Driving and whatnot

Unfortunately, to get around Cape Town you need a car (minibuses and trains are only safe during daylight hours). Even more unfortunately for us: a) our car is stick shift, b) none of us know how to drive stick, c) Cape Town is akin to San Francisco in terms of having unimaginably steep hills which are no friend to the novel stick shift driver, d) we must remember to drive on the left side of the road, and e) Cape Town drivers are crazy. All of the above combined obviously make an interesting driving experience for us. Still, we are determined to learn (though not surprisingly, others are braver than I am at the moment). Byron has been an absolute trooper and has seemingly mastered manual shifting relatively well. Yes, we pull out of half of all stops with screeching tires, but it’s better than nothing having a car sit in our lot with no one driving it. With Wenli and I in the car to serve as annoying reminders for making sure we are in fact driving on the left side of the road and that we don’t actually drive too far on the left side of the road and take out everyone’s mirrors (its startlingly harder than you might think to get a feel for having a large part of the car be to the left of the wheel as opposed to the right), we make an okay team. Thank you, Byron, for being brave enough to drive and for putting up with our running commentary! Sunday Byron even drove us all the way from our house to downtown to meet a few Princeton in Africa alumni for lunch. It actually went very well, until we realized the road we were going up was very, very, very steep, at which point we decided to just keep driving past our restaurant until we could turn around so we could park going down hill. Someone told us to be sure and park with our wheels turned into the curb if we’re facing downhill, but we didn’t exactly have to worry about that because we pretty much parked on the curb (again, adjusting to spacing with the wheel on the left side of the car is way harder than it seems!). All in all, we survived. Wenli has since advanced to driving around our neighborhood and has even gotten up to 4th gear once. I, on the other hand, am really struggling. I’ve just been practicing getting into 1st smoothly in empty parking lots, and it hasn’t been going so well. Either the car does this horrible lurching/earthquaky thing or the tires squeal as we jolt to a start...and I’m not quite sure how to find a nice in between balance. Very frustrating. However, I did manage to drive the car from the parking lot back to our house (about 2 blocks) and park, which involved going to into reverse, so I think I’m getting braver. It’s the little victories that count.

What else is new...well, last Saturday Wenli, Julia, and I found a lovely little Saturday market to explore and eat our way through. The market was housed in an old biscuit factory in an up and coming neighborhood of Cape Town, with lots of little artsy shops and surrounding open air (but tent-covered) clothing booths and food galleries . The food booths ranged from Greek to French to Mexican to Indian to Thai, etc. and there were also lots of baked goods and specialty items to choose from. It was really nice to spend the morning there, but every time I go to something like that in Cape Town I can’t help but notice how everyone is white and trendy/well-off. Though the city is large, certain circles (i.e. wealthy, predominantly white ones) are not...we ran into people from work and Wenli’s friend at the market, and we constantly run into Byron’s friends all over the city, making for an odd small town feel. Today, however, I went into the absolutely packed Shoprite grocery store near the train station with Byron (and I think Shoprite is a cheaper grocery chain) and I was definitely the only white person in the entire store. In many ways this is still a very segregated society, in some sense of the word.

Last night I was able to connect with one of Alysha and Sepp’s friends, Alexia. She was incredibly kind to take me out to dinner. We managed to catch the sunset as we walked along the beach of Camp’s Bay (see pictures above) before having dinner in one of the restaurants on the beach. Camp’s Bay is so unbelievably beautiful! Of course it’s a very upscale neighborhood and I could never afford to rent there, or even go out to eat there that often, but it’s worth it every once in a while. Somehow in the middle of “winter,” we enjoyed an evening on the beach with very mild temperatures and warm breezes, and we were able to eat outside and I wasn’t even cold (no small thing, obviously)! Though the evening was truly wonderful, Alexia and I couldn’t help but discuss how Cape Town is such a land of contrast. It just isn’t possible to be driving through neighborhoods with multi-multi-million dollar homes without thinking of how so many others live in cramped, dirt floor, makeshift houses just down the road. The constant confrontation of wealth and poverty can be somewhat wearing. I don’t mean to sound entirely negative though – this place is very full of life and provides a very dynamic and enjoyable cultural experience, and I’m certainly happy to be here.