adventures 302.

Morning Tea at Mount Nelson

It's South Africa's version of the Peabody or the Parker House, and we loved it. Siri, Evan, and I went one morning for tea, hoping to score maybe a scone or two. We were far from disappointed. We sat on the veranda, where I pretended only a tiny bit to be in Titanic (you know, that part where the mean fiance flips the table over on the veranda). We each ordered our own teas and settled in to devour a spread of snacks. 

Old Biscuit Mill

Yes, we've already been. But it's gorgeous and delicious every time. So here are a few new sights to see at the coolest market in town.

Yep, it's real. And enormous.

Charly's Bakery

Think Cake Boss. Think Ace of Cakes. South Africa style.
Yes, we ordered ourselves an entire cake. And finished it in 4 days. And it was delicious. And I have no shame.

Table Mountain

We finally did it. After an entire semester of looking at this mountain out of our living room window, we got around to climbing it. The word on the street is that dear ole Table Mountain is a quick and easy climb, a touristy experience. Well, I don't know how they figure, but Siri and I hiked for 4 long hours, climbing up through freezing streams, fighting our way through fog, and getting lost in marshlands that somehow were on the mountain. But we made it, and that's what counts.

There was a little lake on the top of the mountain. Who knew?

Lion's Head

World Cup Stadium

Let me preface this with this: Cape Town Stadium (as it's officially called), site of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (cue Waka Waka), is closed for tours. Done. They just don't do that anymore.
Did this stop us? No, no it did not.
Enter sketchily bribing a security guard, squeezing through barely unlocked gates, and trying to keep to the shadows inside the stadium.
Was I a little afraid of losing my life? Yes, yes I was.
Was it worth it to see this enormous stadium where half the world watched for the entire 2010 tourney? To see Cape Town's proudest sports achievement? To sneak into a place that others are only allowed in for concerts, only to take a private tour of the facility? Yes, yes it was.

Truth Cafe

This is the part where we all realize how much of a weird kid I actually am.
So I had this class about African identity, and had this teacher named Nick Shepherd. First, you should know that Nick Shepherd is a gorgeous man. Like, seriously. I made it a point to never miss a single class of his. This is important so you understand why exactly it is that I know all the details of this story, i.e. I hung on his every word.
One of his lectures was about the Prestwich Street Controversy. Here's the overview: In the 1600's, Cape Town was full off all sorts of folks, including folks that the Church would have considered "unfit." These people, upon death, were buried in unmarked graves in mass burial grounds, as opposed to fenced and marked graves in Church cemeteries. People in these burial grounds would have included slaves, free blacks, suicide and plague victims, poor whites, etc.
Okay, fast-forward to the early 2000's. A rich developer goes to build luxury condos/hotel suites, and ta-da, they dig up bones when working on the foundation. A little morbid, yes, but you have to see that these non-Church burial grounds had nothing to mark them so that, over time, they would have appeared just to be grassy plots of land. So Joe Developer reports the bodies but keeps right on digging and building. And people throw a fit. A huge fit. There are protests and uprisings, all saying that it is a disgrace to these people to exhume their bodies, that they should be left in their burial grounds where burial rituals were likely to have been performed by the families (burial rituals were a very, very important part of the life and death process).
Does Joe Developer care? No, he does not. The 2,500 bodies (or remains of bodies) are moved across the city to a hospital basement for storage. More rage from the community. So the city of Cape Town looks at the property that it owns and picks out a little grassy triangle near Prestwich Street, where the bodies were found. You know where a road has an intersection and one side has a cut off road that creates a little triangle inside the streets? That's what they had, right in the heart of the city, so they build a little memorial. They put the bodies in little cardboard boxes and stack them up inside. After a couple years, the City is exhausted of paying for upkeep of this little memorial, so they sell the main part of the building to the Truth Cafe, a trendy coffee shop. And that's where we're at here in 2011.
So we go. Nick Shepherd had made me very resentful towards the entire issue, so I went in a little bowed up, a little bitter at the situation. But, we get inside, and, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it was absolutely delicious. Not a coffee drinker myself, I had a muffin and a Coke, but Siri had a latte and swears it's the best she's had in a very long time. Not to mention that the barista made the coolest designs I've ever seen in a cup. We dealt with 3 employees, and they were quite possibly the nicest people we've met in Cape Town. It was a gorgeous day, so we sat outside and watched our fair city rush around. And after our snack, we went down into the catacombs and saw the boxes.
Told you I'm a little bit of a weird kid.

The luxury condos/hotel on what was the Prestwich St. Burial Ground

Bo Kaap

There's this part of the city that looks like it belongs in a beach development at Orange Beach, Alabama. Just randomly up on the hillside in the city. It was kind of precious and kind of made us want to throw down deposits and live in a little lavender flat forever.