Cape Town Wrapup

It was a great trip. Cape Town is a really interesting city. I am definitely looking forward to going back (but boy oh boy is that a drag of a trip).

I went there for the excuse of attending Dave & Ilda’s wedding. Because they both grew up there, I figured it was a great opportunity to see the city with people who could show me the real Cape Town. Because of stupid logistics, Dave wasn’t there for most of the time when I was but Ilda made a surprisingly large amount of time (considering it was the week before her wedding) to drive me around.

We started off the day I arrived by going to the area where wine is grown (or however that works). As I don’t drink, we went to a winery and cheese place and had a beautiful lunch and tried all kinds of cheese. They also had pet goats, which were very entertaining. I quickly ran out of oomph and ended up crashing for 14 or so hours at my hotel, which managed to knock any jet lag out of my system.

Spent the next day going to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were kept. The tours there are conducted by former political prisoners, so we heard personal stories about how they used their time there to determine how South Africa should operate post-apartheid and to keep their hope and spirits alive.

I went to the Old Biscuit Mill market on Saturday morning and enjoyed checking out all the crafts, but especially the huge food area. It literally took me more than four loops around the food area before I could decide what I wanted to eat.

I got to attend Ilda’s bridal shower (aka: hen party) and meet a lot of her long time friends. Everyone was very friendly and didn’t mention how incredibly pale I was. The party was at the beach, which gave me a chance to get into the Atlantic in Africa. It was freezing. (But pretty.) While I was wandering around looking for photo ops, I was climbing on some rocks and came upon a sleeping seal about five feet from me. I screwed up the one picture I took of him/her on the rock, but after my shutter woke him up, he played in the water and let me take some pix.

Fairview Winery, Ilda's shower, Old Biscuit Mill Market, Robben Island & Table Mountain pictures

We went to the District 6 museum and the Jewish museum. I wrote about this experience earlier on my blog here because it really was significant to me.

Ilda and I spent a day driving down to Cape Point, which is the southern-most tip of Africa (not really, but it’s the tourist southern-most tip). The drive was great and we got to stop at some very picturesque towns and see the local penguins, who allowed me to climb the rocks and hang out and shoot lots of pictures of them. Watching them do their wobble-walk is hysterical.

We got to Cape Point towards the end of the day, so the tourists were all leaving and the little tram up to the top was shut down, which meant we had to hike it up. It turned out to be a pretty exhausting walk, but we saw a bunch of cool animals – I’m thinking it’s because the other people have left and because the day was cooling down. I’m sure I’ve seen ostriches in the zoo, but I never really paid much attention to them. Let me tell you – ostriches are proof that God has a sense of humor. If you look at their parts, every part of them is bizarre. And they can turn their heads around in 180 degrees – I got a picture of it.

It was a really amazing, special day and it was such a gift to get to share it with a friend.

I went to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden with Ilda’s sister Isabel and their aunt, Sister Teresa (a nun who lives in Mozambique and who only speaks Portuguese). It was a gorgeous day and a beautiful park. Sister Teresa managed to reach over the language gap to let me know that my face was red (combination of sunburn and walking up a big hill).

District 6 museum, Simons Town, Cape Point and Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden pix

Because I was so taken with the animals I saw at Cape Hope, Ilda’s other sister Luisa arranged for me to go on a safari at a private reserve. It was really great and I’m so happy with the pictures I got that day.

I wrapped up the trip by going to the South African Museum and seeing an exhibit of wildlife photos. They were just amazing. While walking back through the Company Garden, where the original European settlers used to plant their crops, I stopped and had an omelet at a sweet little restaurant and did some people watching. It was pretty perfect.

Later that day, Dave & Ilda took me to Bo-Kaap, a largely Muslim neighborhood that’s characterized by the bright colors they paint their homes. It was very striking.

Safari, Bo-Kaap and the Company Garden pix

I went to Dave & Ilda’s wedding and found their friends to once again be so kind and thoughtful. They made sure to reach out to me and make sure that I was comfortable. I especially liked that there was an inflatable bouncy castle at the wedding – although D & I managed to climb in there for a celebratory bounce.

Dave & Ilda’s Wedding pix

It was a great vacation, and even though the trip to and from is pretty rough, it is definitely worth it. Here are a few of my favorite pictures I shot. Click on the picture to enbiggen (or just click on the links above to see all the pix, make them Very Big or order prints).

 

 

Whitney Houston

Dead.

Sad, but not very surprising news. Looks like tomorrow’s Grammys just got a theme.

Gif du jour

Note the licker’s t-shirt, btw.

America’s Favorite Satanist

America's Favorite Satanist from Vicki Marquette on Vimeo.

Go Joe Go! (We’ve been friends since high school. He’s a great guy.) Lurve that he describes himself this way:

I refer to myself as the Bastard Love-child of Vincent Price and Martha Stewart.

Awkward

This snake is all sorts of irritated with people asking if she’s pregnant. She’s just fat.

More photos from Sara Ataie

Loudmouth Idiot Takes the Cinnamon Challenge

And insists on using a giant spoon to boot.

I feel oddly self satisfied after watching that.

This makes me happy

This clip is giving me flashbacks

Julianne Moore rocks it – as she always does. The lamestream media now includes HBO, I guess.

Continuing the Cape Town Love

New video from Die Antwoord:

Joan Rivers Stoned

I’m pretty sure this entire show is all set up, but it’s still kinda amusing. Also, Melissa Rivers is a big ole drag. Although she did call these old broads “Cheech & Chong” which is pretty amusing.

It would have been even better if they started making out in the hot tub…

Pot should be legal when even 70+ year old women are into it. Seriously.

Inequality

Okay, I have to admit, when I saw this picture, my first thought was that I agreed with whatever these women were saying. Cause they’re cute (especially the angry one on the right) and in the cold and topless.

But then I read on and it turns out that I do actually agree with what they’re saying.

If you’re not familiar with Davos, it’s the location of the annual World Economic Forum, where a bunch of incredibly wealthy and powerful smarty pants get together to talk about what they have identified as the most pressing issues in the world and how to address them.

From the Telegraph:

Police in the Swiss resort of Davos quickly arrested the three topless women demonstrators near the heavily guarded grounds of the World Economic Forum (WEF) as they repeatedly chanted, "Poor because of you!".

"In this building now there are a lot of men but only a few women, the same way as in each parliament and in each congress," protester Inna Shevchenko told reporters on her way to the venue where business and world leaders gathered for the 42nd annual WEF meeting.

She’s got a point. In the U.S., women are not only under-represented in the top 1%, but we’re also under-represented in government and the executive suites of corporations. I wonder how things might be different if there were more women driving these businesses and participating in making the decisions of government.

Of course, there are many different flavors and perspectives amongst women, ie: me and Sarah Palin. But I do think that we come to the table with some different perspectives and that’s always a good thing (although scary to those currently at the table).

Full video at the Telegraph site if you want to see them in action.

Education and Liberalism

Rick Santorum recently said that Obama wants to make it easier for more kids to go to university because the university system makes them into liberals. While I know that it is a fact that the majority of college professors are indeed to the left of the political spectrum (which seems to reinforce this study showing that less intelligent people tend to be more conservative), this letter from a professor to his students shows how far Americans have gotten away from the idea of learning how to think and challenge different beliefs:

(click to embiggen)

I really regret being in a place in my life where I wasn’t able to go to a good university and have the experience of being intellectually challenged – it’s probably the biggest regret of my life. From my outsider’s perspective, one of the big things that you learn in university is how to think. I’ve done my best to do so on my own and I think that I’ve been pretty successful, but I don’t think that university is about indoctrinating certain ideas, but rather to be able to look at things from different perspectives; to understand that there are many perspectives on issues and to be able to deal with complexity.

Love

Animals

Went to a private reserve today and saw a bunch of animals. Tired, but here’s a few pix I shot to keep you interested:

 

Apartheid and the U.S.

Yesterday, Ilda and I went to the District 6 Museum. District 6 is an area of Cape Town that was designated a “white” area in the 60s and all (primarily black) residents (35,000) were forced to move 16 miles away. Then they demolished the entire neighborhood. And never did anything with it. We drove around there after the museum and it’s just fields.

It started me thinking about what it would be like if all of Eastchester (where I grew up) was demolished. A whole community displaced and redistributed. It’s almost inconceivable.

The museum was largely focused on showing what an active and vibrant area District 6 was. It also focused on illustrating what life was like during apartheid. One of the items they had was a “Whites Only” bench. While taking a picture of it, I realized that we in the U.S. had plenty of “Whites Only” items until the 60s. And it got me thinking…

I kinda wanted to think about apartheid as this distant, terrible thing that happened in Africa. But in the U.S., we (or at least some/many Americans) treated black people in a very similar way:

We made intermarriage between black and white people illegal.

While we didn’t force them to live in separate areas officially via laws, unofficially, they were effectively forced to live separately from white people.

We treated black folks like they were a different, substandard species by doing things like conducting scientific and medical experiments on them, treating them like they were intellectually inferior, not allowing them to have the same rights and opportunities as white people.

And, we (along with the Brits), kidnapped black people, brought them here and enslaved them.

It’s kinda hard to feel superior to what the government of South Africa did under those circumstances. I found it really uncomfortable, actually. And, to boot, when much of the world was supporting the ANC in fighting against the government and the concept of apartheid, the U.S. did not help at all. So who ended up stepping up to support them? Communist and terrorist (Libya, etc) countries, which made it really easy for the U.S. to continue to do business here and claim that the commies would take over if the ANC was successful, thereby allowing apartheid to continue and effectively supporting the government that was imposing it.

Makes it a little hard to swallow being an American here. Makes me sad.

After the District 6 Museum, we went to the Jewish Museum. Among other things, it showed how many Jewish South Africans stood up to apartheid and were very influential in the fight against it. There was a newspaper article that talked about a trial of hundreds of people who had been arrested for anti-apartheid actions and it talked about the fact that over 1/3 of them were Jewish. Considering that Jews are a very small part of the population in Cape Town/S.A., that was very inspiring to see. This helped provide some balance for me and made me feel somewhat less guilty by association.

It’s a complicated, difficult world out there. I often am busy with my own thing, just worrying about what is happening in my life and how it makes me feel. Or I’m focused on U.S. politics and not very aware of what’s going on in the world. Something like this really slaps you in the face.

Everyone needs a good slap every now and then, I think.