Merry Christmas

Posted by Janine & Mikkel

Last night, on the 23rd, we celebrated Danish Christmas here at our house. Mikkel became our chef cook in Danish cuisine and scents of rice pudding, red cabbage, brown potatoes and stuffed duck aromatized the house. Although these smells don’t go too well with a heavy temperature of about 30 degrees, it did eventually bring us into the Christmas mood: We had a great dinner with 12 good friends and ended up eating, drinking, rolling dices (for presents and for washing dishes), chatting and dancing until the early hours. Except for the style of the dancing, the lack of hymns, the funny hat and the quantity of empty wine bottles, the evening quite resembled a traditional Danish Christmas dinner.

This morning though we have to face reality (luckily the dishes are done!) and get a few practical things done before we are leaving Cape Town and our house on Tuesday. At the same time, we’ll have to make some time to celebrate the fact that we’ve been together for 7 years today (And prepare ourselves emotionally for the seven bad years and/or relation-crises that supposedly come after this…;-)

Tomorrow we will celebrate Christmas Day with the family, friends, neighbours and the neighbour’s friends and family of our friend Mlamli in the township Guguletu. They have already slaughtered a sheep yesterday to respect and please the ancestors and of course to cater for all the people coming. Just to add a little cultural twist to it, Janine will bring her (grand) mothers’ original apple pie to go with it.

And then, Tuesday early morning, we will jump into our good old Fox and see how far north east (s)he is going to bring us. We are going to be highly equipped with tent, camping gear, wetsuits, walking shoes and sunscreen and will be gone for about 4 ½ weeks. We may make it all the way up to the south of Mozambique, but we haven’t made any plans yet and will see how far we get. The end of January we need to be back in Cape Town in order to catch our flight and get back to Holland on the 30th of January.

We’ll be posting some updates during our trip, but will not send out the email (this is a bit too much hassle since we do not have our own computer) so if you’re interested, you’ll need to just check the blog once in a while.

Now all that is left is to wish you all a VERY MERRY Christmas and a GREAT new year! We are looking forward to seeing you all in 2007.

Big hugs from Janine and… another one from Mikkel

Imagine this:

Its 10 o’clock and you are 25 km inside a small and forgotten game reserve driving along bumpy back roads spotting springboks, kudus, ostriches and “Phumbas” through the lion coloured dry grass scattered with small trees. You have 2 liters of water with you in the car because you camped wild in the evening outside the gate to the game reserve and did not get a chance to fill up the water containers before entering. That same evening you have discovered that you had a flat tyre. You replaced it with your spare tyre but decided not to change the morning’s plans of visiting the game reserve by sunrise. The temperature is rising above the 30 degrees. The last person you saw (besides the sleepy guard at the entrance gate) was some local guy who allowed you to camp on “his” premises in return for a meal and a chat. This guy was of the opinion that the game reserve had lions even if the guide book didn’t mention it. Now imagine your reaction when you hear your second tyre bursting…

Suddenly Africa becomes real. Having no network to phone for help, we were forced to walk 25 km towards the entrance…not quite the same as the guide book’s “scenic hike”. The idea of a left-behind lion lingering in the grass is suddenly not that exciting anymore. Being “off the beaten track” becomes a bit less appealing and the true meaning of the expression of “being in the middle of nowhere” finally dawns upon you. We ended up walking for 4-5 kilometres (carrying the wheel), with me looking over my back and looking for potential “climb-up-and-escape-trees”. Then we suddenly had network –what a relief!- and were able to call the park’s reception to send someone to bring us out of the wilderness, fix our tyre and bring us back in.

This little adventure happened on our trip to Namibia last week. I will try to refrain from travel guide superlatives such as daunting, breath-taking and amazing, but Namibia is truly like that - extremely beautiful with seemingly endless landscapes of mountains, valleys, plains, desert and ocean. But don’t go if you don’t like driving and need people around you. Namibia is first and foremost big (we drove 3.500 km and only covered the south…), beautiful, empty…and very dusty. It took us seven days in the country before we saw the first traffic lights. Some days we would drive for hours without seeing other cars and even the few towns we came by seemed like half deserted villages. I put a few photos with this post when I get beind a proper internet connection, but not sure they actually bring justice to the feeling of absolute solitude.

On our second day however we drove past a huge grape plantation with some factory buildings next to the green wineries. There were a few people around, but still a feeling of desertedness. We wanted to buy or taste some of the grapes, so went inside one building and were greeted by the manager who said we should come with him through a small door to the back. This was like entering another world. In the “back” there were two assembly lines each with around 250 grape packing workers. At the end, boxes were piled high ready for shipment to Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, Føtex in Denmark and many other countries. The grapes will arrive in a shop near you just before Christmas! Later we picked up a fired worker who had worked there for 2 months. He had received 800 Namibian dollars (around €95 or dkr 700) a month for somewhere between 50-60 hours of work pr. week. In other words: less than €0,50 or dkr 3,5 per hour. Now think about how much he would have to work to actually buy the grapes in Føtex or Albert Heijn!

Later that day we arrived in Luderitz, a town founded by the German colonizers on the southern coast of Namibia. It’s rather weird to drive 300 km on African gravel roads only to be greeted by an old white haired guy with a Schaeffer dog with “Guten Tag! Suchen sie etwas bestimmtes”. The area around Luderitz is all owned by the diamond corporation which is now in Namibian hands, but for 90 years one of the world’s richest diamond mines were making the Germans and white South Africans extremely wealthy. Finding the diamonds was actually easy, because most of them were more or less lying on the ground, but securing that workers didn’t take the diamonds themselves proved (and still does) the most costly. Namibia’s first x-ray camera was installed in Luderitz. Not for medical purposes, but to take photos of the workers’ stomachs when they returned at the end of their working day.

To many of you it might come as a surprise that Namibia only gained independence from South Africa after 1990. The apartheid laws were also imposed on Namibia which is still very obvious. All managers and owners seem to be white. At the tank station it is a black person filling up you car, but a white who you pay to. Almost everywhere you hear Afrikaans spoken (so no-one could really gossip about us without us hearing it J). Nevertheless the black population are quite positive about the transformation. And I must admit that extreme poverty and extreme wealth is definitely a lot less obvious than in South Africa.

After two days in Luderitz we drove into the real desert: The Namib. They call it a cold desert. Can only say that if this is a cold desert I certainly never want to set my foot in a warm one! We luckily ventured into the dunes with sunrise which gave us 3-4 hours to climb around on the 300 meter high dunes before the heat became unbearable.

We are now back in Cape Town again, trying to get back into work mode for another month or so. Sorry for the lack of photos. Take care.

School, beach and sangoma’s

Posted by Janine

To keep up with the expectations raised by the name of our blog, I’ll write about three real ‘South African experiences’ from the last couple of weeks, all giving very different impressions of life here. Firstly ‘dancing’ in a room full of traditional healers, then learning Afrikaanse songs by young, smart girls in Manenberg and last but not least… enjoying summer on the beach.

Kids in the township

future gangster


Siswe, a guy I know through TAC. He teaches dancing to the kids and is pretty good at it himself.


Kids in Kayalitsha, the biggest township in Cape Town (1 million people)
Comfortable view












These kids (and a lost drunk mother) are dancing "pantsula", one of the hottest dances in the townships. We were invited to this streetparty by Siswe.

Making sense of…sharks & vehicles

Posted by Janine
As last week’s post pointed out, life in South Africa can be quite complicated. The result is that I am constantly trying to make sense out of this place. Surely I came across many things which ‘require sense-making’. Let’s start with a simple one on myself.

1. One of the things that made me really excited about coming to Cape Town was the idea that I may be able to get up in the morning, see what the weather’s like, get to the beach with a surfboard and hop in the water. Reality shows that after eight weeks, I didn’t get much further than a chat with the dude from the surf shop. This lack of action may have something to do with the current sea temperature, but there’s an obvious other reason: a guy got his foot bitten of by a shark a few weeks ago.

2. I am spending more time in a car than ever before. I hate cars and miss my bike but I have no other option than reconciliation with the vehicle. Bikes are not done, walking is not fun and public transport hardly exists (although I do take the train to my work sometimes. The price difference between 1st and 2nd class is 30 cents, you are sure to have a seat in first class, while you’re standing up and being squeezed in second. Still I figure that 2nd is much better; if I were a thief, I would definitely go for 1st class. So there I am, squeezed in the 2nd coupe between two big-big-mommas and being stared at by many male eyes as the only white young woman).

But besides the occasional train ride to work and the safe university-shuttle to my classes, I am pretty much dependent on the car. I even own a third part of our car. Owning a car isn’t all that enjoyable though, when you’re not able to drive. I had the brilliant idea of taking driving lessons here -these are ten times cheaper than back home- and then get my ‘learners license’ here. I thought might as well try and get that, so I can freak the hell out of Mikkel who’ll be sitting next to me in great fear, once we’d be traversing South Africa by car. But then it turned out that the drivers licenses have a waiting list till APRIL. So much for my plan…(although I may consider the plan B: bribing the department of traffic)

Now you’re probably wondering what number 2: my driving has to do with number 1: great white sharks. Well, the connection is that they both represent a danger. And particularly in South Africa, these dangers are quite substantial! Before coming here, a girl told me never to get into traffic on the last Friday of the month. People apparently get nuts and spend their wages in bars, where after they drive home. Possibly worse than these “drunk-nuts” are the minibuses transporting people from and to the townships. Taxi drivers are just as bad. So basically whatever your involvement in driving is, you are surely in danger.

There are around 500,000 traffic accidents annually in South Africa at a cost of nearly 10,000 lives, and thousands of injuries. On average one person is killed a year by Great White Sharks, with 3-4 attacks as the annual norm. I do not dare to go surfing but I do want to get driving. What sense does this make!

Just a comment

Posted by Janine
I hope that Mikkel's examples gave you, brave readers :-), a sense of the 'unease' we often feel here in South Africa. We don't fit into the surroundings of the (poor) people in the townships. But at the same time, we don't fit in with the white rich either, at least not without feeling uneasy about it! Somehow this country and its past make it harder to enjoy certain things -and luxuries- without a feeling of guilt. This gets worse by the fact that white South Africans (and tourists!) do not always seem to have this unease...

Different Worlds

Posted by Mikkel
Hi there everyone. Hope you are doing well and a big “thank you” for all the positive comments to this sight. This time I didn’t really know where to start…so any kind of suggestions on what you want us to write about next time are warmly welcomed. For now I’ll try to give you an idea of our life here, exemplified by two different parties: one a football gathering with my new team mates and the other a traditional African party in Guguleto township.

Last week my football team (“Team Evil”) secured promotion by winning 3-2 in one of the last matches of the season. It was a Wednesday so no big celebration was called for, but half of the team gathered at a team mate’s house situated on the hill overlooking the center and harbour of Cape Town. We ordered pizza and had a couple of beers while talking and watching CL football. I would have liked to show you photos, but Erick brought me straight from the football pitch to his house. An interesting ride by the way due to the combination of his new ‘Mini’ and his Schumacher tendencies! It did become a rather weird gathering though. Two guys went to another room where the playstation was set up and three guys took out their laptops and started chatting and emailing. A few other people were smoking on the balcony. Two of them had been to the World Cup in Germany and they showed me some of their photos from the trip.

The second party was in the township of Guguleto. An African party is not just a party in Africa. It is a traditional party honouring the ancestors and held on rare occasions. In our particular case it was at Mlamni’s place in Guguleto. His mother had decided that it was time to honour the ancestors and in particular her own mother who had died 11 years ago. This African party included African beer (the most positive thing I can say about African beer is that it doesn’t really resemble beer, see for yourself!), food, greetings to the ancestors, more African beer, brandy, more greetings, more African beer, more brandy again, normal beer and whatever other kind of drink that materialized…and more of it! The guests (a mix of family, neighbours, friends and whoever happened to come by) were divided according to age (and respect) and gender. The women were inside the house; the older respected men – the elders - in a small circle of ad-hoc benches in the backyard (se photo at top) and the younger men in another group next to the elders. In the front there seemed to be a left-over crowd of young people but since I ended up with the elders I would not know so much about who and what went on there.

I was being seated with the elders, which caused some raised eye brows from the younger men [read: my age] in the other circle. One guy was even a bit aggressive until I managed to let him know that I was a visitor from Denmark, that I felt very honoured and privileged to sit with the elders and that I was definitely not a white South African. He knew Peter Schmeichel and I explained how Zuma scored the best goal in the Danish league in 2003…and everything was OK!

All across the world older people seem to be complaining about the “youth of today”…this seems to be the case also in South Africa: According to the elders the youngsters sitting just next to us (se photo) were “disrespectful”; they were “gangsters and robbers” and they were “careless about the old ways.” While the elders were telling me this in one ear, the young men were telling my other ear that the elders were grumpy old men and that I should come and sit with them!

In between all the drinks several of the elders were kind to tell me all about the rituals, what they said when they greeted the ancestors, what made someone an elder, how I was supposed to do if I did not want to drink when it was my turn (a very useful piece of knowledge that I could have used earlier!) and much more. The neighbour’s son who was around my age, but (like everyone else in Guguleto) still lived at home went to find his world map so I could point out Denmark to him. He told me how he liked looking at the map, planning where he wanted to go “one day”. He had no clue if he would ever succeed, but the will was definitely there.

People got drunk and became more and more rough and even slightly abusive (so I heard from Mette and Janine). Suddenly one guy asks if I know that he is a singer. Before I can answer he has already begun his song constantly looking at me. After two minutes of singing he tells me that he wrote the song himself and demands my opinion: do I think he can make a career as a singer? The party started around two in the afternoon, we left around six and although I really enjoyed the party, it was also a great relief to leave all these drunk, loud, and rough “brothers and comrades” behind.

Why am I telling you all this? I hope these two parties can give you an idea of some of the different worlds we are part of here. And somehow I must admit that I do not feel completely at home in neither of the places. In the township people are warm, open and welcoming, but they also give me the urge to justify or excuse my own situation. I explain that it was a very cheap car we bought, that we were so lucky to rent the house we are living in and that my university gave me a grant that made it possible for me to come here. When the neighbour at the African party showed me the places on the map he wanted to visit, he highlighted South America, USA and Australia…as you can guess I did not respond with a “been there done that!” And just as much as the people in the township are warm and welcoming they are also very much in your face, constantly grapping or addressing you in order to tell you something about their life.

And with the people from football (who all happens to be white by the way…just if you hadn’t already guessed that) we talked about the last time they went to Europe. How one guy had only had 2 days in Prague, but planned to stay longer next time. We talked about what a great house it was, and how we are going to have pool parties in his garden when the summer sets in. We talked about music, Champions League, girlfriends and the jobs the guys are having. All of it stuff I can definitely relate to. But most of the time, people were busy watching television, playing play-station or chatting on their computer. To some extent, so I admit, I was bored.

I also keep having this uneasiness about the way they take their lifestyle for granted (just as much as I do in Denmark). I don’t know what I expected; perhaps some sense of recognition of the privileges they still enjoy due to past injustices? Actually I don’t know anymore. Is it really fair that I want South Africans whites of my age to walk around feeling bad for owning a car, having a good education and living in a nice house?

I think you had more than enough now so I leave you (and myself) with these questions...

Afrikaans

posted by Janine

Vandaag tijd voor een paar alledaagse Afrikaanse uitdrukkingtjies:

Het spijt me: "Ek is jammer"
Zelden: "Nie baie keer nie"
snack: "peuselhappie"
sandwich: "toebroodjie"
grappig: "koddig"


Krantekop luidt: " Idol te vet om te sing."

En de aanwijzingen bij die robot (stoplicht) :
- Druk knoppie.
- Wag tot verkeer staan.
- Loop vinnig deur.
Het kan nooit te duidelijk zijn, toch?

Later meer!
Mooi loop,
janine

A taste of action

posted by Janine

I want to comment on the pictures that Mikkel posted of these lovely big ladies and excited men. These were people demonstrating last week on the 'Global Day of Action', a day of protest organised by TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) -the organisation I'm working at.

It turns out that I got here at a very interesting moment: TAC is quite an 'activist' organisation but this is the first time since 2004 that there's so much action going on. They are mobilising people, getting on the streets and even getting arrested and sprayed with pepperspray by the police! (just for the record: I was there but just as a witness).

The protests are all about the Minister of Health who should be fired because she is:

• letting prisoners die of Aids due to a lack of treatment

• responsible for a country with the most people with HIV/Aids in the world, without having an actual, coherent plan to do something about it,

• pretending that beetroot, garlic and lemon can cure or prevent Aids!

So that's why we were demonstrating. In the days leading up to the event, the other volunteers and me were running around faxing and calling the press to make sure these protests would get the attention they needed. The results have been good: TAC has been in the news(papers) almost everyday last week! And yes, I even made it to the 7 o'clock news myself...

Other than that I am a lousy activist. I am a sissy 'cause I notice that I'm used to things being comfortable and taken care of. Instead of standing 'on the barricades' a whole day, blaming the Health Minister for spending her time drinking cappuchinos, I caught myself longing for a cup of coffee in a warm place myself!

This is seriously wrong, when you know and see how people keep on singing, yelling, marching and dancing with a non-stop flow of energy. It's where the spirit of the Apartheid-struggle shows itself: in the old days, people used to demonstrate and march for tens of miles, sometimes without food and in terrible weather conditions. Just because they had a mission. Now it's not that different, there's just another mission: getting rid of HIV/Aids. I need to learn something from that. No more cappuchinos... Let's get the spirit!

Race thinking!

Posted by Mikkel

I’m back again…and this time it will probably end up quite serious. Don't take it as me trying to educate you, but just as an attempt to make you understand what I'm working with. At the end there will be photos!

You will find that in 3 weeks time I have already learned the South African language of race and colour. For those of you who are not familiar with this, here is a bit of background information: During Apartheid the people of South Africa where divided into 3 major racial groups - whites, coloureds (mixed race) and blacks. A hierarchy was established with whites on top living in the nice areas of town, going to the best schools and having the best jobs. Take the allocation of school money pr. pupil as an example: a black pupil being allocated 10 times less than a white; and a coloured pupil 4 times less than a white).

Since last time I wrote you I have been installed at the City of Cape Town’s Employment Equity Department, where I have my own desk and computer. We are around 9-10 people in the department which is about half of what there should be, but unfortunately this country seems to be notorious about not following policies up with adequate funding. The department is, among other duties, supposed to bring all municipality staff (23.000 employees) through a two day Diversity Management Workshop. They have been busy for around a year and have so far managed a bit less than 2000! So far I have attended one workshop (and had two cancelled the very same morning they were about to take place). The plan is to attend more workshops, conduct follow up interviews with the participants as well as the facilitators and basically participate in what else the department is involved with from recruitment interviews to "Employment Equity Awareness Sessions".

I can tell you that it is heavy stuff they are tackling at the workshops. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to most of you that a storytelling session about racial relations and prejudices brought about some rather sad stories. There were stories of inferiority and discrimination; of special toilets for white, coloured and black people; of you Grandmother threatening you with the “black men who will come and take you”; of being put to prison for being out in the street after nine in the evening or for not having brought your “Pass”; and most of all: stories of lost opportunities when the school was too far away from home or you had to work instead of going to school in order to get food on the family’s table when Dad died or disappeared.

These lost opportunities of education are to me some of the most important issues here. Many whites and coloureds tell me that they do understand the need for affirmative action (positive discrimination) as a way of addressing past discrimination, but that it has gone on long enough and it’s now the time “to wipe the slate clean” Addressing past injustices seems to be acceptable as long as it does not affect your own opportunities or those of your children! But blacks are still the people with the poorest education and therefore lowest in the job hierarchy. The majority of blacks still live in the worst areas, in the worst houses and often attending the worst schools. A collective feeling of guilt which for instance still marks a country like Germany does not seem to be very present. And many people do not acknowledge that their superior position in the competition for jobs is a product of many years of oppression, which does not change when the discriminatory laws are uplifted.

Race matters in South Africa! That is a fact I was prepared for, but after 3 weeks I notice how I have already begun adopting the South African way of speaking about race as the most natural way to categorize people. It is both telling and deeply ironical that a Diversity Management Workshop begins with all the participants filling in their name, phone number, department, gender and race. And in the last rubric you sign!

I know this was a lot of serious stuff, but that is the realities here. On the more funny side I can assure you that we had some good parties, that we have encountered wild penguins, that we have been to church with a lot more singing and clapping than at home and that I can now say for sure that Table Mountain is truly flat as a table on top. Parties, penguins and mountains are mostly reserved for weekends, which can become a bit of a puzzle because everyone is so nice to invite us out for this and that. During the week I’m at work more or less every day. Tuesdays I have now started coaching a group off teenagers in football and I’m also maneuvering myself into position for a team to play with a couple of days a week. Tonight will be my first match.Take care all of you.

PS: I’m posting a couple of photos from a Global Action Day demonstration we attended organized by TAC in order to get the Health Minister fired. All the comrades were singing and dancing for hours (so I was told by Janine, because this activist had to get back to the office!) Take a look at the photos and I’m sure Janine will tell you some more later.

More importantly

Posted by Mikkel
Don't know what it is about women, but they always forget the most important stuff! Check this out!

In and out of the townships

Posted by Janine
After a week here, we finally got to see the “real South-Africa”: we went to the townships where most of the people of Cape Town are living -about three million. On Tuesday I was training football in a township to a bunch of primary school boys (yes it’s true) and on Friday I was dragged onto a stage to dance to ‘African house’… in front of 800 high school kids!

The girls at this high school were definitely much better at shaking their asses than I am, so I wasn’t particularly glad for this honour, but hey what can you do. It was a ‘rape-awareness day’ (sexual violence is a big problem here) and I came along with two American girls from my work. It was great to see the energy coming from the event: songs, poems, DJ’s, theatre and even a good old fashioned magician with a hat and strings. The whole thing was in Xhosa though (the language spoken most by the black people around Cape Town) so I have no clue what messages about rape were coming across, but I’m sure it was better than nothing.

The football training is something I’ll be doing every week from now on. Through a student association at the Uni, students can sign up for all kinds of development projects in the poor townships. I was going to teach hockey (guessed I would be more capable of that) but there were only three boys when we arrived. We decided to only do football (soccer), not knowing that within 20 minutes, there were suddenly about fifty boys running around! Quite a challenge to keep them away from the ball ALL at the same time.

This weekend we also spent a large part of our time in townships. Friday night some people of my work took us to Mzoli’s, a famous ‘braai’ (=bbq) place where we got seriously tasty meat. On Saturday a friend of Mette wanted to show us the best place he knew: it was Mzoli’s again! You do feel quite overdosed though, when you hardly get other than meat. To flush it down, we tasted a home-brewed beer at someone’s house. This was a sour yeasty substance served in a small bucket…I think I’ll keep it by this one try! (voor de nederlanders: denk aan ‘t mengsel van “ Brood Herman”)

I started my work at TAC (Treatment Action Campaign, the biggest Aids fighting NGO of South Africa) on Monday and basically have just been reading a bit and chatted with the other volunteers, who are mostly American. I’m glad that I’m going to do something with Aids-prevention -in a country where 5 million people are HIV positive- but haven’t really got a clue yet what it is I’ll be doing.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’m following a course at the Uni. The teacher was ill this week but I am allowed to follow the course, which gives me a chance to get into the Masters Int. Development in Amsterdam (in Feb.), juhu!

It’s getting too long, sorry. But my biggest impression here up to now is similar to what Mikkel wrote: the incredible friendliness of the people. Everyone we met so far, whether white, black or coloured (and yes, speaking in terms of these races is what everyone still does here) have been so welcoming, open, easy-going and nice, that it keeps surprising me. Especially when thinking about the hard life that some of these people are living and the huge contrast between the townships and the rich villa-neighbourhoods on the seaside. But then again, the townships may be poor and look like slums at times (not everywhere though), people there are very aware of style. Many guys may live in a shack in their mom’s back yard, they’ll still drive a cool car and wear the latest fashion. In fact the townships are so much more lively and happening than Cape Town city, that I sometimes think it’s a shame that we are stuck here and can’t be part of their ‘vibe’ a bit more often.

Well… really enough for now. Hope you’re doing good and having it warmer than me in my double fleece and woollen socks (no heating in these houses…). Take care!

First five days in Cape Town

Posted by Mikkel
We have been 5 days in Cape Town. 5 days where I became a car owner and a house dweller, had whiskey shots with the girl driving me home, and compliments about my “African lips.” All in all very interesting days.

To begin with the materialistic account: We were picked up in the airport by Mette and our landlord Keith who immediately took us to our residence in the so-called District Six. District Six is a neighborhood just next to the centre of town which was claimed a “White Group Area” back in 1966. Most of the 60.000 coloured and black inhabitants were forced to move out in the townships on the Cape Flats – approximately half of them in houses provided by the government. The other 30.000 simply had to find out for themselves. There are hundreds of stories of people running out of their house just in time before the bulldozers leveled it with all their belongings.

Our house was one of the few to survive. It is a (for our standards) huge detached house with a garage, a beautiful view over the bay and a compulsory weekly cleaning lady (we had to take her because otherwise she would be out of work!). Today the area is becoming rather “multi-culti”, which is white slang for “not as good as only-whites areas”. Sunday we went to the car market and bought the second cheapest car for sale. It took me three test drives with three different vehicles, but third time it was instant love! A white South African produced Volkswagen Fox back from the Apartheid days. The owner had to fix a few things, but Wednesday I hope to drive it into our garage.

Cape Town is fantastic. Which other city can boost ocean and a 1000 meter close to vertical mountain side smack in your face. The beauty and the dangers are probably the most told stories about this place. So far we have only experienced the beauty, but safety issues take up quite a lot of attention – ours as well as most other inhabitants it seems. Many people talk about the places you cannot go, trains you should not take and stuff you should not wear. American Elina whom we met Saturday is constantly walking around with a pepper spray. I showed my disapproval with this practice by naming her Pepperlina…behind her back of course – I’m not risking anything with an armed American!

We are taking our precautions by not walking after dark, sticking to busy roads and places and using good old common sense. And so far we have only experienced really great people. One of them, Andrea, brought us home after a few beers and some shots in a bar. Normally something we would have objected against, but what do you do when it is too dangerous to walk home and maybe not safe to jump on a random taxi in the street. The toughest part of all this is actually the restrains you are put under compared to at home where you just jump on your bike and go in to town. But as I said earlier: we have only met great people here.

Another one of the great people, Mlamni, a guy our age from one of the townships who has been to Denmark, summed up the difference between the two countries for me. “Denmark and South Africa are completely the opposite,” he said, “I like how everything is so well organized in Denmark, but you go in to a bar and groups of people just sit by themselves for the whole evening.” People here are indeed quite opposite of us Danes: very open and very direct. Something I happily encountered first hand when a beautiful black woman (one out of many) next to me in the bar told me that I had good African lips! We chatted for a bit, shortly interrupted by Janine asking me to get her a drink (she might have sensed the competition!) I told my new acquaintance about my stand with Janine whereupon she responded: “You are crazy, man! Why do you bring a white woman with you to Africa!”

Today I started at my “work” at the City of Cape Town and Janine also started both at the university and the aids-organisation TAC. so probably there's some news on this front within a short time. We are also hoping to visit the Cape Flats and to go surfing this coming weekend. Take care all of you.

Transiting in the Netherlands

Posted by Mikkel
Adieu Denmark, but not yet South Africa. After having said goodbye to everyone in Denmark we are now in Holland doing the same. 5 days to go before leaving for the African winter. Arriving here turned the roles around a bit. I have all my stuff packed and ready whereas Janine is trying to get all the practical things organized. In Denmark it was the other way around. Enough for now. Next post from me should contain the first experiences from Cape Town.