some more storytelling

first mishap: i check in with a friend's passport by accident (she had left it in my desk drawer for safekeeping, guess i passed it back without looking). we laugh about this, since she isn't white and yet the clerk still had no trouble giving me (her) ticket after staring at her passport.

first sight in cape town: the shacks on the side of the freeway as we drive to rondebosch. some things are the same all over.

first trip: to the 24 hr diner for dinner (burgers) and then to pick n pay for breakfast (one bag of cereal for the whole week). main street in rondebosch is incredibly convenient and nice to walk along, with all kinds of stores, and we can't shut up about it because we are used to joburg, which is, according to our wits friends "a raw deal". 24 hr diner? ability to walk around like a normal person? SOLD.

first minibus ride: 6 rand all the way downtown! more reasons to move to cape town. the minibuses only go in two directions, and are easy to hail, since they go down the road starting and stopping with the driver's right hand guy whistling and yelling their destination repeatedly.

first trip through the street market: so many pairs of cheap sneakers! thank god i resisted the urge. train station market, outside and inside, had many vendors you can buy almost anything from. it is a little like if the west side market in cleveland diversified into clothing, shoes, herbal medicines and household items.

first stop at a travel agency (since i've gotten here): only to discover that four or five days stopover for some time in dakar is going to DOUBLE my airfare home, so there is no chance in hell of that happening. i think she quoted me 20,000 rand, which would be more than the whole roundtrip fare is now? how come no one wants to go to dakar? this baffles me.

first ride on the metro: along the coast, which my sleepy brain mistakes for the croatian coast subconsciously. a whale swims by. an incredibly cute little boy sits next to us and makes faces. i try to photograph the obviously orasac-like mountainsides but the window is all scratched up and the pictures come out terribly.

first time in the ocean: to surf at muisenberg, total beginners, in what is basically a windstorm, with a big horizontal riptide dragging our weak little human bodies down the beach. i heard the shark siren at one point, but it might have been a different beach since i looked over and the instructor motioned to me to come back in and try again. i gave up when my arms stopped working.

first realization about sharks: the siren! plus also when the rasta shark watcher guy came over with his shark tshirt and radio and was like, you are safe with us! apparently, just out off of muisenberg and surrounding beaches is a great white breeding ground. nature is fascinating.

first hike: cape point to cape of good hope. too many stairs. at least i had real shoes on, couldn't say the same for my companions. at the top of cape point there is a lighthouse with a lot of graffiti, some even in croatian. some dude from zagreb left his mark at the bottom of the inhabited earth.

first ostrich sighting: beach ostriches near cape of good hope. they remind me of raptors, with their dinosaur looking feet.

first night out: stones in observatory. enough said.

second night out: a bar called marvel on long street which played great hip hop hits from home, and was really fun, if not way too crowded. towards the end i was throwing elbows to prevent getting groped, which is when i went home.

first late night food run: other than the 24 hr diner which we never really ate at that late, actually, we did go for samosas (here it is samoosas, i think) at 3am after closing hours and convinced the chef to open up just for us. in the restaurant was an off shift waitress who either a) just escaped from her 12 step program or b) was just crazy. first she told a rape joke to cure my friend's case of the hiccups, then she tried to get us to order a round of liquid cocaines.

in other news, our host in cape town is roommate to a pair of unrelated tall canadian redheads, although they look like sisters (imagine the odds). one of them is a triple citizen in canada, australia and new zealand (once again, imagine the odds). i didn't even know that was possible.