A Long Hiatus

I haven't written for a long time, I know. Mostly because there hasn't been much to write about. We've been in the typical work-home-tv rut of any other old married couple. Lill and I have mind melded. We actually just separately reserved seats on a plane that were right next to each other. We're even finishing each other's sentences now. It's a problem.

Other than bonding with my new life partner, there hasn't been that much else going on. However, all of that changed last week, we finally got to visit Cape Town!! Cape Town is a really cool city. Not as aesthetically beautiful as Durban but full of young people and things to do. There are also more white people than Lill and I have seen in a while!

One of the first and most surprising things that we noticed about Cape Town is that Table Mountain is way closer to the city than we thought. The city is between a rock and a hard place. Or the devil and the deep blue sea... well, it's kind of between a rock and the deep blue sea actually. And, while they could have come up with a more creative name for Table Mountain, they could hardly have come up with a more descriptive one, unless they had called it Flat Mountain. The Kloofers (which is what they call the big group of Mich folks who live on Kloof St.) have an amazing apartment with a balcony on the street and an artificial backyard overlooking Table Mountain. It's incredible. As soon as Lill and I got in we chilled in the Kloofer's backyard with white wine and some delicious sushi.

I managed to get a lot in over the week. I went to the National Gallery, over half of which is being renovated, the Jewish Museum, which is pretty interesting, and the Holocaust Exhibition on the same campus, which is more an educational review of the events of the Holocaust than a museum. We saw Disgrace, the film based on the novel by J.M. Coetzee, one of the most famous contemporary South African novelists, which Lill and I both read when we got here. The film was, of course, set in South Africa so it was pretty cool to watch it while we're here but it's a massively depressing book and movie and mostly made us hate stupid women and black people. Which is probably why most black South Africans think Coetzee is a racist. He's not, but he does depict the unpleasant side of post-Apartheid life for white people, which is something that most people don't want to think about. The truth is that Truth and Reconciliation was a little less of either than it was meant to be and of course, all wounds were not healed just because Mandela said they were. Life for whites in many parts of South Africa is less than pleasant. Besides their own guilt, anger, and sense of betrayal at times, they have to deal with the fact that they now live in a country in which 95% of the people hate them. Plust most of the rest of the world. Not only that, but they'll never get elected to high office and their concerns aren't ever going to be a priority for the ANC. And, of course, they are living with the products of the system that they created, and with the retribution and revenge that the victims of that system feel they deserve. History repeatedly shows us that providing an entire population with a limited education hurts those in power just as much, and sometimes more, as those they have conquered, but the Afrikaaners didn't get that memo. Anyways, it's interesting and provides what I've found to be a valid point of view. I don't think Coetzee's a racist, he just tells another side of the story. I could go on, but I won't.

On a happier note, we all drove out to Simon's Town because Lill was obsessed with seeing the penguins. It turns out that somehow there are penguins in Africa, how or why we don't know, and most of them congregate in this little area in Simon's Town, although there were some on Robben Island too and who knows where else. They're actually called African Jackass Penguins (seriously) and they're tiny little pygmy versions of the originals. It was super cute, like looking at herds of baby penguins, all laying out in the sun. They definitely looked happier than the Emperor Penguins in that awful documentary. No digging for food in the snow for these birds.

Along with the museums and the movies we went to Robben Island, which I'll write about in a separate post, and we ate a lot. After living in a town that only has fast food restaurants it was so nice to be in a city with real food. We ate sushi and tex-mex, and really delicious burgers and tapas and goodness knows what else. It was wonderful. We also went to a spa called the Wellness Warehouse and got really amazing deals on spa packages. Overall, it was quite the wonderful week.

After a week or so in Cape Town we all (all of the Mich folks) went to a wine town called Franschoek, where we stayed at an amazing guesthouse and enjoyed the company of friends we haven't seen in a while, two of our professors, and lots of really decadent meals provided by the good folks at Michigan Law School (and, technically, the exorbitant tuition that we're paying to be here). We also got to go on wine tastings, chocolate tastings (amazing), and basically enjoyed being in one of the most beautiful places in the world, surrounded by mountains and vineyards and basically feeling like we were in the Shire.

The pictures are amazing and you would really enjoy them if the internet would load, but it won't, so you just have to take my word for it until I get back! But we did have an amazing week and are so glad to be back for our last three weeks of work. Almost done!

Ciao!
k