THE PATRIOT

This is a true story about the triumph of the American spirit (and by “spirit,” I mean “stereotype”):

This morning we woke up early to get started on our vineyard tours at 10am. Now, Stellenbosch is much more…colonial than Cape Town and some of the attitudes are a little more colonial too. As in some people have huge sticks up their colon. Our wine guide was one such person. From the get go, it was very clear that he was not a huge fan of Americans, which is fine; I get it. But by the time we left Simonsig, he and I were no longer on speaking terms. He made some unfunny, Anti-American comment that wasn’t witty enough to dignify a response. So I didn’t give him one. He interpreted my disinterest as not catching onto his brilliance, and said, “That’s the second time today I said something that went right over your head,” I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer and replied, “Sir, I could run circles around your head.” (America: 1, Douche Bag: 0) Have I mentioned this is the first winery we visited? I should have known then that it was going to be a long war.

At the third vineyard (which sported a cheese buffet), the wine guide found a chameleon outside and after fondling it himself, gave us all specific instructions not to touch it. This was also fine, because I would probably be a little protective of a chameleon if it were my only friend too; I get it. After this, Danny was lingering outside to take a picture of the chameleon and the wine guide asked Brett where he was since we were waiting on him. Brett jokingly said, “He’s petting the chameleon.” Big, Mistake. Danny (who heard nothing of their conversation) walked back into the room where we are already seated. He sat at the end of the table opposite the wine d-bag and the fighting words began to fly:

Wine Guy: How’s the chameleon??

(Tense silence.)

Danny: He’s great.

(But he says “great” the way you would say, “I’m going to f-ing kill you in your sleep.”)

Wine Guy: Did you bomb him??

(Implying that as Amuricans we bomb everything in sight—I know I personally bombed 7 chameleons today, and it was a slow morning... this was the kind of witless remark that prompted me to end our budding friendship at Simonsig. Anyways, more tense silence…)

Danny: Ya, I bombed him. Then I made a cheeseburger out of him. But I’ve been in South Africa for so long that I decided to take a page out of your book and make him live in a township for a coupe of years first.

(BURN.)

(America: 2, Douche Bag: 0)

There was just no recovering from this verbal bombshell. At this point, I broke my oath of silence to stare into the depths of my wine glass and mumble something about “the legs on this beaut” and “liking my chameleons…like I like my wine” and Ellen threw back her wine like Napoleon Dynamite downing Gatorade. The rest of the evening was a little quieter and by the time he dropped us back off at SumbleInn, 3 out of 7 of us refused to talk to him entirely. We have to do what we can as ambassadors of American goodwill.

After that, we got a minibus back to Cape Town and immediately got ready to go over to Stiffy, Wado, and Jordi’s house. Now before you pat me on the back for having friends with names that come straight out of American Pie, I really can’t take all the credit. This is group of people that we met at Vortex trance festival when a representative from their group came over to tell us that they thought we were awesome. (America: 5,390,842, Douche Bag: 0) It was Jordi’s birthday so we went over to their place before going out. After hanging out there and meeting all of their friends, they called a van to pick us all up and take us out to a club called Bang Bang. Once about 12 people piled in, I thought that another cab was going to come because there was just no way we were all fitting. But they just kept hopping in (the driver conveniently had a whole playlist of house music pumping), until Connor and I counted 24 people crammed into this one van—all dancing and singing the entire way to the club. After this experience I am convinced South African’s are not only far cooler than Americans, but far better at geometry.

STELLENSLOSHED

We left this afternoon for wine country, a place not too far from Cape Town called Stellenbosch. We took the train there, which was a little longer and a little more hectic than we anticipated, but we made it there just in time for dinner. After we checked into our hostel, the StumbleInn, we went straight out to an amazing Lebanese dinner at Manoushes. I love rocket just as much as any other member of the arugula family, but the “Hezbollah Rocket Salad” did make me question this dining establishment for a second. But all the food was incredible, from warm flatbread sandwiches to the massive pineapple and mango display courtesy of Chef Jean. Stellenbosch is a college town so the waiter had several bar and club recommendations for afterwards. We were excited for a Thursday night out on the town after deducing that no college student actually believes Friday is part of the workweek, but the entire place seemed dead. We stopped in a bar called Terrace that is usually really crowded and the bartender told us that people are busy writing exams at this time of year. We decided we should take matters into our own hands and each one of us should buy the group a round, which probably would have been a good strategy if there were 4 of us… but there were 7. Two hours later when we had hijacked the sound system and plugged in Danny’s iPod to blast house music, played drinking games that all involved pounding on tables and yelling, created a new signature drink for the bar and christened it “The Stellenslosh,” I wondered to myself why on earth Americans ever get the bad rep of being obnoxious??

JOBURG

Yesterday after my South African politics test, Danny, Brett and I got on our flights to Johannesburg. Kelly and Kase traveled with us, and in the process of negotiating a cab we somehow ended up taking a black Mercedes to our hostel. This was oddly fitting, since it is an ex-Mafia mansion—probably what the house of Carmela Soprano’s dreams would look like if she got her act together and built it. Met up with Connor, Louie and Kevin here at the hostel, Brown Sugar Backpackers. Then we got in touch with Brett N. from USC, who is also here in Joburg for Spring Break! He bailed on Cabo to come home to Joburg (spring break capital of the world) and then Sydney. He recommended an amazing restaurant called Grand Central. Danny, Kase, Brett and I went to dinner and from there, Brett and his friend Dunny picked us up to have a “jol”—South African slang for a party. Despite having been in South Africa for the past 2 months, and supposedly learning this lesson our very first night in Tiger Tiger, Danny failed to bring proper shoe wear. Nikes might be “fly,” in the states, but they don’t fly in South African clubs. Finally, we got him in, and had a great first night in Joburg!

OKAY!!... NO, IT'S NOT.

Ellen, Brett and I took a beach day to explore some of the parts of the peninsula we haven’t seen yet. First we went to Llundudno, a secluded beach near Camps Bay with crazy waves and huge rock structures to climb on. The scale of everything there is so massive that it dwarfs you entirely—I felt like I was in Avatar, but Brett and Ellen refused to paint themselves blue (killjoys). After Llundudno, we drove to Haut Bay and had dinner at a seafood restaurant there. All the waiters wore pirate outfits, and we quickly made the jump from Avatar to Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

We drove around with Amon, a cab driver from Zimbabwe who we’ve befriended over these past few months. Amon is a man of few words—well really, just one word: “Okay!” Everything we say garners the exact same reaction. This is fine when you say something like, “Amon, we need to go to Camps Bay.” And he responds with “Okay!” This is not so fine when you say, “Amon, a herd of angry gnomes is headed straight towards us, we’re all going to die!!” And still he responds with… “Okay!” Recently, it has come to our attention that we are Amon’s only customers. I have called him upwards of 30 times and there have only been two times when he was busy—once he was with Danny and the other time he was with Brett. This lack of customers became apparent at around 5pm when we looked out into the parking lot of the restaurant, saw Amon’s car, and realized he had just been following us around the peninsula the other day. Granted, it was probably a smart (although doubtfull strategic) business move on his part, since the three of us are effectively ¾ of his customers. And the other ¼ (read as: Danny) was in the library.

Got back to Cape Town and went out on Long Street: Waiting Room, Marvel, Fiction, and finally Dubliners. At the end of the night, Danny spent 75 rand (a small fortune) buying food from street vendors—the South African equivalent of ghetto dogs, shwarma, and falafel. I argued with Danny that the shwarma was better than the falafel but Danny pointed out to me that he asked the vendor to put falafel IN the shwarma… Moments like this make me so happy that Ellen and I are going back to SC with a new best friend. With great taste in street food.

BACK TO YOUNGSFIELD

After much confusion, we went back to Youngsfield today and I got to see Ouwa again! It looks like the High Court order will not be enough to evict the refugees at Youngsfield, and the mandate only pertains to another camp called Blue Waters. They were trying to include Youngsfield under this umbrella, but hopefully court proceedings will take at least a year and this will buy the families at Youngsfield some time to get on their feet. A girl named Sulega’s tutor could not make it today, but it worked out well because Ouwa and Sulega are best friends, so I got to take them both today. Watching them work together made me love them even more. Ouwa really excels when she can help someone. She was never pushy, but you could see her excitement—she wanted Sulega to get what they were working on too.

KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS

Today was our second week of volunteering with SHAWCO and it went so much better. Seeing the kids again was amazing, and it was much easier to build off the continuity of last week. Today’s lesson was about antonyms so we did a couple exercises together where the kids had to pair up a word with the correct antonym. When I asked one of the precocious fourth graders, Nakishka, what the antonym of “friend” was, she thought for a second before replying… “Rude.” Nailed in, Nakishka. All of the kids are incredibly bright. Their answers to my questions were all complex and thoughtful. I asked another boy, Enrique (alas, no relation to Iglesias—yeah, I already asked), to make a sentence with the word “future” in it that showed the meaning. Enrique said, “The man and woman got married, so now they have a future together.”

As we were leaving, some of the older girls gave Ellen and I an impromptu Afrikaans lesson. It turns out, we are not as quick of learners. We can now introduce ourselves, ask how someone’s day is, and make complete fools of ourselves in Afrikaans. My saving grace was when they taught us how to say “goodbye” (it is “totsiens”) so that I can excuse myself from a conversation before doing irreparable damage… So, Totsiens!

CHURCH (HOLY SHIT) AND GOLDFISH

This morning we woke up early and got the kids ready for church. The dress I was planning on wearing looked a little worse for the wear after being shoved in a duffel bag for 2 days (weird). I wasn’t going to say anything, in hopes that people wouldn’t notice that my dress had more wrinkles than an LA mom without Botox, but Moira caught me trying to smooth out the wrinkles and offered to iron my dress—proof that mothers always know. We all piled into their van and headed to church. Which is held in a classroom of the Oceanview Elementary School. Up until this morning, Dan had struck me as a deeply spiritual, and soft-spoken man. But when he got in front of his congregation, he transformed. He delivered a sermon about letting go of the past. During it he said, “The fight with the devil for your heart is fought in the battlefield of the past. Not the future.” It was really interesting in light of our conversation the day before when we were talking about the history of apartheid in Oceanview. He told me that a lot of members of his congregation still have trouble letting go of the wrongs they’ve suffered through and it affects them on a day-to-day basis. But he feels this resentment tethers them to the past and keeps them from moving forward. The congregation was a much more lively bunch than the ones I’m used to—mothers were screaming out, crying, dancing, and falling over in their trances during the ceremony. It was an incredible experience.

After church, we went back to their home and had a big, traditional Sunday meal that Moira’s sister prepared for us. Almost immediately after we finished eating, it was time to go back to the buses. Saying goodbye to the Jegel family was really hard, especially with Sarah-Claire because I don’t’ think she understood I was going to be leaving so soon. But this family was absolutely incredible—everything that I want mine to be one day. I know we’ll be in contact for a long time.

Ellen and I got on the bus back to Cape Town together, threw our stuff down at home, and went straight to Kirstenbosch Gardens for the last summer concert—Goldfish! We made it just in time and the concert was amazing. It was set against the beautiful backdrop of the gardens and there was really diverse audience, with people from ages 4-60. Got crafty thinking of ways to try and talk our way backstage and met ½ of Goldfish! The best part of the day was getting home to an email from Eric telling me he will be visiting South Africa after graduation in May! The subject line was "We need to talk," which was arguably the worst use of that phase in the history of South Africa and needing to talk. All in all, amazing weekend.