Last days in our home-for-the-month.

On our second to last day in South Africa, we walked two miles to a large Saturday farmer's market in Cape Town for lunch. After our meal, Ben and dad went to a Cape Town vs. Soweto professional soccer game. Mom was hoping she and I would ride the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain but it was still cloudy at the top so she decided we'd wait one more day. So, instead we walked to a planetarium. We saw a show about astroids (very cool) and then stopped for some frozen yogurt on the way home.

The "central park" of Cape Town (see those clouds behind me...covering Table Mtn...??)

The boys loved the soccer game and were practically the only white people there, which they thought was cool. Even though this country is 95% black or colored, there's never been a dark skinned person in a restaurant or anywhere else we've gone (unless they're working there, of course). It was only at the aquarium and the soccer game where there were black people as patrons, with us. My parents really appreciated the change of pace. 

That night, we went out to dinner at a seafood restaurant. It was seriously the best fish I have ever tasted (Cape Malay style - mom's new favorite food). The next morning, we returned the car in town and then stopped at a coffee shop on the way back to our place. Dad meant to get us lunch there but they didn't have breakfast or lunch food....just cake. The South Africans sure know how to do their cakes! Ben got chocolate and I got carrot.

After returning home, Ben and I got to binge watch Friends for three hours (while mom and dad got ready to re-enter our real life). It was great!

This was Ben and I outside an art museum in Cape Town after the Robben Island tour. The chair things spun in circles, and it always felt like you were going to fall out. They were super fun!

After going to dinner the night of the our departure, we collected our stuff, got in an Uber, and said goodbye to South Africa. Our flight didn't leave until 11pm, so we hung out in the deserted Cape Town airport terminal for a few hours. On the 10 hour flight, unlike mom, dad, and myself, Ben didn't sleep a wink. That caused this little episode in the Amsterdam airport. Ben 10 is asleep again! (Since I'm attempting to tease Ben rather than myself, please avert your eyes from the left side of the picture.)

 Our next 10 hour flight landed us in Seattle, where we passed out at our aunt and uncle's. My whole family said that it was sad to leave. When we were out and about at the beginning of the trip, we said stuff like "Let's go back to the (hotel, house etc.) But by the end our our time in South Africa, we could say "Let's go home," and it felt right. We had a wonderful visit, and I would go back in a heartbeat.

Hopefully this blog was at least remotely informative, and maybe even a little funny, because we definitely had some laughs while writing it. Knowing my mom, she will maybe want to do a "final thoughts post", but this will be my last one. Thanks for reading!

-Abby

P.S. Here are two more interesting snacky things we found during our last few days in South Africa.

Robben Island

The clouds lifted (partially) and the winds died down....and we finally make it to Robben Island.

I took a picture of this postcard because it's hard to do Cape Town justice when describing it. And it's impossible to get a good picture, unless you're in a helicopter. Table Mountain and Lion's Head rise up right out of crystal clear blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean....and squeezed right between them are the 4.3 million people of Cape Town and several phenomenal (and phenomenally cheap) restaurants.

Robben Island is where South Africa kept their black, colored (mixed race, white and black), and asian male political prisoners for several decades. And where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison.
In this cell:

That red bucket that you can barely see between Abby's shoulder and cheek was his toilet bucket. Each prisoner was given three small blankets; one to lay on top of (on the concrete floor), one to fold into a pillow, and one to cover them. No cot. No glass on the window.
Prisoners who were less of a "risk" than those like Mr. Mandela, like this guy:

(our tour guide who spent 7 years at Robben Island after being arrested for recruiting people into the ANC) lived and slept together in this room:

There were 63 men in here. And no glass on those windows - the rain and wind just flowed right in.
They shared these three showers and these four sinks (and two toilets). And there was water flowing from these faucets only three days/week.

Racism was so pervasive in South Africa that black men at Robben Island were given less food each day than colored and Asian men (for example: no bread for lunch, just a cloudy white liquid).

Visiting Robben Island, seeing Mandela's cell (where the Obamas stood just a few years ago) and listening to our guide tell his stories of life in prison on Robben Island was one of the more sobering experiences of my life.
As Chris said to the kids when we were walking back to the boat, one of the most surreal aspects of seeing the former prison on Robben Island is thinking about what a waste it was putting a prison on this incredibly beautiful piece of land.

  

She only wanted two things...

Upon our arrival in Cape Town, my mom announced that there were two things we had to do during our time here: a tour of Robben Island, and taking the cable car/hiking up Table Mountain. She set up the tour for our first full day here, but the trip got canceled due to rough seas. Failure No. 4.
Instead of the tour, we walked to and through the Bo Kaap neighborhood. It's the Muslim neighborhood in Cape Town and all the houses are freshly painted in very bright colors. Most of the residents are descendants of Muslim slaves who were brought to South Africa hundreds of years ago. We ate at an excellent Cape Malay restaurant in the the Bo Kaap neighborhood for lunch.

After lunch, we went to a small museum about the history of the Bo Kaap neighborhood. Other than being slightly disorganized, it gave us some good history about the area.

The next day, my mom had re-scheduled the tour, only for us to arrive and find it canceled yet again. Failure No. 5. So we walked to the aquarium instead. It was awesome, and as it turns out, I am only afraid of sharks if there isn't glass between us. Wohoo!

 It's real life Nemo! But which one...

The aquarium had lots of marine life we had never seen, and it was super cool. I hadn't been to one in years, and it reminded me how much I love them. Afterwards, we felt a need to stop at a fancy gelato shop. It was delicious!!

So far, Cape Town has been amazing, even though we've had multiple failed adventures. The next post will be about today and tomorrow. And tomorrow, we have another Robben Island tour scheduled...so who knows what that post will be about!?!

Bye for now!!

-Abby

Two oceans and a lot of penguins (Jennifer)

We finally answered our question about where the Indian Ocean ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins.

Cape Point, South Africa

It's not exactly here.

Cape of Good Hope

Or here. (This is the Atlantic Ocean, by the way.)

The walk from Cape Point to the Cape of Great Hope

But it's close (Cape Agulhas). And the Cape of Good Hope NP was well worth the visit anyway.

It's a little surreal standing on this narrow point of land that is the southwesterly tip of the African continent and watching the line of ships rounding the corner where so many ships throughout history met their fate (it definitely makes you feel small). We were lucky to be out there on a beautiful, calm day.

We returned to Kalk Bay for dinner and finally ordered malva pudding (the most South African dessert), which I had sort of avoided because Abby had mentioned that she thought it must be the coffee flavored pudding (yuck!) KLM served us on the flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg. However, with only a week to go here, it was time to test that theory and try this dessert everyone has been raving about.
Well....it's definitely not coffee flavored....and I wouldn't even call it pudding. It's more like an incredibly moist carmelized cinnamon/apricot flavored cake with a hot custard poured over it. ......delicious!  By far, one of the best restaurant desserts I've ever had.

After the second night in our sweet little apartment in Kalk Bay (a suburb, though more like a fishing/surfing village, 30 minutes south of Cape Town), we headed to Boulder's Beach to see one of only two colonies of African penguins that make their home on the mainland, rather than on an island.

They are small penguins. And they are wattling around and swimming in the waves and sitting on their nests only a few meters away from you at Boulder's Beach.

Then we headed to "dunch" (as Ben calls it) at Lekker (an Africaans word for good or delicious - it is widely used here in all sorts of situations in which "good" might be appropriate) in Kalk Bay. Again on the menu:

...proving I was born in the wrong country.

Then, we went for a walk in the marina, where we saw these guys:

They almost beg like dogs as the fisherman clean their fish. Super weird.

That leftover 1/4 of Ben's cheeseburger from dunch didn't last long. Nor did the carry-out box in my hand (the malva pudding I ordered to go). Shortly after this picture was taken, three kids came up and asked us for our food. I reflexively said "no, sorry" as we've done for all requests for money throughout our time here. Then the kids asked again, said they just wanted our leftover food because they were hungry. I gave them my malva pudding. (They ate it.)

3rd failed mission of the trip. No malva pudding for me that evening.

Then, their friends (three more) asked for our other container. I took it out of Ben's hands and gave it to them.
And then, our children watched three kids, about their age, each take a single bite of the remaining 1/4 of Ben's cheeseburger, sharing it equally between them. In an instant, it was gone.

The walk home (me with a heavy heart - not about the pudding) was spent talking about hungry children....and food insecure families...all over the world.

Tomorrow, Abby will fill you in on our 4th and 5th failed missions of the trip. 

One degree of separation (by Jennifer)

In the US, people play the "six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon" game.
In South Africa, it's not a game. And it's "one degree of separation from Nelson Mandela".

Every black person we've talked to for any length of time (more than a minute) here, tells their "relationship" to him somehow.

(I want to add as an aside how shockingly few black people we've spoken to for more than a minute (i.e. servers at restaurants), considering it's a country of 95% black and colored (mixed race) people. The only black people we've had "real" conversations with (at least a few minutes long) have been our Soweto tour guides, museum workers and our drivers (Uber or otherwise). The wealth disparity between the rich and the poor here is among the worst in the world. And, of course, the wealth gap is very closely tied to race here.

Back on topic: the reverence toward Mr. Mandela here is something we can't even imagine in the US. (Chris and I were trying to decide if we have anyone like this in our country. We wondered about "if MLK hadn't been killed....and then he became president...". But decided, no, it's not a fair comparison - for a variety of reasons: he didn't spend 27 years in jail and we have such a smaller percentage of black people in our country (he was a leader of the oppressed minority rather than the oppressed majority) etc.)
When these black people talk, every single one of them mentions some connection to Mandela, loose as it may be. Examples:
I'm from a small village outside of (city), which is also the largest city near to the village Mr. Mandela was from.
We speak Xhosa, the same language Mr. Mandela's tribe speaks.
My father is from (city), which is in the same state that Mr. Mandela was from.

These are all unprompted, in the sense that we are not talking about politics, history, or anything Mandela-related with them, just asking about their life.

The consistent and quiet, but incredibly strong, reverence toward Mr. Mandela is a powerful and beautiful and painful (27 years in prison; and so little time afterward to fix the mess; and such poor leaders who followed him) thing to experience here. It has been the most subtle (not sure the kids "notice" it) and yet most consistent thread connecting our experiences here. 

Clearly, ostriches have some issues.

The day after my birthday, we drove to the De Hoop Nature Reserve in the pouring rain.  Once we were in De Hoop, it felt like the game drives in Pilanesberg and Addo all over again. There were ostriches and Bonteboks everywhere, along with many new birds and animals.

We settled down in our awesome little cottage and my dad cooked us spaghetti (with his homemade sauce). Ben and I also had our first experience with heating blankets on our beds. It was heaven!!

The next morning, Ben and I were still in bed at nine, so my dad came in and opened the curtains to start waking us up. It worked, but since he was looking at me, I reached onto my nightstand and grabbed my eye mask thing. I put it on and fell right back asleep. Nice try dad!! Now it has become one of the jokes of the trip.
Once Ben and I had actually woken up, we drove 16km to the coast where we could see southern right whales from shore. They were super cool. Then we hiked along the coast for an hour or so, stopping to watch more whales and have a snack along the way.

Check out all these shells on the beach!

After lunch, Ben and I spotted some sand dunes to jump down. (Dad was still into the whales.)

When we finally made it back to the cottage, mom insisted on us going for another walk around a lake nearby. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) for Ben and I, the trail was literally infested with weird large gnat-like insects. They flew up our noses and into our eyes. Definitely not one of most fun experiences of the trip. We abandoned the hike and returned to our cottage. (Thankfully.)

The next day, we drove to Cape Town for the last week of our trip. The next post will be about our time in Kalk Bay, a "suburb" of Cape Town.

Bye for now!

-Abby