New Year's Eve saw a blue moon in the sky, in other words, the second full moon in December... and apparently (according to my great oracle, Kerry-Anne) the last occurred 20 years ago - she remembers it clearly. ;)
As we head full-steam into 2010, and especially if you've been working far too hard, we both wish you all a year of love, laughter, and lots of lucre!
For many years the Volkswagen Beetle was a typical student car, and like most student cars, they have a reputation for not being the most reliable vehicles around.
Of course, students might have conveniently used the "my Volla broke down" line as an excuse for not attending lectures... and for only being able to get as far as the nearest watering hole. Be that as it may, the Beetle holds many memories, both good and bad, for the majority of those who were at one time or another varsity, technikon, or college students.
And, in case you were wondering, the title of this post makes reference to the Beetle as the Volla (pronounced for-lah) - an affectionate Afrikaans abbreviation for Volkswagen, and specifically this Volkswagen.
Look, I'm not going to lie. I'm exceedingly proud of this dessert. I should confess right away that I didn't make the meringue shells from scratch (I did have to put in a heck of a lot of effort to actually track them down, though, so I think I deserve at least some of the credit), but I did make the Chantilly cream, cook up the blueberry coulis, and assemble the whole decadent, sugary creation. I also managed to cut it and dish it up, which, as you'll know if you've ever tried to cut a meringue, was no mean feat either.
I'm also exceedingly proud of the fact that Paul and I managed to do every single bit of our Christmas shopping, food and all (we hosted Christmas lunch at our house this year), between 7.30pm on the 23rd and 6pm on the 24th. Without any screaming matches or nasty incidents of trolley rage! For two people who are severely organisationally-challenged, this is quite an achievement. (Want to know the best part? The entire house was clean again by 9pm. Every dish washed, every piece of wrapping paper thrown away.)
This year, I was feeling particularly nostalgic, so I made sure that the menu included reminders of family members who are no longer alive and the Christmases we shared when I was little. For instance, there were smoked oysters and TUC biscuits for my father's parents (TUC biscuits were a staple snack food in their house), sage and onion stuffing for my mother's mother (I'd always thought she made it from scratch until one day I saw my mother buying a box of ready-made Paxo mix at the supermarket :P), and pickled eisbein for my brother (the last two Christmases I spent with him both involved eisbein, and he was an absolute expert at cooking it).
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a really special day. For those of you fortunate enough to have your whole family with you, treasure these days and moments - one day the memories you're building will become more important than you could imagine.
Everyone has a holiday style. Paul and I aren't much into camping (I'm scared of spiders - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it), and we've never stayed at a backpackers' lodge (although I've heard that that can be a pretty awesome experience). We tend to go for comfort, but not indulgent luxury - although, if someone else is paying, then hey, we'll take it. :)
I'm generally most comfortable in a B&B with friendly (but not intrusive) proprietors (and nice linen!). A pretty garden or lovely view is likely to seal the deal. What's your preference when it comes to holiday accommodation?
It's certainly not a time to be spent in the shops. As Christmas draws close the madness will cease - for a day or two - and then it'll be back to large families shopping in troupes, girlfriends shopping together...
As a side note, I'm interested to hear how this December's retail earnings compare to those of the last few years. Perhaps it's just that I've avoided the shops as far as possible, but it seems to me as though spending is somewhat depressed.
This little beach just a bit beyond the Sea Point public swimming pool doesn't look like the greatest place to swim (far too many rocks), but I can imagine that it's a great place to catch a quick tan - if you're into that kind of thing. The interesting thing is that it actually has a beach shower, which I imagine means that people do swim here quite a lot.
The wind was absolutely pumping on this day, but despite that, a bridal couple arrived on the beach for a quick photo session (look in the middle, kinda to the back of the photo). Not only was the wind going absolutely crazy, but it was around 1pm, so the African sun was beating down on them with all its vengeance - from behind. So unfortunately I can't imagine that the photos will turn out too spectacular.
So, here's a tip if you're planning on getting married and would like to have great photos taken:
I first tasted Jack Black one evening, about a year ago, at a bar in Observatory. The only reason I did so was because a friend mentioned that it was brewed locally at a small distillery - hence the word "Premium" in the title. I have to say that it's a great beer - not that I'm a connoisseur or anything, but it's really easy-drinking, which I guess could be a problem. :)
If you read their "Find Us" page you'll discover that this beer is only available at restaurants and stores in Cape Town and the surrounding areas of the Western Cape (or online at Diletto, for delivery anywhere in South Africa). Yet another thing to try when you visit Cape Town. ;-) You can read the story that inspired the name of the beer on the Jack Black website.
I don't often "fiddle" with our daily photos much, but decided this time to try and compile an HDR version of the the spectacular sunset that we had last Wednesday. And, while this is an HDR photo, I didn't play with the colours and didn't fiddle with brushes or weird filters to alter the original photos in any way.
If you're unfamiliar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, give me a moment to explain. Typically, when humans look at high-contrast scenes (like sunsets) our eyes adjust so quickly that we're able to see detail in a huge amount of contrast - from the very bright sun dipping below the horizon, to the dark shadows caused by mountains, buildings and other obstacles.
HDR photos are typically composed of three or more photos of exactly the same scene, taken one after the other from exactly the same position, only at different exposures - meaning that one photo will be really dark (underexposed), one will be really bright (overexposed) and one will be properly exposed.
One then uses software to merge the three (or more) photos into a single picture that typically takes the best from all three photos and combines them into a single photo. My photo above got a little out of hand (with the eerie-looking shadows creeping along the road and down from Devil's Peak) ending up looking perhaps like the scene belongs more in a movie about demons and vampires.
PS. I promise, there are no vampires in Cape Town. Demons, however - there are plenty - we've been battling several of them at work in the last week! ;)
While I'll not rehash what's special about the renovated mill (see their website, or my old article), in my next post I'll explain what was special about this evening and why I visited.
Most locals would know that De Waterkant is also known as the Cape Quarter. I never realised, though, that it had previously been District 5, sibling to the infamous District 6.
Way back in the 1700s and 1800s it was the home of many Malay slaves, and then in about 1966 the government of the day forcefully relocated these people away from their sea view and mountain shade to the comparatively barren and flat Cape Flats. Unfortunately for the government, and definitely not according to their plan, it was not the upper crust that moved into District 5 - it was the bohemian liberals, free-thinking students, and proudly gay population. *snigger*
Today De Waterkant is still an energetic and colourful area with old buildings and cobble streets. It's an area that you should spend at least an afternoon exploring. Here's a map with a place marker to help you find this road. :)
We arrived at the venue just as the sun was setting, and I have to say that the frustration of three hours spent in stop-start traffic quickly faded as we watched the sun set over the mountains to the music of supporting band, Zebra and Giraffe. The Killers were spectacular; the show was better than either Kerry-Anne or I had expected... in fact, it was outrageously good!
Unfortunately, the heavily packed parking area, the 2km single-lane exit road, and the crowd of 20,000 people trying to leave at the same time meant that some of our friends only arrived home at 04h30 in the morning, after spending hours just waiting in the parking lot for traffic to clear! We were the lucky ones - because of where we were parked (fairly close to the exit), we weren't stuck in the traffic for quite as long as that. We arrived home after only two and a half hours, at 1am.
Luckily for Cape Town it seems as though Big Concerts, the organisers of this event, won't be handling the arrangements for the 2010 World Cup football! :D
If you've been following our blog for any length of time, then you'll know that Cape Town has plenty of beautiful buildings, beaches, mountains and farmlands. But that's not all, of course... the city also has more than its fair share of beautiful women. To illustrate this point, we'll introduce you to one of them.
Kerry-Anne and I met up with the beautiful Robyn Hobson for a quick lunch (which turned into rather a long lunch) at Andiamo - an Italian restaurant at Cape Quarter in De Waterkant.
The name @robynhobson popped into our Twitter feeds a while back, after her first visit to a geek-filled 27Dinner. What caught our attention first was that she's an FHM model, and second, that she was quite unlike any model stereotype we'd ever imagined - she's friendly, smart, and funny (no, not the laugh-at, but the laugh-with kind of funny :D). Robyn's just finished her final exam as a Business Science student, and now plans to focus on her acting career for a while.
Please take a moment to visit Robyn's FHM profile, and if you think she's deserving and like the idea of a beautiful brainy actress from Cape Town winning the competition (we do!), click the button and vote for her. :)
Coastal Tool Hire is a company that, as you would have almost certainly guessed, hires out tools. While away on honeymoon (many, many years ago :P), Kerry-Anne and I stayed at a guesthouse on Knysna's Leisure Isle - and as it so happens, the owner of the guesthouse also owned Coastal Tool Hire.
Now, whenever we see one of these signs it brings back memories of boat rides, oysters, deep dark forests and that awesome guesthouse on Leisure Isle. :)
I mentioned a while ago that Chocolat, the coffee shop and restaurant in Durbanville, has interesting decor - most of which is for sale. This particular clock was standing on a small table, together with a beautiful lamp.
Isn't it cool that today, with all the modern furniture and appliances, you can still decorate your home as though it were an old-style cottage (or mansion if you're lucky enough to have one :) )?
Personally, I'm caught it a predicament where I like minimalist modern decor as well as this kind of retro old-style English/French decor. But perhaps there's a happy medium of minimalist old-style English/French - although some may argue that this happy medium is due only to my budgetary constraints. :)
Years ago, before I was 10, my grandfather owned a farm in the Northern Transvaal (now called Limpopo). This tractor reminded me of our visits to my grandparents over the Christmas period.
I remember two small tractors, similar to this one, that stood on their property, with flat tyres and worn-out engines. The strange thing is that I can also remember the (very distinctive) smell of old oil and grease (from the tractors) baking in the sun, and now as I look at this photo I swear that I can actually smell it again!
Sticking with the French theme of the past two posts, let me present Renault, a genuine French icon, and Bendy-Man, who I don't think is much of a French icon.
The yellow man in the photo consists of few tubes of plastic with a high-powered fan below. The fan blows air through the tubes, keeping the guy standing. It's helluva amusing to watch him in the wind, because as much as the fan blows to keep him standing, the wind kinks the tube causing him to bend in all directions. Click here to see another photo.
I can imagine that if someone were to make an evil bendy-man with a terrifying scowl on his face and lights that cause his eyes to glow it would it eerily scary - especially on a dark, cloudy and windy evening. You need only to have stood and watched one of these for a while to know what I mean. :)
I sometimes find myself wondering why restaurateurs hire dull, lazy, and sometimes even abrasive staff as waiters and waitresses. Staff like these only serve to put me off returning to the particular establishment. The owners of Chocolat and Royale (the burger place in Long Street) certainly never made this mistake. They both seem to have succeeded in hiring friendly, spunky, happy staff that make it a pleasure to return. Well done to both of you (and thanks to the friendly, spunky, happy staff)!
The Old'e English Shaving Shop sells old-style English shaving brushes, razors, creams and after-shave lotions. While they do have a small shop (in Maitland, just outside of Cape Town), they also have an online store and a genuine old-style barber shop, Mr Cobb's, at the V&A Waterfront.
I'm not sure how comfortable you guys are with having a stranger toy with a cut-throat near your neckline... but I'm not convinced that I'm quite ready for the experience. I mean, what if the barber has some kind of alter-ego Mr Hyde-like personality? Scary stuff man, scary stuff!
Imagine the size of the car! No seriously, I think these tyres are the kind used on those hugely-oversized mining vehicles (see more here).
These mammoth tyres act as a buffer between docking (or moored) boats and the harbour wall. My car's tyres cost between R800 and R1200 depending on the brand, with some luxury 4x4's tyres costing 4 or 5 times that price. I wonder what these tyres would cost and hope that the harbour sources used tyres from mining companies instead of buying them new - it's a great way of recycling rubber!
My dad retired from work many years ago, but back then one of the things that he use to do was inspect the harbour cranes to ensure that they were kept in a good working condition. He use to climb to the end of the jib (the part right at the end of the arm from where the cable extends downwards) in all kinds of weather. If you're familiar with Cape Town's weather you'll know that this would mean that on occasion he'd climb out there in high winds and even rainy weather - and apparently, even tough the cranes may look perfectly stable from the ground, when you're up there they bob about a bit like a rodeo bull!
The Westin Grand Cape Town Arabella Quays Hotel is that large hotel that you pass on your left as you enter the city on the N1 highway. It's the glass-covered one right next to the traffic lights that (if you were to turn right) would take you to the Waterfront.
The Westin Grand used to be known as the Arabella Sheraton, and back then (about 3 years ago now) I once had the opportunity to attend a meeting in the building. Even back then the hotel was magnificent, and from the descriptions I've read on the web it seems as though they've even managed to upgrade it somehow!
The hotel is attached to the Cape Town International Convention Centre and is right next to the little canal that leads from the hotel area to the V&A Waterfront. I haven't tried it yet, but you can catch a ride on little taxi boats that will take you to the Waterfront. Anyone else been on one?
Buying lunch at Waterfront restaurants is normally fairly expensive - not unreasonably so for the most part, but proper meals certainly tend to cost more than at other locations. We discovered a place called Java Jive Cafe, near the Blue Shed, big Musica store and the Waterfront's famous Pumphouse.
Although we didn't indulge in the R28 curry, we did share pancakes and a cup of coffee. Well... no, we each had our own coffee, but shared the two scrumptious bacon, mushroom and cheese pancakes, which left us with a total bill of around R60 - not bad for a quick snack at the lovely Waterfront!
As the title suggests, this photo is of a small drydock at Cape Town harbour. For those who perhaps don't know, a drydock is used to perform ship repairs that cannot be done while the ship is in the water.
Essentially what happens is that the vessel enters the drydock (which is still filled with water). The wet drydock's gates are closed and after securing the vessel, huge pumps pump every little bit of water from the huge swimming-pool-like container. I'm guessing that the process is carried out fairly carefully, as one would have to ensure that the vessels are properly supported as the water is drained. Imagine having one of these topple over in the dock...
Clearly I don't know very much about hip hop music. This storefront had me confused, as I had never heard of a shop or brand of clothing called "Methodman". After googling a little I discovered that it was no wonder I was confused - apparently Method Man is the stage name for an American hip hop artist.
Cape Town has had a large hip hop following for many years, but it seems that over the last few years there has been a huge increase in the general popularity of the genre. A fact that might surprise some of our friends: when Kerry-Anne's niece and nephew visited us last year, we listened to so much hip hop in the car that we developed quite an appreciation for it - to the extent that I now own a Flo Rida CD!
Have you ever been on a long-distance bus trip? When I was young, I used to go on a lot of school camps, and of course, we were always transported to and from the campsites by bus. Most of these trips were only two or three hours long, but on one occasion we travelled all the way from Cape Town to Pretoria (about 1400km) on a bus - an ordinary bus too, not one of those nice luxury ones with the soft seats, headrests and little curtains.
I guess it's not so bad when you're young, because it's kind of an adventure. Still, I remember it being a Very Long Journey. What's the furthest you've ever travelled by bus?
Exactly how is it that sign-writers manage to miss such obvious errors? And perhaps even more oddly, how is it that their clients fail to spot these errors? Of course, on the other hand, maybe Kappa Painters & Carpenters were just using this as a clever marketing ploy to get naive blog owners to market their business on the internet. :)
In any event... I'm not sure that I'd trust their attention to detail!
Raw fish, no problem. Soy sauce, yum. Sticky rice, nice. Seaweed - erm, no, I think I'll pass.
Kerry-Anne loves sushi and I'll eat it if the craving gets the better of her and she really has to go to a sushi bar. I don't know about you, but the sushi I like most is the type with the least seaweed, and since I do enjoy the fish and rice I guess that Nigiri would be my favourite. But I just can't get my taste-buds around Maki (those are the ones wrapped in black seaweed), and I'm just not sure that seaweed was ever meant to be eaten by humans. :)
I'm interested to know... (1) if you love Sushi, do you know why this is, and (2) if you don't like it, what in particular don't you enjoy?
After reading what Paul had written about Longkloof in the previous post, my immediate thought was, "Pah! How hard can it be to find some information about this historical building? Must be all over the web, surely... he couldn't have googled very well..."
I had to eat my words, of course, after paying a visit to Google. Plenty has been written about Longkloof the area, but I couldn't find anything about this building. I couldn't even find a photograph of it online, which surprised me, because I thought it was a fairly obvious subject for a photo shoot. I'm not one to give up when faced with a mystery, though, so I kept on hunting.
I found this set of notes by Anne Lehmkuhl (definitely worth a read if history fascinates you), from which I was able to deduce that the building was once the wine cellar of the farm Groot Moddergat, and was built somewhere around 1841.
But I wanted to know what the building is NOW. Not content, I kept going, trying a bunch of different search terms, until eventually I struck gold. Or rather... clay. Because, as it turns out, the building now houses... drum roll, please... A POTTERY STUDIO.
It was no easy job to figure that out, let me tell you. And even once I'd worked it out using my superior powers of observation, I still couldn't find a single website to actually verify this information. So how did I know? Well, while Paul was taking photos of the building, I happened to notice the unusual fence adjoining the house, just off to the right of this shot. And when I saw this photo on the Longkloof Pottery site, I recognised the fence and wall immediately.
Now, please don't go knocking on the door and demanding to see the pottery - judging by the lack of information on the web and the lack of signage outside the property, I'm guessing that the talented resident potter, Yogi, would prefer to keep his studio a sanctuary. (And a pretty awesome sanctuary it must be too!) Visit his website to see more of his remarkable work and find out how to contact him.
I don't know for certain what this building is, but to me it looks like a homestead built many, many years ago. We discovered it almost by chance while driving down Hout Bay Main Road, from the circle next to Constantia Nek Restaurant towards Hout Bay.
The particular road on which it's located is kinda narrow and there's so much to see that, even though it's right on the roadside, it's easy to miss. I didn't want to scratch around too much, and there didn't seem to be any clues as to what the building was, or had been. Please be so kind as to leave a comment if you know something more about the building, other than that it's found in Longkloof, Hout Bay.
