as you can probably tell from the picture, and there were a couple parts where you had to climb ladders. I was very careful not to trip because it was a long way down!

When we got to the top of the mountain, we saw there were a bunch of people already up there (a lot of Americans). It was a full moon last night, and it's a tradition around here to hike up in time for the sunset, watch the full moon rise, and then hike back down by moonlight. We all brought wine and crackers and cheese up there so we just hung out and watched the sun setting.

One of the views on the way up:



From top of the mountain:



Me trying to look triumphant:


The whole gang:


As the sun was setting:


There were a bunch of astronomy students up there (wearing reflective vests that said "astronomers work in the night"-- I really wanted to steal one) who set up telescopes, one with the moon in focus and the other one pointed at Saturn. Looking at Saturn was really cool- it was crazy how distinct its rings were! It kind of looked like a fake image of Saturn, and David and I were joking that the astronomy kids could probably just put random slides in front of the telescope and convince people they were really looking at something in space.

The views were just amazing- one one side of the mountain you could see the ocean, and on the other side you could look out on all the twinkly lights of Cape Town with the moon overhead.


Before heading down, Jim passed out some flashlights he had bought earlier that day. He had bought a special one for David that was a kind of pink microphone-flashlight with Hannah Montana on it. David thought it was hilarious but it turns out it had a really weak bulb, so he eventually had to switch for a stronger one. Still pretty funny.


I got to lead the group on the hike down, which was really cool. At times it was really unclear where we were supposed to go, so I just kind of kept picking my way down hoping we didn't get totally lost. Turns out I picked a different way down than we had taken up, and this way involved climbing down a really steep part of the rockface using this long dangling metal chain to help you down. It kind of hurt my hands but I didn't have too much trouble getting down- the only difficult part was figuring out how to hold my flashlight and clutch onto the chain for dear life at the same time. I think it was almost less scary hiking down at night because you couldn't actually see how high up we were (and thus how far down it was).


The Hair Straightener Fiasco
Yesterday at work, the attorney in the office, who we will call Jen, bounded into my and Zanele's office and just yelled at me "HOW DO YOU STYLE YOUR HAIR???" I was kind of surprised, because Jen has never actually spoken to me. I told her I actually don't "style" it, I just blow-dry it. She was apparently not convinced because she then asked me what kind of hair straightener I use. I told her I have straight hair, and thus do not use a hair straightener. Then she basically commanded me to figure out what the "best hair straightener out there" is, tell her how much it was, buy it online, have it sent to my house in the States (apparently the 'best hair straighteners out here' cannot be delivered to South Africa), and then mail it to her, at which point she would send me some kind of money order to reimburse me. I was a little shocked that she was asking me to do this, but I said I'd look into it, and if she really wanted me to do this for her I could just tell her how much it was and she could pay me before I left. Still, this would be a huge hassle for me to have buy her a $200 hair straightener and then mail the thing to her from home to Cape Town, and she didn't seem too grateful to me for even considering doing this.

Regardless, I did a little online research, polled some of my curly-haired friends, and put together a document listing the different brands, providing links to their product pages, listing the price in $US and rand (which I had to convert myself), and giving their user ratings. I emailed the whole thing to her. Today, she busted into our office, apparently to talk to Zanele. Despite the fact that Zanele was on the phone, Jen was rudely gesturing at her to try to get her to interrupt her call to talk to Jen. I thought this would be a good time to talk to her about the straightener, since clearly Zanele was occupied. So I said, "Jen, did you get my email?" Jen said "yea yea", dismissively waved her hand at me, and then turned back to trying to get Zanele's attention. SO RUDE! And she hasn't said anything else about it all day. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this in a diplomatic way, but mark my words I am NOT going out of my way to order this woman a $200 hair straightener and then mail it across the world to her. For all the people in this country that are really, ridiculously nice, there are some people who I think are downright rude. Last time I checked, beauty product consultant/personal shopper (for the only person in the office who has never even SPOKEN to me, mind you) is not part of my job description at ODAC. Hmph.

bizarre video art and lots of wine

Notes:
to see all my pictures, go here
Also, I updated my last post with some more pictures of the shark cage diving.


Last Monday was Mike’s last night in Cape Town (except it actually wasn’t, because he missed his flight the next day, but we didn’t know that was going to happen at the time) we went out for some farewell drinks. After randomly tripping and falling outside of Dubliners, leading a bunch of people to stare and point at me as if I were the drunkest person they’d ever seen (I was stone cold sober), I met up with Jim, Hirsh and Mike at this place called “Julep,” which had really delicious cocktails. After that we went back to Dubliners and hung out and listened to this sort of one-man cover band, who kept interrupting his signing to ask someone to bring him drinks. Hmm. That got a little old after a while so we headed to this place Zulu Sound Bar, which I’ve been wanting to check out for a while, which was pretty ‘hip’ if you will but as I wasn’t trying to be exhausted for work the next day I left the boys and caught a taxi home around midnight.

I spent a good part of the week translating documents/contracts/emails from English into French for Mukelani, one of my supervisors. I definitely didn’t mind doing a lot of translation work when it was from French→ English and was part of my research for the memo I was writing on access to information policies in the Congo, but I was a little annoyed at having to do straight French→English translation work (and we’re actually not supposed to have to do straight translation work for our internships this summer). I finally finished up with that project and am kind of hoping I don’t have to do any more straight translation during my last week and a half at ODAC.

One of the most mind-boggling things about working at an NGO in South Africa is that when the internet stops working (which happens A LOT), instead of getting on the phone immediately to try to get someone out to fix the problem, the majority of the people here at ODAC just sort of throw up their hands and say ‘oh well, guess we can’t do any work until it starts working again.’ This is what happened on Friday at around 1:00 pm, so Jim and I got to leave work 4 hours earlier than normal. We took that opportunity to check out the National Gallery, which is very close to our office.

What an interesting experience. I think the most striking/bizarre feature of the exhibits was the video art. One of those pieces was just a video of a guy in a business suit dancing on top of a building wearing a kind of newspaper headdress. Another featured a white drag queen wearing only a chandelier and high heels, running around a township dancing and twirling like a ballerina while being pointed at and stared at by the people of the township (this exhibit actually had its own private little viewing room). Yet another intriguing piece of video art was just a shot of a line of people’s feet climbing into a vehicle with this really strange (and distracting) music playing—the title of this one was “Where do I begin?”. Honestly sometimes the value of modern art just really escapes me, but I guess I would rather art be weird than boring.

View looking out from the National Gallery into the Gardens:



More of the Gardens:


Later that evening David, Jim and I got a couple of pizzas and went to see “A Serious Man,” a Cohen brothers film, at Labia Theatres across the street. It was a really weird and frustrating movie that left about a bajillion plot lines unresolved at the end. Grrr.

I also just finished reading The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, recommended by my Mom, which is an AMAZING book about African American maids working for white families in Mississippi in the 1960's. Read it. I've been reading a ton this summer, and the best books I've read so far have been Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, Disgrace by J.R. Coetzee, and the non-African themed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran-Foer (an AMAZING novel).

Sunday morning Jim, Hirsh, David and I woke up early, went to the train station, and took the train out to Stellenbosch, which is an area in “wine country” about an hour from Cape Town. The town itself, where Stellenbosch university is, is really beautiful (and wealthy).

Street in Stellenbosch:


I had set up an all-day winery tour for us through a hostel called 'Stumble Inn Stellenbosch' Backpackers (very clever), and so we went to that hostel to meet up with the tour. There were about 15 of us overall, and after meeting our very eccentric tour guide we all got in the vans and headed to the first winery, Simonsig.





We got a tour of the winery and I learned that one barrel for making wine costs about 9,000 Rand (about $1200) and can only be used three times. Each barrel contains about 300 bottles of wine.



Then we all sat at outdoor tables and got to sample a bunch of their wines. We started with “Cape Sparkle,” sparkling wine made in the Champagne style, which I think sounds like a name that would have belonged to a My Little Pony (not that I ever owned about 45 of those). Our tour guide, whose name I guess is “Titi Titi,” made a point of dramatically opening the bottle of Cape Sparkle with a sword.



After the first winery we hopped back in the vans and went to the second winery, Fairview. As soon as we got out of the vans our tour guide plucked this really cool chameleon off of a plant and showed him to us—one of his sides was darker than the other so he can look more leaf-like when he needs to.



This was my favorite winery because you got to go around to different sort of bars and sample whatever wines you wanted, and there was also a huge cheese tasting counter. I tried a port-like dessert wine and the lady told me I had to try it along with their full-fat blue cheese--turned out to be a DELICIOUS combination. This winery also had a bunch of goats in the front that were climbing up a set of stairs that wound around a little tower in their pen. I’m guessing those goats were responsible for the wide array of goat cheeses available at the cheese sampling bar.



After that winery, we headed to Franschhoek where we had lunch. Many people in the group were ambitiously drinking wine with lunch- I had slowed down about an hour earlier and had been giving half of every wine tasting to Jim, who was only too happy to assist me. We then went to a third winery (I think it was called Dieu Donné, meaning God-given) near Franschhoek, which was by far the most beautiful winery probably because of how it was located right near these two mountain ranges that form a corner. We were mainly hanging out with these two British students that we met and a Canadian girl who actually wasn’t very friendly, despite the fact that she was traveling alone.




By the fourth winery, Boschendal, most of the group was pretty tanked. I suppose all-day wine tasting can do that to you.
See the face of our tour guide:


After leaving Boscendal, we headed back to Stellenbosch, and then had another beer at a really authentic-feeling pub in town with the two British guys.

Stellenbosch in the early evening:


When we went back to Stumble Inn to drop off the two British guys, we discovered the unfriendly Canadian girl in a very compromising position with Titi Titi (note to female traveling alone: NOT the best plan).

When we finally caught the last train back to Cape Town, we somehow picked the car that was basically being hot-boxed by about 15 Rasta guys who had ridiculous dreadlocks and were smoking A LOT of pot. Hirsh of course immediately makes friends with them and gets into deep conversation with a few of them. It was a very long ride back to Cape Town. At this point I could feel I had a migraine coming on from all the sun and the wine (even though I stopped doing anything more than sipping the wines I thought I would like, meaning no white wine, at about noon) and I knew I wasn’t going to make it out that night. The boys wanted to go to Knoxville (the bar right next door to our hotel) but I knew I was going to fall asleep pretty much as soon as I got home. I was right.

Yesterday I spent a pretty sad day at the hotel nursing my migraine, but today it appears to be better. Tonight is going to be a full moon and we are planning on hiking Lion’s Head mountain, the one right next to Table Mountain, hanging out up there for a little bit to meet up with some other US friends and watch the moon, and then hike back down by the moonlight and get dinner in Cape Town.

Can’t believe in 9 days I’ll be heading back to the States!

Nelson Mandela's prison and swimming with Great Whites

The beginning of last week was pretty uneventful. Jim and I finally ate at the Ocean Basket, this seafood/sushi place next door to us on Wednesday night, on Thursday at lunch I was served “anchovy butter” with my toast at a place near work, and on Thursday night we brought two entire pizzas and a bottle of wine into the movie theater across the street (yes, Labia Theaters) and watched Youth In Revolt (just out in theaters here, even though it came out about 9 months ago in the US) which was surprisingly hilarious.

On a few different lunch breaks last week, Jim and I wandered over to Greenmarket square, the square where all the vendors are, and bought some random things, mostly gifts for people. Not only is everything a lot cheaper after the World Cup, but the vendors are much more flexible in bargaining. When they don’t seem like they’re going to budge on a price, I like to ask them to throw some other random object into the deal, so I’ve ended up with some zebra-headed salad tongs, a beaded peacock keychain, and some South Africa flag themed earmuffs.

On Friday night, Jim, David and I went to this Asian Fusion Restaurant on our street called the Opal Lounge, which has been listed as the “most beautiful restaurant in Cape Town.” It really is gorgeous on the inside, with very interesting various rooms. I was looking for the Ladies’ Room at one point and entered the ‘Peacock Lounge,” which sounded promising, only to walk into a room which a bunch of jungle-themed furniture where two men were sitting on a couch smoking cigars and looking at me in surprise. Oops! The menu was also really interesting, and the food was delicious. My butternut squash soup had some kind of coconut ice cream on the top of it, and it contained something called “lemon air” which I’m still not entirely clear on.

On Saturday morning, Jim and I set off at 8 am to catch a boat to Robben Island, the island where Nelson Mandela was kept as a political prisoner for 18 years.



There were HUGE swells as we headed off there (the island is 12 km off the mainland), and being on the boat felt kind of like being on a roller coaster, with your stomach dropping every couple of sections. When we got to island, we were herded onto a bunch of buses that were waiting, and were then taken on an hour-long guided bus tour of the island.

View from Robben Island looking back toward Cape Town:


We had an Indian-South African tour guide who thought he was pretty darn hilarious, making all sorts of very un-PC jokes throughout the tour. My favorite was one where he asked why India wasn’t good at soccer, and then said it’s because everytime they get to a corner of the field, they set up a shop instead of taking a shot. We passed a “Leper Graveyard,” a cannon that was built to protect the Cape Town harbor during WWII but that wasn’t finished until 1947, and the island’s ambulance (even though there was never a hospital on the island).

We finally got to the prison, and we got a tour of the prison from a former inmate. There was some very rude Zimbabweans who were just talking all throughout the inmate-guide’s descriptions and taking pictures of each other grinning and smiling outside the prison, in front of jail cells, etc. At one point when the guide was telling us about the institutionalized favoritism of coloured’s over blacks in the prison (yes, they say “coloured” in South Africa) and the ID cards that they used to have to carry, someone’s baby escaped from its parents and crawled over to the guide and basically started crawling up his leg, while the guide just tried to ignore the baby until someone came and retrieved it. I couldn’t tell whether or not I was allowed to laugh at this.

View of prison yard:



Our tour guide:



View of the prison:



We all headed back to the buses and then got on the ship to head back to Cape Town. I wanted to sit on top of the boat for the way back, and I was fighting with some little kids to get a seat. I eventually let one kid have my seat because I felt like a bad person, but then a guy came up and said there was a “32 kilogram requirement” to sit on the top (I guess so little kids don’t fly off the boat?) and ordered the kid to go downstairs to the lower deck. He was crying about it to his mother who was trying to convince the staff member that he was actually 40 kilogram, which was CLEARLY not true, so he eventually had to go. HAH! So I got his seat and got some GREAT views of the Cape Town harbor with Table Mountain and Lion’s Head in the background on our way back in.




Jim and I met up with David for lunch at this Italian place, which was kind of in a mall complex that was hosting a “Ubuntu festival.” This appeared to consist of people having a cook-off on some skillets and other people finger-painting on a big white piece of paper in the middle of the mall. The best part about it was that one of the guys finger-painting had a sports jacket on with the last name “FARTMILL” on the back. That is a REALLY unfortunate name. David, Jim and I maturely laughed about it for about 5 minutes.

After lunch we headed over to the East Corridor to the District Six Museum, a museum about (and sort of for) the previous residents of “District 6,” an area in Cape Town that was declared a “white area” under the Group Areas Act in 1966 and then razed & reconstructed, forcing 70,000 to move from the inner city to separate townships determined by their race. It was a really cool little museum with lots of interesting art pieces.


There’s this one huge map that an artist made that covers the floor of the main room, and ex-residents have been able to sign their names and previous addresses on the map.




I left the boys who were going to do some souvenir shopping, and was walking back to our hotel when I tried to take a shortcut. I was walking along and I heard someone behind me say “sorry.” Then a little louder- “SORRY.” I really didn’t think anyone was talking to me, but when I heard the guy shout “SORRY” extremely loudly and realized there was no one else around, I turned around to find this very alarmed looking guard. Apparently I was trespassing through the grounds of Parliament, and the guard thought the best way to get my attention was to shout SORRY at me until I got the idea. Oops. Well, upon taking the long way around the grounds of Parliament, I got to see this lovely sight:

I mean, who wouldn’t want to put a giant cow statue on their house?

The next day, Sunday, we were signed up with a company called SHARK ZONE to take a trip to Gaansbai, a place about two hours down the coast, and then out in a boat to “Shark Alley,” the Great White Shark capital of the world to go shark cage diving. This basically involves jumping into a steel cage that is attached to the boat and floating on the surface with buoys and swimming underwater to the see Great Whites that are around the boat. When I called on Saturday to confirm everything and see if we could add one more person (David) to our group, the lady kept agreeing with me by saying “happy day,” and “happy happy.” I took that as a good sign.

So at 5:30 on Sunday morning, we were picked up in a minivan containing a bunch of other tourists, and we drove to Gaansbai. We had breakfast at a little place right by the water, signed our lives away to Shark Zone, and then we all hopped onto a waiting boat. We had heard from Hirsh, who had already done this trip with a different company, that almost everyone got seasick on the way out to Shark Alley because the swells were so high. It was an EXTREMELY lurchy ride out there, but I felt ok. On our way out we saw a southern right whale breaching not too far away from our boat—you can kind of see it in this picture:


About an hour and half later, we parked the boat right by a small island where thousands of seals live (this is why the Great Whites hang out there, poor seals ☹ ). The staff started “chumming the water” (ew) and after getting a safety talk, we hung out and waited for the sharks.



After a while, someone spotted one, and this huge shark circled the boat for a little while. We had learned from a very educational video playing in the van on the way to Gaansbai that Great Whites are very curious animals, like dogs, and they usually come up to boats not so much because they are hungry and want to eat the chum/the people on the boat, but because they’re curious about what the boat is doing in their territory. The staff people had this huge tuna head (gross) tied onto a sort of buoy that was then attached to a long rope, and they were constantly flicking it around in the water to attract the sharks. Throughout the day the sharks would come up to it and rise out of the water to bite at the tuna head, and then the Shark Zone people would pull it out of the way at the last minute so you’d just see the shark jumping out of the water baring its teeth. PRETTY AWESOME.




There were about 30 of us, and groups of 5 took turns going into the diving cage. The group right before us had an AMAZING dive; we were standing on the boat right by the cage all suited up in wet suits, and there were sharks literally jumping and biting at the cage because they were kind of dragging the large disgusting tuna head all over the bars of the cage.

Us before getting in the cage:


Unfortunately, right when it was our group’s turn to hop into the freezing cold water (David, Jim, two Canadians we met and myself), the sharks seemed to discover something better to do and hightail it away from the boat. So we bobbed in the freezing cold water in our wet suits and diving masks, waiting for sharks to come along. I think the scariest part of the whole thing was making sure that all of your limbs were always tucked properly into the cage; there were these certain inner bars that you were supposed to hook your feet under to keep you in one spot, because the wet suits were really buoyant, but I was too short to reach the bottom bar unless I was completely underwater, so I had an interesting time trying to figure out where to put all of my limbs while we were waiting for sharks to come.

About to get into the cage:



Us climbing down into the cage:



View from inside the shark cage:


The water was REALLY cold; the wet suit kept most of my body pretty warm, but my hands and feet (even though I was wearing these kind of diving shoes) were FREEZING. About 20 minutes later we heard someone yelling about a shark, and they yelled to us “DOWN, RIGHT!” which meant swim under water and look to your right. We did so, and I saw a huge shark swim right by the cage on our right. The image of that shark’s HUGE eyeball looking us over will be forever planted in my mind. Apparently that shark swam around us for a little while longer, but we couldn’t get any other good views of it. Finally I was so cold that I had to get out, and they took the rest of the boys out a few minutes later because it was getting to be around 3:30 and we had to head back to shore. After squeezing myself out of the wet suit I saw that my face and hands were completely white, and someone said my lips were actually blue, so I went in and took a hot shower in the lower deck to try to regain the feeling in my extremities. After getting dressed again, I realized I was REALLY not feeling well- the combination of te freezing cold water, being in a lurch-y boat all day, and swallowing a good amount of chum-filled seawater (EW) was really not working for me. David and I both got sick and then spent the ride back head in hands outside of the bathroom in the lower deck. When I got back to shore, I felt much better, and we had lunch with the whole group at the same place where we had had breakfast, and watched a DVD of footage that one of the staff members had taken throughout the day. Then we got loaded up in the vans and headed back to Cape Town, stopping on the way to catch some views of Hermanus, on Cape Whale Coast, which is considered best land-based-whale-watching destination in the world. I was EXHAUSTED when we got back and immediately passed out.

Today at work we had a 2 hour staff meeting in the morning, during which we learned that ODAC has made the decision to fire their IT company, “Dial-a-Nerd.” It doesn’t really surprise me, because the internet is out practically every other day, but I will miss those guys wearing their “Dial-a-Nerd” embroidered uniforms.

Over and out,
Cary.