Going Out

I was on since before we even stepped into the elevator. Wearing jeans and Bria's tank top, belt necklace and eye liner to the max, hair greased back and pre-rockin' to Beyonce in our hotel suite. Met the boys in the lobby and we are off to Long Street.

Our first bar was dark, crowded, and writhing, the way I like it. Full of Africans. Downed a vodka coke and danced with my group. Rihanna and Britney blaring over the speakers. I think I was having more fun than anyone because they decided to skip out and we walked down the block to the next place.

Our second bar was an Irish pub. Large, roomy, full of smoke, full of white people, full of bad dancers. DJ on the synthesizer with a face mike, karaoke singing all of his songs. Here we have Bon Jovi, Journey, Shaggy, can't remember what else but it wasn't very rhythmic. Seany is all over the bar making friends. He meets an American, Steve from Delaware, and the consensus is quick that Steve is adorable. I talk to him and find out that he's here in Cape Town volunteering for the year. He lives in a shit apartment. The boys trade phone numbers.

Vodka sour shots! We meet some Irish fishermen at the bar.  I talk to the DJ. He learns that we are American and in a choir and now we're his for the rest of the night. He spends a lot of time with us. The music gets better. There is some spontaneous kissing. More dancing. Carmen is loving the DJ. More dancing. Sean now knows every single person in the bar. More dancing. I drink glasses of water.

Third bar! Gay bar! We climb out of our cabs and into a dark, half empty room. Unenthusiastic karaoke is going on amidst the thumpa thumpa. I make friends with a Xhosa dude who immediately picks me up to dance. He sings me the Click Song and offers to come by our hotel to teach us. I karaoke to "Shoop." More vodka sour shots. Philip and I do a lot of mirror dancing. Carmen is not allowed to drink anymore. The gays are all over Sean. There is a lot of sloppiness going on. The Nigerians show up and my Xhosa friend warns us we should leave. Bria has taken a picture of every male in the room.

Carmen and I venture downstairs to use the bathroom but there are things going on in the corner so we duck outside. Wait for everyone to make it into a cab. Stumble out at our five star hotel. Go to sleep for we have a busy day of sightseeing ahead.

shitty goodbye dinner

Oh, this evening sucked. Baladucis restaurant at the mall. I was very tired, everyone was being super cliquey, the food was shitty. Thank you Paul, Carmen, Liz, and Casey for saving me.

(**The upside is that I hung with Liz and Casey for the first time! And tasted malva pudding, finally.)

Table Mountain

I seem to be one of few people who got a lot of sleep last night, although I did hear the vuvuzelas from the stadium across the street as the soccer game let out and the fans streamed the streets in front of our hotel. So I woke up this morning well rested, after getting eight hours – the most on this trip so far. It was a bright and beautifully sunny day! After a back and forth and back and forth and up and down between the lobby and the room and breakfast and Carmen's room and back to my room again, I found out that the cable car WAS in fact running, so I ran upstairs for a fourth time (really I took the elevator) and woke up Sean (who was passed out in last night's clothes) and changed my clothes for the third time and met Ben in the lobby (who had just completed a 5K) and we were off! With some help from Chrighton Dula, a friendly but racist cabbie.

The road actually goes halfway up the mountain until the part where earth gives way to stone. From there, we took a round cable car up to the top. The cable car had 360 degree windows and of course Sean suctioned his camera onto them. The view was stunning – we could see the whole cape bay area.

The top was not actually smooth flat. I had this notion for some reason that the mesa would be smooth like an actual table, like bowling lane smooth. No. It was flatish, but we walked along large rocks whose cracks were filled in with tiny plants. There were a lot of tourists on the top of the table, but it wasn't crowded. The air was perfect and it felt really good to walk around.

From the top, we could see all the places we had been this past week: our hotel, the stadium, the wharf, Cape Flats, Robben Island, the rocky cliff where we took our first jumping picture (and where I taught Dan how to plank), Cape of Good Hope, False Bay, and the white sand beach where we took our final jumping pictures. We could see the green and rocky peaks of Lion's Head and the Twelve Apostles on one side and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean further beyond. The weather was perfect. The sun was shining and we took a lot of panoramic pictures. It was kind of a relief to be without the big group and just make decisions between the three of us. It was really a fantastic morning with good company and a perfect way to end the trip.

SAFARI!!!

I PETTED A LION!! This is the most exciting thing on the safari! Plus we got charged by an elephant! Plus we saw rhinos! And springbok! And ostrich! And zebras! And Elands! And buffalo! And some boring birds!

Here are some things I learned on our safari trip:

• The Cape Buffalo is the most dangerous of the Big 5 animals.

• Rhinos use their second, smaller horn to protect their eyes when fighting.

• Rhino poop does not smell like shit. (It does not smell like anything, actually, because it is made up of dried grass and not much else.)

• An elephant will give a warning before it charges you. If it swipes its trunk across the ground in front of you, it means business.

• Frances James has not lived for 64 years to be trampled by an elephant.

• Our guide, Dennis, is super hot.

• An elephant penis can weigh up to 68 kilos.

• Dennis is as big as an elephant penis.

• A lion's fur is soft like a house cat.

• Zebras are gray when they are born, and develop their stripes as they age.

• Springbok are like gazelles in that they are small and graceful and their hind legs are longer than their front legs, but unlike gazelles, when they run, they actually spring up into the air kind of like a kangaroo. I heart gazelles and now I heart springbok. (When you say “springbok,” you must roll your “r” and pronounce “bok” with a shortened “o” as if you have a South African accent. “Sprrrrrringbuk.”

• Springbok never drink water; they get their moisture from plants and dew.

• Casey and Liz are super great safari partners. We totally rocked the front seat.

• Ostrich have super sharp claws on their feet that can tear your torso apart.

• It is preferable to be stomped on and pecked at by an ostrich than to fight it standing up and risk being clawed open.

• Dennis was attached by an ostrich once on a walking safari and he had to spend seven days in the hospital. He chose to get stomped on but forgot about the power of the beak. He suffered broken ribs.

• Eating springbok gives some people who shall remain nameless serious bathroom problems.

whale watching and southern tip

I decided long before this trip that I was not going to participate in the whale watching activity, on account of it being on a boat. In the ocean. For several hours. Many of us decided that it would be a good day to duck out and go to Table Mountain instead. But when we told Latifa our plan, a look of pure sadness fell across her face as she conveyed how much we would miss out if we stayed home. She was so sad for us and her voice was so utterly filled with devastation that we all changed our minds and decided to at least travel with the group and sit in the bay while the whale boats went out. Anything for Latifa.

I am so glad I went, because I ended up seeing some beautiful things. I walked around the shore with Carmen, Ben, Sue, and Mark. I collected sea glass for Sue and it was there that we spotted our first whale! He was very close to the rocks and was just sort of frolicking around, not really going anywhere fast and not doing tricks, either. There were a few flaps of the tail and then after several minutes, he was gone. Though it was overcast and sprinkly, it was nice being outside. Also we saw some rock hyraxes, which I taught my students about in 4^th grade at TIOH. Related to the elephant, these small, furry things live in Israel, too.

Later, we headed up to Cocos restaurant (no relation) where we could watch the bay and eat at the same time. On the way, we saw our second whale. This one was moving fast and we could only see its back as it passed by the road. At Cocos, I got a delicious cheese melt. Then the boat people came back and we land people felt smug that we saw the same number of whales as them but didn't have to suffer on the rough water. (Several people did get sea sick.) I watched an incredible video of Sami sleeping slumped forward and Tom Reinsel holding onto her life jacket from behind so she wouldn't slip off her seat into the ocean. At the restaurant, we had our best whale sighting – a whale breached (jumped) totally out of the water and slapped back down again, repeated five or six times. He lifted his whole body except the tail out of the water. It was total Planet Earth quality. I'm hoping someone has it on video. (Probs.)

At this point, the buses split up and the lazy ones returned to Cape Town while the more adventurous trekked on to the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean officially meet. This was my first time on Cyril's bus since the airport. There was palpable excitement on this new bus, being filled with people who chose driving and oceans over drinking and sleeping.

The route to the tip was gorgeous, passing through a landscape we hadn't seen before on our trip. Rolling green hills, pasture land, bright yellow fields of canola, idyllic sea-side villages with white-washed buildings and thatched roofs, meadows and a meandering road. Many remarked that it resembled Ireland. It was green, green, green. The sun was out and everything was fresh and happy.

At Cape Agulhas, brown and gray rocks sliced through the water, earning the nickname “The Place of Needles.” The water was turquoise, clean. Small waves lapped against the shore. The water was 10 degrees warmer than at the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean currents actually meet at the Cape of Good Hope, where we were the other day with the lighthouse and the hills. That's where the temperatures mix and theoretically create water turbulence. At this location, the oceans' names change, simply by virtue of being at the southernmost edge of Africa. Some old mapmaker drew a vertical line from here down to Antarctica and declared the left Atlantic and the right Indian. (If you take into account science and nature, the water here is all Indian Ocean.) We took pictures near the marker in a big group, alone, with an American flag (weird?) and a South African flag.

The beach here was covered in rocks. Big, sharp rocks about 6-8 feet sticking up at the shoreline and smaller pebbles on the beach. All the beach rocks were round and polished so smooth. I spent a good ten minutes trying to come up with a reason to take some home. You know, the ultimate Sophie's choice about taking and keeping (and later not wanting) versus leaving and missing. In the end, I realized the perfectly round pebbles would be perfect for a game of mancala (that I could keep in my classroom), and loaded about 30 rocks into my pockets before I was called back to the bus.

On the way home, we drove through the same lovely hills that were now strewn with flocks of sheep and herds of cows. Paul and I had some heart to hearts about camp and teenagerhood in the back of the bus. I played a game with Sue and Kelly wherein Sue correctly guessed all of the furniture and décor in my apartment. Cyril passed out single serving bottles of South African liqueur Amarula, which is like Baileys but fruity and equally delicious. Kelly, Sue, and I buttered up Cyril and got a second bottle each. Everyone was getting drowsy and there were many rows of people lying down and sleeping. At 4pm, we passed our first stop-light since the morning. The setting sun over Cape Bay was beautiful. We rolled into the hotel 2 hours later than expected, but it was a fantastic afternoon.

Did I mention the balsamic vinegar chips I bought? They were divine.

Aparteid History Day

Today we went to the District 6 Museum and Robben Island. District 6 was formerly a multi-cultural neighborhood in the heart of Cape Town. Blacks and whites lived side by side with Indians and Jews. The government first assigned the Blacks and Coloreds to go live in homelands and townships outside the city, then bulldozed over buildings. Obviously, this was a bad thing. The museum is dedicated to preserving the memories of how the neighborhood used to be, and contains hundreds of photographs from the 1950s and 1960s. Someone preserved all of the old street signs and the back room is full of family recipes embroidered on cloths. The entire floor was a laminated hand-drawn map of the neighborhood, and former residents have filled in their names where they used to live. Everyone took a bazillion pictures.

Then we took a ferry to Robben Island, the location of the prison in which Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner. The ocean was quite rough, and apparently there was a lot of sea sickness below deck. I stayed on top where it was blustery and wet and super cold, but the rushing air felt good and we all had a panorama view. Most sadly, a huge flock of birds flew dramatically in front of us right as the boat rocked over a particularly large swell, and when I took out my camera to capture the incredible bird formations, I lost my balance and totally ate it on the deck of the boat. The hand holding the camera smacked down, sticking the lens and effectively rendering it useless. Shame! Fortunately, I have camera insurance at home to get it replaced and can get photos from the other 64 people on this trip. But still totally sucky because I just bought it two weeks ago and spent a lot of time shopping, learning the shortcuts, and really liking it!

On Robben Island, we had a very dramatic tour guide for our bus trip around the island. The whole thing reminded me of Alcatraz and the book Al Capone Does My Shirts, which is about Alcatraz, on account of the extraneous prison community, like the guards' homes, the caretakers' houses, the school for the caretakers' children, etc. Mandela's cell was in fact tiny. A square room painted blue with a single window over a single bedroll. The two tour guides we had were very informative, one being an overdramatic storyteller and the other a former prisoner. Everyone took a bazillion pictures.

I can't really say that I was moved on this tour. I was a little distracted about my camera and knees were hurting and it was drizzling on and off and I was freezing. As the line of choir singers filed in front of his cell to take a picture, I kept thinking how bizarre it was that Mandela's jail cell has been turned into a shrine of sorts. The history foundations could have told us any of the thousands of square cells was the one that Mandela lived in, and we would have believed them. Is that cynical? I'm just not so moved by a room that has no personal markings whatsoever. Glad I went, maybe it will mean more for me later.

The Africa Cafe

Welcome to Africa dinner!

The Africa Cafe was the absolute perfect place to go for our Welcome Dinner. The walls and light fixtures were created out of recycled materials, like glass wine bottles and aluminum can tops. The food was family style and it was out of this world. Their website is http://www.africacafe.co.za. Here is the menu in order of tastiness:

• Vetkoek: fried bread balls made out of rainbows and unicorns. These were like African donuts. Everyone agreed that this was the best dish. I would love to find a recipe online and try to replicate it using my brother's deep fryer.
• Mozanbican Sprout Salad: Though this was a simple salad of greens, sprouts, avocado, beets, and nuts, the dressing on top was crazy good. Will probably never have this again, but I can dream about it.
• Cassava Bread: almost like an asiago cheese bagel but flat.
• Malawi Mbatat Cheese and Sim Sim Balls: sweet potato and cheese balls fried with sesame seeds. These are not as good as the red bean and sesame balls at Whole Foods, but delish. Soft and warm. Gooey inside.
  
• Dhanya Dip: white yogurty dip with lots of stuff in it.
  
• Vegetable soup: flavored with seaweed, apparently. Very tasty. Did not resemble seaweed.
• Carrot Cake: meh.
  
• Xhosa Imfino Patties: like a fried spinach burger.
  
• Umngqusho: that "q" in the food is a click sound, fyi. Mix of samp and beans. Not memorable.
  
• Egypt Koshery: rice, lentil, and noodle salsa dish. Not terribly exciting.
  
• Tanzanian Mango Chicken (did not eat)
• Botswana Seswaa Masala (did not eat)
• Cape Malay Mussel Curry

After all the food, the waiter ladies walked from room to room singing and dancing and playing the drums. I watched their performance in four different rooms. I'm sure someone has this on video somewhere. Super highlight of the trip.

Amy Biehl memorial

We started with the African freedom medly, the men singing very slow and loud with the women echoing. As soon as the percussion started in, the ladies in the back cheered and started clapping and dancing. We finished “Gabi Gabi” and the crowd started to clap, but we jumped in with “Asikatali” and they went wild! Smiles of recognition lit up the faces of the Amy Biehl women, and they all started singing along. The workers in the back were singing and dancing and cheering and whooping, and many older men and women were swaying in their chairs. We were singing and smiling and crying and it was the best reception we've ever had. Imagine singing civil rights songs to a crowd of African Americans right after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Maybe that's a bad comparison, but that's what it felt like. When we started “Singabahamba,” everyone was just high on the emotion in the room.

“Pie Jesu” was next, and so many of us were moved to tears with the soaring harmonies and absolutely beautiful sopranoes of Julie and Carmen. It was stunning, even in the small, hot room and piano and violin as the only accompaniment. “In Remembrance” was beautiful, even though it was not our best performance. The gospel songs KILLED. The percussion, the dancing, the clapping, the awesomeness of Julie / Diana / DTP, the full harmonies, the songs with African origin. They LOVED the gospel. And then the audience was cheering, “Encore, encore!” in their accents, and we sang out “Akekho” to more dancing and singing. The ladies in the back came up and sang with us and it was exactly what we had all been waiting for since we dreamt up this trip over a year ago across the oceans in Los Angeles.

school concert

Our first concert was one big choral fail! In a totally funny, awesomely bad, no regrets way. It was at a school that resembled Hogwarts with the coats of arms of houses on the walls. We played in an auditorium with bad lighting that was about a quarter full. Gerhard the brass band conductor showed up in a dapper blue, yellow, and orange getup. (We are deeply divided about whether Gerhard is gay or not, and this getup pushed him slightly in the Oscar Wilde direction.) A microphone was knocked off the stage during rehearsal. In the first act, I got terribly post nasal drippy and thought I was going to gag my brains out and so serriptitiously had to unwrap and put one in my mouth and hide the wrapper somewhere while dancing in the front row of the stage. THEN as I was enthusiastically swaying, one of the cough drops that I stored in the waistband of my pants (because of sans pockets) fell down and lodged itself around my thigh. HOT!! In the second act, while the men were singing Kharumi, my right contact popped out of my eye. A little shrivled, I had to get it moist before popping it back in, so I put it in my mouth. (Insert easy joke here.) As I blinked it into place, a minty feeling overcame my eyeball and I realized that I had been sucking on menthol cough drops for four hours. Fun!

The second half of the concert actually went great. “Train” was fantastic, “Bye and Bye” rocked the house, and Gerhard spent most of the set gazing amorously at the soloists. I'm not going to mention “The Click Song” because it will ruin my good mood. When we got back to the hotel, I tagged photos for an hour and then slept the best seven hours of my life.

Togetherness Lunch

In between wineries, we stopped in a small Dutch Reformist town while it was drizzling and ducked out to a lovely empty restaurant on the edge of the main street. We were the only people there and so had a beautiful and loud lunch with wine. Our restaurant had just opened a few minutes prior and so we were the only people there in our back room. We shared our hopes and dreams and memories and said some of those inside things that aren't secret but don't always get a chance to be given to others. I learned that Bradley's first CD purchase was Ace of Base, Philip's most memorable musical event was when the Philharmonic had to restart a program because someone's cell phone went off, Robert's first TV watching experience was more formative than any movie, Bria has a hippy mom who introduced her to Radiohead, Ben watched Basic Instinct too young and scarred him for life, and Sean is really sweet and friendly and helped make this lunch moving for everyone. (But he really needs to stop smoking.)

Robes and Slippers

Our hotel room is fucking ridiculous awesome. We peeked into our rooms and immediately erupted into shrieks and yells and yips and jumping like a Real World reveal. Our hotel room is nicer than my apartment. Nicer and bigger. And the walls were painted gray but it did NOT feel depressing. In addition to our two bedrooms with matching super fance bathrooms, we have a living room section, a dining room, and a full kitchen. With a dishwasher. And a washing machine. And an Ikea Expedit shelf full of wine glasses.

In order to keep in the mindset that we are very important, we created a rule that when you enter our room, you must wear robes and slippers. We are very serious about this. As we all reclined on our fake ostrich skin couch and sipped champagne, the boys called to come up and hang out. We conveyed our rule. Even though they whined and begged, we kept firm and eventually they acquiesced and arrived at our door with robes over jeans. This is like when my students pretend to follow the dress code and wear a collared shirt buttoned ever so slightly over a non-regulation tshirt or tank top.

Don't you hate when you have to fart but you are surrounded by people, so you hold it in and hold it in and hold it in until it goes back into your body? And then when you finally decide to let it out, you have to like surround yourself with pillows? That's what we talked about at our Robes and Slippers party.

DUBAI

Dubai is a lot like Las Vegas, without the public drunkenness. The airport is very chrome and shiny, sparkly pillars, fake palm trees, and lots of THINGS TO BUY. The terminals are deserted when we walk through, even though it is early evening. The men at the airport all wear floor length white cotton tunics, and the women wear floor length black flowy dresses. Outside is hot and humid and smells of rotting trash.

At the hotel, we all turn in our passports (with much trepidation), get our hotel keys, disperse to our rooms, and spend fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to turn the lights. Bria, Sean and I walked down the block to an Indian restaurant and had a delicious 10pm meal. We shared everything and were the loudest people in the restaurant by at least 50 decibels. Sleeping in our tiny single beds (2 inches apart) in the heavily air-conditioned room was LOVELY, even if only for five hours.

What else could our Dubai hotel boast of? Arabic lounge music streaming in the bathroom, a bidet, and a service shaft (took a picture of course), a night club (closed due to Ramadan?) a rooftop pool, and three wake-up calls for the price of zero! Julie and I set two different alarms, but the several wake-up calls that we didn't order roused us from our sleep an hour before planned and so we were the first people down to the lobby.

And then we gorged on breakfast! This was the nicest hotel breakfast spread I've ever seen. European style cheeses and cold cuts, hot sausages and eggs, potato pancakes, pancakes and french toast and croissant and cakes and all other manners of breakfast starch, yogurts, fresh fruit, steamed fig (yum!!!), several types of fruit juices (and not that American sugary fake fruit crap either), dry cereals and granola, and strong coffee. We had to eat quickly to make our airport shuttle, but no worries! They would probably feed us breakfast on the plane, too.

The bathroom in Dubai airport has heated toilet water. Not heated toilet seats, but toilet bowl water. And it wasn't just heated, it was STEAMING. Not welcoming. There was also a bidet spray nozzle hanging on the wall.

Dubai from the air is a tiny circle of steel surrounded by miles and miles of flat, sandy desert. Sand, sand, sand, sand, sand. There are mountains rising out of the sand as we go south over the Arabian peninsula, but it is so hazy and dusty that nothing looks pretty. I get thirsty just looking out the window.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PLANE

The airport is fun because everywhere you turn is another Angel City person. We dump our stuff at the “headquarters” row of chairs at the gate, hoping that maybe one of the twelve lingering choir members would watch it? Not really asking, just assuming, Sean follows our every move with his little bug camera.

Once on the plane, there is a slow scramble to move around and switch seats. The flight is not full, and our group is spread out over ten rows with lots of empty seats. Thank goodness, because we have FIFTEEN hours together on this flight.

Here are some Emirates Airlines features:

• The in-flight entertainment book is fifty pages long. There are over fifty movies (to be watched at any given time on your own screen – with pausing!), twenty types of TV shows, many many games, and over one hundred radio channels, some of which playing whole albums of current and past artists. I watched Country Stong (terrific) and The Company Men (not terrific) and came in nearly last in the in-flight trivia tournament.

• The flight show channel, in which you can watch the plane's progress around the globe, features not only the typical animated plane infographic, but also has a forward camera and downward camera that show real-time actual footage from below and in front of the plane. It was too bad that most of our flight took place at night.

• There are stars in the ceiling above the aisles that light up at night.

• The plane bathroom was large! Dan reported that it was “big enough for a threesome!”

• Free booze.

Despite sitting next to the window, the only pretty thing I saw the entire time was North Dakota or Saskatchewan at night, very rural and thus not brightly lit, however each farm house was marked by a yellow light, as though they were required to keep a giant spotlight by the garage, and the effect was like little fireflies spread over the darkened land. It reminded me of my favorite line from Peace Like a River, where the night sky is compared to a velvet cloth strewn with diamonds.