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.