Cape Town!

After I ended my internship and spent half a week at home in DC, I headed out on my long, long series of flights to Cape Town. I thought that it was 12 hours, but apparently I had misunderstood, because just the first leg of the trip was about 12 hours. I flew from DC to Dakar, where we stopped for an hour to refuel and swap some passengers (11 hours to Dakar + 1 hour stopped). From there, the flight continued on the Johannesburg (6 hours), where I cleared Customs and all that jazz and continued on to Cape Town (2 hour layover + 2 hour flight). The grand total was 22 hours in transit. And that's not including the transport to and from the airports. Luckily, on the DC - Dakar - Johannesburg flight the seat next to me had a defective seatbelt and couldn't be used, so I essentially got a nice little mini-bed to curl up in.

Anyway, suffice it to say that I was slightly groggy when I arrived in Cape Town. Cape Town is also 9 hours ahead of the west coast, which wasn't really helping matters either. I got picked up by a shuttle and dumped at the hostel where I had made a reservation, a relatively quiet place called "Zebra Crossing" just off the main backpacker street. I was staying in an 8-person dorm room, but luckily there were only 3 other inhabitants, including two English girls and one Irish girl. I played some cards with them, and they took me for a drive out the Waterfront in their rented car. The Waterfront is the touristy, built-up area out by the docks on the northern end of the city. We ended up in a big generic shopping mall, decided against a movie, got out some money, and picked up some groceries. All the while, I discovered that one of the British girls had lungs the size of a deep-sea diver and used them for the purpose of continual, rapid-fire chatter. But they were all very friendly and I was grateful that they were willing to take me along despite having known me for a grand total of half an hour. But it was strange to me that they'd been in Cape Town for 3 weeks and hadn't met any local people and were still going on and on that the Waterfront (which is essentially a boardwalk with some expensive restaurants and huge shopping malls) is the main attraction in Cape Town. Who knows.

I spent most of Tuesday trying to get myself out of bed, and then running errands and getting myself set up (getting a SIM card for my cell phone, responding to some emails, etc). I finally managed to get out and see a bit of town by the late afternoon. I started down Long Street, which is the main backpacker area with a lot of bars and hostels. The place was actually pretty cool and not as touristy as I thought. There was a really great bookstore with a lot of current South African literature, I ended up buying some political commentary comic books, as I figured I might actually read those. There was also a place called the Africa Music Store, which despite the potential to be really touristy and kitschy, actually had a really knowledgeable staff about current South African and African music. I got some recommendations for kwaito CD's - kwaito is a South African type of music that's kind of a mixture of hip-hop and dance music with an African flavor. The strange thing about the street was that every shop had bars across the door and you have to ring a buzzer to get in. And almost every store also has a prominent "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" sign, next to ADT or Community Watch stickers. It was just so strange to be confronted by a set of cast-iron bars when I just wanted to pop into the bookstore, but it goes to show the mindset of people in town. Although I must also admit I was glad that my hostel was off this main road and had two bolted gates before the front door.

I took a little history walk down by St. George's Cathedral, Archbishop Desmond Tutu's church. It's right across from the Parliament and at the head of the long, leafy pedestrian mall along which you can find a lot of the government buildings. As such, it played a big part as a refuge where protesters during apartheid when the police came out. Right near there is the Groot Kerk, the mother church for the Dutch Reformed Church. The place wasn't that interesting, but you can still see a plaque where the "slave tree" used to be - it was there that slaves were sold during Dutch colonialism. Across the street is the old Slave lodge, one of the oldest (and most depressing) buildings in South Africa. There was a museum there, but it was closed by the time I got there. Then I walked down past the big Castle of Good Hope, built by the Dutch in the 1600's and the adjacent Government Parade, where some ridiculous number of people (I can't remember the exact number, but I remember that it was ridiculous) crammed together in over 100 degree heat to hear Nelson Mandela's first speech after being released from prison, which he gave from the balcony of the Old Town Hall opposite the parade. I was reading my guidebook and looking really touristy, and there were a couple of girls around my age there packing up their handbag stand for the day. I'd read that there was a market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so I asked them about it - we got to talking and they asked me to come back the next day and check it out.

It was getting dark, so I had to rush a bit to get back to the hostel, especially since I was walking around by myself. Sure enough, I was approached by a guy who followed me the whole way down Long Street asking for money. I had to duck into a restaurant to get rid of him.

The next day I only managed to get up at 11:30am, so I had to rush to get over to get a chance to walk around the market, which the girls had told me would start emptying out around 1pm. The market itself didn't end up being very interesting - it was mostly just household stuff. But I got to talking with the two girls at the bag stand, and we really hit it off. Their names were Cleo and Tasko, and they had been classmates together in a two-year technical college, where they studied International Relations and Business.

Cleo was the more talkative of the two, and before I knew it she was taking me on a walking tour of the area, which included a big shopping mall and the train station. I ended up hanging out at her stand for several hours, while Cleo talked about her life and tried to teach me how to do the clicks that are characteristic of the Xhosa language that is the predominant African language in the Cape provinces. I also got to hang out a bit with her boyfriend Serge, who's an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He fled about 4 years ago because of everything going on there, came to Cape Town and met Cleo on a taxi where she yelled at him for trying to be manly and take the window seat - apparently it's viewed as more dangerous, so a man should sit there, except that Cleo wanted to sit there that day. She told him to move over, they got in an argument, and ended up dating for 3 years.

I had made a plan to go see more of the city center area that day, so I said goodbye to them mid-afternoon. I went and wandered around the Bo-Kaap, the area that was traditionally home to some of the Muslim population in Cape Town. They had a little museum, so I checked that out, and then just walked around the neighborhood. All of the houses were very brightly painted; apparently this was a legacy from some of their Malaysian ancestors. A lot of people were brought over from Malaysia, India, and other Southeast Asian areas as a middle class of semi-skilled slaves during the Dutch colonial period. It was during this period of slavery that society began creating the racial categorization that was later codified in apartheid. There was the lowest class of black slaves who were used entirely for unskilled labor and denied education, a middle class of semi-skilled slaves (including Malaysian and other Southeast Asian people), and the upper class of whites. Of course there was also the murky waters of the mixed race offspring that always seem to somehow pop up, and they were thrown in there somewhere in the middle, too. These categories were later solified and made official through apartheid, resulting in the categories of "White", "Indian", "Black", and "Coloured" - with coloured referred to anyone of mixed race or who they didn't know what else to do with. Strangely, Japanese people were categorized as white, while Chinese people were categorized as coloured (although apparently that flip-flopped depending on who was doing better commercially at the time).

Anyway, that was a long tangent to say that the houses were indeed painted pretty bright colors. The area was pretty residential and there wasn't much going on, although apparently crime is an issue, as every time I took out my camera, I had someone on their stoop tell me to be careful with showing it or that I should put it away. I came back later with my class and took some of these pictures (strength in numbers makes it less likely that I would get mugged, I suppose).



[The colorful houses of the Bo Kaap]

In and near the Bo Kaap were two interesting craft ventures, Monkeybiz and Streetwires. Both focus on helping rural and urban poor find work through crafts that can then be sold to the tourist industry (and increasingly to the art industry worldwide). Monkeybiz seemed to specialize in beads, especially beaded animals. They also had a special focus on helping HIV positive women; all of their craftswomen who are HIV positive get free anti-retroviral treatment and nutritional supplements. Streetwires seemed to be a larger operation, and they specialized in really creative wire designs. The most impressive thing I saw there were these functioning radios made almost entirely out of scrap wires and coke cans.



[1,2-Beaded animals at Monkeybiz, 3-Scrap metal radios at Streetwires]

From there, I walked up through the Waterkant, which is apparently the new happening place to be, but mostly seemed like a pretty yuppy area with a lot of unnecessary shops. From the Waterkant I walked to the Waterfront, partially because I wanted to get to know how to walk there, but also partially to see the place in the daytime and see what else they had arouned. I actually ran into Serge as I was arriving at the big mall, apparently he's working as a security guard in a big construction project out back to build a huge parking lot. Other than that, the mall wasn't too exciting, and this time I opted for a taxi home, who of course tried to cheat me and drive over a mountain and back again to get me back to my hostel. Grrrr. But I got there safely in the end, and I only payed him half the meter.

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