Daddy Days

My father came down to visit me and get to see South Africa a bit. The first two weeks of his visit he joined an organized tour and visited the most famous places in the country with a group.
The third week he exchanged the companionship of the group for me and the expertise of the professional guide for my amateuristic guiding skills. Although I must say for myself, humbleness aside, that I became quite adept in organizing the different classic trips.

Joining an organized tour is a good way of visiting a country you re not familiar with, but it has a couple of downsides. One of them is that you get told where to go and where to stay away from for safety reasons. Understandably, the tour organizers do not wish to take big risks. Imaginge being the guide who allows a group to walk around freely in an area, and they get robbed. That's bad for business. So before my dad arrived in Cape Town, he had been kept on a tight leash. Hadn't had a chance to escape the protective tour bubble and interact with South Africans, or just walk around them. And with a little help from my friends, I was able to change that.

We were warmly invited by Emil -a friend from work- at his place to have a braai and watch the rugby. That's as South African as it gets.

Minor disadvantage for me was that Emil is the biggest Sharks supporter, and The Sharks beat my team (Western Province) convincingly in the season final. My dad had seen the final on tv, and bought a cap of the winning team. And by wearing his Sharks cap at Emil's place he ensured himself of piles of meat and endless supply of beer. But please don't ask him to name two Sharks players by name.

Part of the standard repertoire I have for visitors is a visit to the winelands. There as well, a friend helped me to step the normal programme up to a unique experience. Xan's dad owns and runs a wine farm in Franshoek, and he took time out of his busy schedule to tell us all about the wine making process. I was, like probably many other people, of the impression that you just needed to squeeze the grapes (preferably by squashing them with bare feet in a big wooden tank whilst playing the bagpipe and eating cheese and bread), add some spices, filter it and poor it in a barrel. But as Dieter - Xan's dad- explained, there is a lenghty, labour intensive process involved in which timing and quantities are crucial. Lynx wine farms is one of the smaller around, but they clearly control the complex process well and they produce high quality wines. The friends and family visiting me during the festive season will get the chance to experience the quality, as I have stockpiled bottles for the dinners.

One lucky strike to make my dad's visit unique was a game by Bafana Bafana (national soccer team) in the Cape Town Stadium. It was the first time they played here. In the wake of the world cup a lot of people support Bafana, in spite of their average performance. So the stadium was actually sold out, and gave an impression of what the world cup games were like. Unfortunately Bafana Bafana lost after dominating the game but not being able to attack properly. The USA barely came close to the South African goal, but were lucky to score after one weak counter attack.

One other thing I like to do is take visitors to Mzoli's when possible. So I took my dad and Thomas, a Belgian friend who was finishing his contract in Cape Town. As you could read in one of my previous posts, Mzoli's is a butchery in Gugulethu. The owner - his name is Mzoli- came up with the idea of not just selling the meat, but to braai it too. The concept became so successfull that now every weekend streetparties are held around the butchery. It is probably the only hangout in a township you can visit on your own without a guide. And that is one of the reasons I like it.

As safe security personell and police try to make it, still it is a township with all the known challenges. As we were driving to the place, I was reading the news paper of that weekend. By pure coincidence, the front page was almost entirely dedicated to unrests in Gugulethu with outbursts of violence against police in which fuel bombs and stones were thrown. The article mentioned that certain ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League) members were suspected to be behind the unrests. The ANCYL has internal elections around this time, and some supporters came up with the strategy to make some living areas uncontrollable. How they think this portrays them as democratic representatives of the people is still a questionmark to me. But surely there is some logic behind it? Fact remained that we were driving towards a possible hotbed of problems, but we checked with police officers, and all was safe around Mzoli's.

The Mzoli experience was complete, we had our meat after a considerably long wait, we had nice chats with other patrons and the kwaito music was pumping. As we were sitting at a table, enjoying our meat, something happened. Now this is a story I'm sure my dad has told a couple of times by now, and it has probably grown out of proportion, so allow me to summarize the events as factual as possible. We were eating our meat when we noticed a part of the crowd in the street all looking at one spot, out of our range. My dad still claims he heard a gunshot, but no one else did and surely not Thomas and I. But something was going on because other people had jumped to their feet too, trying to find out what was happening. As a part of the crowd in the street broke lose and came running our way, girls screaming (why do you they always do that?) panic almost broke lose. Most people just stayed put though, and calm returned. When the party continued, I approached two guys in their twenties that had shown no sign of unrest. Whilst we were on our feet, trying to decide what to do, they sneered "you better look for cover". So I asked them what they though was going on. They had no idea either, but they said they heard no guns. And even with a shootout, you better stay where you are or you might catch a stray bullet.
Both of them had seen gunfights before, something I could not ever imagine witnessing.

As we decided to leave, I recognized Mr Mzoli from a picture in the news paper. I shook his hand and told him how I Love the place. He was courteous but took no real interest in me till I mentioned that we were from Belgium. I thought he was being overly courteous when he followed us to our car and instructed his people to make sure we drove in the right direction.
But in fact he was being overly cautious because what we didn't know at that point was that the night before, the Dewani couple was hijacked a couple of blocks away.





-----------------

Mo-vember.
During the month of November, a couple of countries in the world have a cancer awareness initiative. They ask men to grow their moustache, and only their moustache, for the entire month. The aim is to set up sponsorship programmes for growing the Mo and donate the collected money to Cancer Fighting charities. I didn't look to collect money, but grew my mo none the less. And whenever people asked me what i was doing, I told them to go for prostate cancer checks regularly after age 40.
Not the ladies though, they should go for breast cancer check ups after age 50.

Below the results of Mo-vember...

And this month I declare Me-cember as I plan to spoil myself with some gifts, and with the visit of my brother, his girlfriend and my mother!!!