Daniel Eliasson

One day, Stephanie decides she wants ice cream, so off to Steers we go to get some soft-serve. Steers is a chain of fast-food burger restaurants, similar to McDonald’s or Burger King. It’s a Sunday, obviously a slow day, and we enter the empty restaurant to find three black women manning the counters, and I can see some people working in the kitchen as well.

We take a minute or so to decide on what ice cream we want; I choose a simple one with a chocolate flake, and Stephanie decides on a chocolate dipped cone. Stephanie steps up to the closest cashier and places our order. The girl just mumbles something, and gets back to slowly folding little BBQ sauce satchels into napkins. The other two women are hanging over a second register, so we try with them. They make no sign of acknowledging our presence at all, until after a while they’ve done something to the register, and one woman wanders off. The other then proceeds to take the order, with a couple of double-takes before it’s all settled. Then she gets an ice cream cone, fills it up with soft-serve, takes it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, and proceeds to drop it into the tub of chocolate topping, coating not just ice cream, but also cone. She grabs the cone, audibly crushing it in the process, and neatly just wraps a couple of napkins around it, then presents Stephanie with her chocolate-and-napkin flavour ice cream.

My ice cream is dished up without further incident, and we leave the Steers some 10-15 minutes after entering. By that time, another customer had shown up and was queueing behind us; she’s probably not been served yet, poor girl.

If the universe does indeed operate on some zen-y notion of a yin to every yang, this Steers must be the antipode of those McDonald’s restaurants in Stockholm where they have only 45 seconds to serve each customer.

A few days ago, as I was sitting in our room with the door to the stoep open, I heard a chirping sound behind me, and when I turned around, I saw to my surprise a white chicken walking along a little ledge outside the window. I called for Stephanie, and by the time she arrived, the chicken had found the door and entered our window.

This struck us both as funny, since I’d been talking about wanting to have ducks just a day before, and apparently this chicken seemed to have overheard me. We showed it to a couple of the other people in the house, and everyone wondered where it’d come from. A little later, Stephanie heard distressed bird sounds outside, and when I looked over the wall into our neighbours garden, there was another, brown, chicken there. I shouted, but no one seemed to be at home, so I brought the brown chicken over to reunite the two.

It was hard to get good pictures, since they wouldn't stand still

For a few hours, the pair was happily poking around the house, eating the things we tried to feed them, and being generally adorable (except for the pooping). Unfortunately, they did turn out to belong to the cricket playing loud guys from the house next to ours, and had to be returned later. Their owners didn’t seem like the most loving bird owners, coming up with quotes like “Just throw them here, they’ll fly” and “We’ll kill them when they start making noise”.

They were only here for a couple of hours, but I’m quite sure I won’t be the only one who’ll miss the little chickies:

Most things are cheaper in South Africa than in Europe, but a few select items are instead more expensive. Among all the things that South Africans value in life, nothing is dearer to them than toilet paper. So, at least, I’ve come to believe from the prices of it. Around here, something valuable to you might be worth its weight in TP, not gold. Since we all are students in this house, the cheap option is opted for. Thus, we use 1-ply toilet paper. Which in itself is not so bad, but this particular paper strikes me as more of 62 %-ply, since it seems to consist almost half of holes. At first, I just assumed the people here simply liked the intimate sensation (ad slogan: “it’s like it’s not even there!”), but the prices tell me that it’s just good old fashioned economical prudence.

It was my birthday last Wednesday! I was woken up in the morning by Stephanie, who brought me a cup of coffee, and after the coffee, I got presents from both her and Reane. The latter gave me a nice black t-shirt, while the former gave me tapenade, dried mango slices (although Reane opined that these were her idea, and since it’s the idea that matters, it was pretty much a gift from her, really) and a Madam & Eve book!

My new t-shirt

After breakfast, we went to the Fairview wine farm where we had a nice lunch (I had trout, Stephanie had chicken pie, both had ice cream), albeit with the slowest service in the history of ever.

Fair view from Fairview

Fair view of Fairview

Apart from wines, Fairview also produces cheese, using both cow and goat milk. We bought a few nice ones: a cream cheese rolled in honey and dukkah, a piece of brie, and a white mold cheese with cranberries in it. That, together with a nice ciabatta, some olives, hummus, salami and ripe figs that we bought on the way home made a nice birthday dinner for me and the twins that evening.

But let’s talk wines for a moment. You can buy a tasting of six wines for R20, and of course they sell bottles if you fancy any. I bought a Fairview Shiraz for R60. The same bottle goes for 119 kr on Systembolaget. How you like them apples, Jens?

The allegedly famous Fairview goat tower

P.S. The title refers to the prophecies my grade 7-9 friends made about me dying at age 27 in a civil war, and the prophecy coming true seems more likely for each day; I did move to Africa and all.

Eish, blogging is hard. When nothing happens in my life, there’s nothing to write about, and when suddenly stuff happens, I don’t find the time to write about it. So, without further ado, I’ll quickly show a little of what I’ve been up to lately (and not so lately). Since I’m feeling lazy, I’ll put in a load of pictures, and just assume that each one counts for 1000 words.

The last weekend of March, Stephanie’s cousin Britta got married to Michael, and we were invited to the festivities that took place on the vineyard Vrede en Lust not far from Stellenbosch. The wedding was no small affair, and when Stephanie’s father heard the cost from the father of the bride, and counted to three daughters of his own, he began to look slightly worried.

The bride and groom

The blogger and his African

The next weekend, we (being me, Stephanie, Reane and Alastair) packed ourselves into Alastair’s car and drove to Oubaai, which is located near George, in the Eastern Cape. The girls’ parents are part-owners of a house in Oubaai that was supposed to have been sold for a profit, but wasn’t. Lucky for us, since we got free accommodation.

Oubaai itself consists of a bunch of expensive houses near the coast, and a large golf course. Nearby Heroldsbaai is a popular holiday place, and is very busy in December, according to Stephanie. Since we were there off-season, the place was sparsely populated, but not empty. Heroldsbaai is a small bay of the Indian Ocean surrounded by cliff walls overgrown with fynbos vegetation. From the bay, a long flight of stairs climb up a mountainside, and a small path then runs along the mountainside and comes up to the top of one of the arms of the bay. It begins as a tunnel through a thicket of bushes, then emerges onto the mountainside with a nice view of the whole bay. We walked along this path and took some photos, which unfortunately came out somewhat dark. We had a bit of bad luck with the weather, it was overcast and began to rain towards the end, but we did get to see a few little dassies on the cliffs before it began.

View over Heroldsbaai from the path

A pair of nasty ba-no-nos artistically left behind by someone

The next day, we went for another walk, this time in nice sunny weather. We took a path that wound itself slowly down to the shore, passing an old abandoned house, and eventually stopping at a nice observation deck. We got a beautiful view of the ocean, and despite the wind, we stayed nice and warm. On our way back, we found a little gray gecko catching some sunlight on someone’s doorstep.

Long abandoned house with nice view

A neatly camouflaged gecko sunbathing on a doorstep

Not as tranquil as it looks, in fact, it was quite windy

P.S. Since I know some of my readers are a bit hyperlinkly challenged, I would like to point out that the links on place names take you to a map of the location, so go ahead and click. Also, clicking a picture takes you to a larger version.

We went jogging one morning, when the sun had risen over the horizon, but not yet over the ridge of mountains on the east side of Stellenbosch. We went between a little group of houses near ours, along the sandy road past the nearby school and its sport grounds, up the long slope, slowly down the hill again, through the past by the stream, over the old hanging bridge, a little up the mountainside and finally down again through the streets and back home.

The landscape sometimes strikes me as familiar, the sand that breaks through thin dry grass and low bushes reminding me of Öland’s alvar, with little thorny bushes playing the role of junipers, and red sand substituted for the pale. Other times the landscape seems more like something out of a nature documentary on Africa, especially the tall pale trees that branch heavily and culminate in almost flat tops. These trees climb the mountain slopes around the town here, and in the areas that were ravaged by the bosfires, I’ve seen clusters of them where an abrupt line is discernable between those with brown tops that fell victim to the fire, and their lucky neighbours, spared by a wind that suddenly changed direction, still green and alive.

We were up on the slope of one of these mountains the other day, not exercising, but close enough to the opposite; sitting on the dusty ground, drinking Savanna Light ciders, and watching the view of Stellenbosch below. It’s a very pretty view. The ancient mountain ranges circle the city, their plateau structure looking almost crumbly, yet still solid. Below them a sprawl of white buildings spread out, richly interspersed with trees, parks, and a patch of fynbos reserve. Across from the mountain, the shacks of Kayamandi township climbs a hill, and at the other edge of town, the vinyards take over, vines standing to attention in straight lines.

I will bring the camera up the mountain some day soon and get some nice shots, before the rainy season begins, but as of yet, I have little to offer in the pictorial department.