The Good Doctor

We are most assuredly in the dead in winter now. It's dark out when the alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and the snooze button has begun to look more and more attractive. We've gone five days without seeing the top of Table Mountain, and as I write this, the wind is blowing so hard that the front door and the door to our balcony are rattling in their frames. And something just made a horrendous crash outside.

The wind here is strong enough, and has enough of a personality, that locals have named it. Or, rather, they've named one of the three winds, the summer southeaster that blows up from Antarctica without gaining any purchase on land before reaching the Cape Peninsula. It's been dubbed the "Cape Doctor."

You can learn more about the Cape Doctor and the accompanying cloud formation called the "Tablecloth" here.

There's also a northwester and a southwester that do not, as far as I know, have names. But they can be brutish and mean and infuse the entire city with a strong desire to stay at home and drink rooibos, the herbal tea native to this country.

I don't know which direction the wind is coming from tonight--it seems like it's coming from everywhere at once, actually--but it's pulling a trick that I've only seen it do once before. In our new apartment, where everything was gutted and remodeled and sold to solid South Africans with an eye for good construction and excellent attention to detail, the wind has found a way inside. Tonight, as we do every night, we've pulled a light curtain across the door to the balcony, and that curtain is billowing outward like a sail every time the wind turns to blow full force into the side of the apartment building. A solid 60 mph wind gust outside becomes a gentle breeze inside, and is reigned in by the curtain. Katie and I are camped out by the heater with sweaters on, reading about global warming in our New Yorkers that arrived yesterday (thanks to some good friends). And we're drinking rooibos tea.

Villagers Say Dead Sangoma Is a Snake

A widow fears for her life because of rumours that her late husband, a sangoma [witch doctor, kind of], has returned from the dead in the form of a huge snake with a human head.

Glory Nyathi, 42, of Cottondale near Acornhoek in Limpopo, is accused of feeding the human-headed snake in the middle of the night.

“My four children and I are treated like witches now,” she says.

“People are threatening to burn my house and don't want my children to attend school.”

The wild rumours suggest that the snake, like the dead sangoma, wears glasses.

They also say it terrorizes villagers at night.

Nyathi has challenged anyone with evidence to come forward.

“My husband is dead and I want his spirit to rest in peace,” she says.

Her husband died on December 8 last year.

Nyathi believes the rumours started when their son, 11, thought he saw his father herding cattle earlier this month.

She went to police for help, but says the officers laughed at her.

Yes, dear readers, the Voice was back in form last week. I was about to say that we didn't get these kind of wierd stories back where I used to live, but that's not entirely true, is it?

I discussed this fine Cape Town tabloid previously here and here and here.

On the Stand

A couple Fridays ago, I took the stand at Cape Town's High Court.

It was during a hearing for a case that's been all over the news here in South Africa.

When I say I took it, I should say that the chair was offered to me, and since I was sitting on the floor at the time, I figured it was as good a place as any.

I didn't have to testify. That was probably for the best, since I was there so I could report the news, not so I could make it.

The case involved a defamation lawsuit brought by a leading AIDS advocacy group against a doctor named Matthias Rath, who has rolled into town lately to try to convince people to take his vitamins instead of proven AIDS drugs to treat their HIV infections.

The courtroom was packed, and all the reporters were lined up along one wall. At first, I had grabbed a spot where reporters aren't really supposed to sit, directly behind the attorneys. So I got bumped when Rath and his retinue showed up…but not before the good doctor plopped down next to me and I tried without much success to interview him.

I moved to my spot on the floor, among several other reporters, but when the court officers kept tripping over me, one of them opened up the door to the witness stand and asked me to sit in there.

“Really?,” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Ummm,” I said. “Okay.”

The witness stand wasn't as prominently placed in this courtroom as it is in American courts, but it meant that I had a literal front row seat for the show that followed.

The three judges hearing the case all wore black robes, of course. They were on my right. One of the judges, the one so close to me that I could practically reach out and touch him, looked exactly like C. Everett Koop would if he had a deep tan.

A woman who I assumed to be the court reporter (though she appeared to be recording audio of the proceedings on a computer instead of a stenograph machine) sat directly in front of me. During one break, I caught her reading one of the exhibits that Rath's lawyer was trying to get admitted into evidence. It was a book by Rath called “Why Animals Don't Get Heart Attacks.” To say that this man is operating outside the scientific mainstream is perhaps an understatement.

There was a component of audience participation to the whole thing too, which made it a bit different from the courtrooms I'm used to. I don't think an American judge would take too kindly if people in the gallery kept saying “That's right!” or, emphatically, “Mmmmm Hm!” when someone made a point they agreed with.

The real show was outside, though. That's where protestors backing both Rath and the AIDS advocacy group, the Treatment Action Campaign, where having their say. They were having their say so loudly that, at one point, the judges asked representatives to go outside and ask them to quiet down so they could hear what the attorneys were saying.

The day in court was mostly about resolving procedural issues, and for the judges to rule on several motions. So when the noise outside started to increase again, in a way that sounded alarmed and unorganized, the journalists looked at each other and, one by one, began quietly standing up and leaving, even as the hearing continued.
I wanted to go too, but I couldn't get the door to the witness stand to open. After a minute of struggling right there up in front of the court as the attorneys were having their say, I got it to pop open with a mighty kick. It made a nice loud noise that would have been even more embarrassing if the crowd outside hadn't again elevated the noise level.

It turns out that there had been a brief shoving match between the two sides. Nothing newsworthy. But I stuck around for a while down on the street, because, let me tell you, people in Cape Town know how to protest. There were no dumb slogans, none of those retread chants, like: “What do we want? “Insert Your Cause Here!” When do we want it?” “Now!” Instead, there was dancing, with women forming a circle, all turning to the left, and hopping backwards in step. And there was singing. Fantastic singing, with improvised harmonies and soloists with megaphones.

I had left my camera at home because I assumed it would be confiscated by the court officers. It's a decision I'll regret for a long time, because the protest was one of the most photogenic events I've ever seen, and the court was extremely lax about letting cameras in. I saw none other than the esteemed Dr. Rath surreptitiously hold up his digital camera to snap a quick picture right before things got underway.

As the singing continued, I went up to one woman who needed no microphone for her voice to carry over everyone else. She was a very short, round older woman standing on the steps of the courthouse, slightly apart from everyone else.

“You're the best one here,” I yelled over the crowd.

She gave me a high five. Then she translated the lyrics of the songs for me. The protesters were singing in Xhosa.

“They are saying, 'TAC is my home,'” she said.

I wrote that down.

“Now they are saying, 'We are going to win and freedom will follow.'”

I wrote that down too, though neither line really illustrated the controversy, which involves TAC's ongoing fight with both Rath and South Africa's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, whose many sins, from TAC's perspective, include the fact that she has been very slow to condemn Rath.

She leaned over again, just as I made out a familiar name amid the harmonies and the Xhosa clicks. “Now they are saying, 'We will start with Rath and Manto will follow.”

Ah! Money quote.

See the story that resulted here. I had so much stuff from three weeks of reporting that not even the money quote made it in.

Observe a tree

There's a student-y neighborhood called Observatory near where we live, and we've been spending a lot of time there, because its student-y prices are right in our price range, even if the student-y students make us feel a wee bit old.

But the name of the neighborhood presents some problems for us. Here, people pronounce it "observe-a-tree." Of course, we would pronounce it "observe-a-tory." But, in the interest of being understood, shouldn't we pronounce it "observ-a-tree" too? Even if it sounds exceedingly snotty to our ears?

I don't want to go back to the U.S. as one of those annoying ex-ex-pats who thinks a few months out of the country qualifies them to have some sort of weird continental accent. But what if calling the neighborhood "observe-a-tree" opens up some sort of linguistic floodgate, and I return home calling the bathroom the "loo," the elevator the "lift," and the letter "z" by its full name, "zed"?

(As an aside, soccer is still called soccer in South Africa. I've asked around, and have yet to find anyone who knows why. But for you, dear readers, I will keep investigating the matter.)

I think I've found the solution, though. I realized some people have a nickname for this student-y neighborhood, and I've proposed that we call it by that name to avoid permanent injury to our charming American accents.

The nickname? It's: "Obs."

Backside Strip

South Africans--white South Africans, anyway--seem to have a thing for dried meat.

The stuff they eat here might be a distant cousin of beef jerky, but for two important differences: it's made from a quality of meat that you might actually want to consume, and the animal involved isn't always a cow.

They call it biltong. They sell it everywhere, including the nationwide chain of gourmet grocery stores called Woolworths, where it can often be found in all its varieties hanging on a rack by the cash register.

On the back of every package are these words:

Did You Know?
The word 'biltong' is derived from Dutch, with 'bil' meaning 'backside' and 'tong' meaning 'strip.'

Yum.

This is what the package looks like:



And this is an exclusive view of some biltong, right before I ate it:



That particular kind was marketed as “moist sliced beef biltong,” which Katie believes “sounds dirty.” That was before she read the product description in smaller letters on the front. It says the biltong inside is “tender and moist with a natural fat layer to enhance the flavour.”

Double yum.

Though all biltong is dried meat, all dried meat is not biltong. There's a type of sausage here called droëwors that is available in dried pieces, like this:



As I said, it's not all made with beef. That particular scintillating piece of animal came from this package:


Triple yum.

Philip

Our apartment complex is finally starting to fill up to capacity, and that has meant the departure recently of Nine-Fingered Philip, our sort-of security guard.

The apartment building was newly remodeled when we moved in nearly two months ago, and we arrived on the second day that the builders said it was habitable. But the residents of the other units were a little slow to move in, and for several weeks there were perhaps three or four apartments occupied in the entire complex of 21 units.

Construction had been completed on the unoccupied units, including the installation of the stoves, which are a precious commodity here. So, as much for the sake of the empty apartments as for the human inhabitants of the building, the builders hired Philip to watch over things. His only apparent responsibility was to conduct late-night rounds, walking past our door every hour late into the evening.

But he was here, it seemed, pretty much all of the time. And that was a little creepy. He was a gaunt man, weather beaten and rather gruff, with a pussy sore on his left earlobe, and he could usually be found sitting in a lawn chair under the open door of one of the covered parking bays, which was his home for as long as he had the job.

I liked Philip at first, though Katie always found him a little too weird.

Nonetheless, despite her personal misgivings about the man, she was even more appalled than I was over his living conditions, there in the parking bay, with a slab of foam for a bed and with no electricity to power his space heater as winter set in.

In any case, he'd be there in the mornings when Katie and I left together on our way to drop her off at school, and he'd be there 30 minutes later when I got back. He'd be there when the mail came, and he'd bring it up to me, knocking on the door and handing it to me with a flourish. He'd ask me where I was going if I left, and he'd ask how things had gone once I came back. His hovel was directly across from our assigned parking space, so there was no avoiding him.

Not that I was always looking to avoid him. Some days, I'd ask him to tell me what was in the Afrikaans newspaper, gossip about who was moving in next, or chat about the weather or where he was from or whatever popped into my head. Once, I asked him to be on the lookout for the guy who was coming around to install someone else's blinds, and Philip dutifully corralled him for me and arranged for the guy to hang all our blinds for next to nothing. I tipped him 20 rand-about three bucks-for the favor, and he smiled at me and said, “Oy! Thanks, man.”

I was always vacillating back and forth between wanting to establish some boundaries so he would stop expecting to have a lengthy conversation every time he brought the mail by the apartment, and wanting him to think of me as his buddy, so I could ask him the one thing I was most curious about: his missing middle finger.

It was hard to miss. He was a habitual chain-smoker, and he'd hold the cigarette between his pointer finger and his ring finger, close his eyes and take a deep drag, giving me plenty of time to stare. And when he'd knock to announce his arrival every afternoon for the mail delivery, he'd wave at me through the frosted glass window next to the front door. Well, he wouldn't wave, exactly. He'd yell “oy!,” hold his hand up, and I'd count.

“One, two, three, four... yep, that's Philip,” I'd sigh, and open the door.

If it was anyone else, I wouldn't have been able to recognize them through the frosted glass, but Philip and his hand were hard to miss.

It was around the time that I had resolved to get to know him better that he started making such intimacy impossible. He started getting weirder.

First, upon returning from the store one day with a bottle of wine among the assorted groceries, we caught him staring at an outdoor light bulb directly in front of the entrance to someone else's apartment. We watched as he stared, and stared, and then suddenly reached up with a bare hand and grabbed a moth. He turned to us with a crooked grin, examined our shopping bags and said, “Oy! Enjoy your drinks.”

Yeah. Thanks.

Next, we saw him going through the trash. Our trash. Twice.

Then came the days he was oddly silent, and would watch us from his lawn chair as we descended four flights of stairs and walked to the car. We'd say hello, and he'd just stare. We'd quickly get into the car, shut the doors, and, without looking at each other--because Philip was still looking at us--one of us would mutter a low “okaaaaaay.”

Philip vanished one day last week. Most of the apartments are occupied now, and his job as watchman of the unoccupied units had become unnecessary. A neighbor told us he was supposed to leave at least a week before he finally disappeared, and that the builder had confiscated his electric gate opener that gave him access to the complex. But he hadn't left right away, even though he was no longer getting paid. He'd shut off the gate from the inside if he was leaving, which allowed him to open it with a push upon his return.

That last week of his residency, it was windy here in Cape Town, and it rained a lot, but Philip continued his evening patrols. It would have been a good plot for a horror movie: weird caretaker with a grudge wanders the grounds of an apartment complex late at night, his disfigured body casting eerie shadows on the window when the sky is illuminated by lightening.

No one got murdered in our building, as far as I know, but maybe in the movie version, the clueless police could be perplexed that every victim had their finger cut off.

With these sorts of things going through our heads, I suppose it's a little redundant to say we're glad he's gone, even if I never did get the story of the missing finger.

But he hasn't really left. Not entirely. Sometimes, late at night when the wind is howling down off the mountain, I think I can still hear his plaintive cry in the darkness.

It sounds like this: “Oy!”

More from the Voice

The promised posting of news from Cape Town's tabloid, The Voice, is going to have to be a bit more irregular than the weekly feature I proposed last week. The problem is, the paper is wildly uneven. Some weeks it's brilliant, and some weeks, not so much.

There was one article that could have been a hands down winner over the past seven days, except it was written rather poorly, and it was, in some ways, even crueler than the one that ran away with the best headline nomination last week.

It was about a physically and mentally disabled man who ran away from home. Except he didn't really run, because to run, you first have to be able to walk. Instead, he rolled. And not in a wheelchair, either, because he didn't have one. He went end over end all the way across his rural town, until he found someone to give him a lift. When that ride came to an end, he rolled some more.

The guy is apparently still missing, though the newspaper didn't do anything to help refer people to the proper authorities if they spot him on the roll somewhere.

Remember how I said that sometimes the paper runs headlines in Afrikaans? That was the case with this one.



Click here for a larger view, to get a glimpse at the jaw-dropping audaciousness of the graphic that accompanies the story.

Power Up

Our apartment has an electrical meter set aside just for our us. That's no different than you'll find in any New York apartment building, of course, but this one has a feature that makes it something of a throwback.

Ever heard references to meters that operate on coins? We have the modern-day equivalent. In order to keep the lights on and the fridge running, we have to pre-pay for our electricity by buying vouchers at the local supermarket. Then we come home, punch in the long string of numbers on the voucher, and the meter flashes a smiley face and racks up the power units we just purchased. Then, over the next several days or weeks, it slowly winds down again until you put in another voucher or until it reaches zero. At which point the lights shut off.

We're still getting used to it. When we went to Durban for five days, we came home to find the fridge soaking wet and very warm, as the little bugger had eaten up our remaining power and then defrosted itself. Worse, we didn't have any vouchers sitting around, so we had to run out and buy more before we could switch on the lights.

Now, we buy a big voucher for 200 or 300 rand--good for about three or four weeks--and then get a backup for another 50 rand, so when we forget again we at least have some way to switch the lights back on until we have a chance to go get more power.

The meter is over the stove:



And here's a close up:



It does have a few advantages, I suppose. If you don't have a lot of money, you can buy your power in small denominations and then be very careful that the lights aren't on for any longer than you need them. And this system means there's no meter readers, which probably cuts down on costs. But in a country with massive unemployment, you'd think the one thing that the government utility would want to do would be to employ a couple thousand people as meter readers.

Is our system in NYC the anachronism? How is it done in other countries? Is this the wave of the future? Any insight as to how it works in other parts of the world would be welcome.

Mmmm. Fish.

This is a picture of our dinner tonight:



This is a picture of the warning label on the back:



I'm happy to report that I am not "some people."

A Corpse Screams at Hikers

It was scary enough for the two men hitching a lift in a hearse with a corpse in the coffin.

But when the corpse started screaming it suddenly became too much.

The men smashed the back window of the hearse and fled into the night, leaving all their belongings behind.

Now the "corpse" wants to find the men so he can give them their things back.

Mzolisi Skolpati laughs when he tells how the men ran for their lives from the screaming corpse.

Skolpati says he was hitching a lift to Mthatha on Sunday night when the hearse stopped to pick him up.

It was a freezing night, and he asked the driver to close the window.

But the driver said the window was broken and couldn't close. He suggested Skolpati snuggle down inside the brand-new, empty coffin in the back of the hearse to keep warm.

"Since I was drunk, I climbed into the coffin and fell asleep," he says.

When Skolpati was asleep, the hearse driver stopped to pick up two more men hitching a lift.

They got into the back but because they were a bit scared of the "corpse" lying in the coffin, they closed the lid.

"I thought I was dreaming when I heard them talking about the dead man in the coffin," says Skolpati.

The men lit cigarettes, and smoke drifted into the coffin and the smell woke Skolpati up.

He was terrified to find the lid closed, so he started screaming for help.

This was too much for the hitch-hikers, who smashed the back window of the hearse, jumped out and fled.

Fortunately, the hearse was travelling very slowly.

And that, my friends, is the winning article in the first week of our new contest, in which we find the best article from the Voice over the previous seven days and share it with you. I previously discussed the quality journalism of this Cape Town tabloid here.

But wait. There's more.

Click here for this week's winner in the headline category. You won't be disappointed.

Which isn't to say you won't be deeply offended.

But disappointed? No way.

I Think She's Flirting With Me

When I was reporting this story for Newsday at the Waterfront last week, I didn't manage to get the picture I came for, but I did get this one of a sea lion.

When I raised the camera up to take a picture, she actually started batting her eyelashes at me.



Mom, you'll want to go here for a larger image suitable for your screensaver.

The Great Flood

Our car, our major purchase for the time we are here in South Africa, shares many of its qualities with those of a used sponge. I mean no disrespect to used sponges, but it's true.

The first two weeks we were here, we were renting a car from a guy who came recommended from someone we vaguely knew before we arrived, and once we got here, she suggested that we just go ahead and buy a car from him as well. So we went to see what he had in stock in our price range, and it turns out that cars in South Africa keep their value a little better than they do in the states. The one we ended up with has a certain charm, I suppose, but it's still a piece of crap.

The car is a VW Golf, a stick shift with the steering wheel on the right side, of course. It has a choke, which you have to pull out to give the engine more gas for the first several minutes that you're driving in the morning. It has power nothing, not windows, not locks, not steering. In keeping with the local custom, it comes with a u-shaped lock that attaches around the stick shift when the car is parked, to deter thieves. It's white, and it appears that white VW Golfs are the most common car on the roads of Cape Town.

It looks like this:



We were quite proud of ourselves when we got this clunker. This purchase means we are a two-car couple, even if the other car is currently sitting in the driveway of Katie's parents' house in Virginia. In our fondness for our new vehicle, we tried to come up with a name for it, a process that Katie insisted required some time. We had to get to know the car first, she said, to learn its name instead of imposing a name upon it.

Nonetheless, after a few minutes behind the wheel, I began lobbying hard for "Ernie." That struck me as appropriate: it's a modest name, and a little quirky. Katie liked her friend Jenny's suggestion of calling it "Golf Cart," which was also appropriate, since our car lacks any power under the hood and is about the size of something you might drive around a country club. Another moniker we kicked around was “Wunder-Baum,” since the previous owner, a German exchange student at UCT, had hung an orange pine-tree-shaped air freshener off the rearview mirror that had the word "Wunder-Baum" printed on both sides.

But Katie was right in saying we needed to wait, because one characteristic that hadn't been immediately apparent soon made itself known: when it rains, the car floods.

And I don't mean that it gets just a little damp. Even Noah would be perturbed by the amount of water that collects on the inside of this car.

This problem is not endemic just to our vehicle. We've recently learned it is a characteristic common to all VW Golfs. Out for drinks last night with a couple from our apartment complex, Marcus and Laura, we were comparing car-trouble stories when Laura said she noticed with sympathy the condensation on the inside of our windows the other day. Oh yes, she assured us, her Golf had the exact same problem.

So, if there are any Golf owners reading this, you'll know what I'm talking about. After a good rainstorm, you get in the car and check around for any signs of a lake. It won't be there right away. But once you start driving, once you make a sharp turn or head up a hill, the water that's collected somewhere in the engine begins to pour out from under the dashboard. It runs into the plastic tray that's at shin level between the front seats, and then overflows from the tray all over the floor.

I've been meaning to buy some sort of plastic cup to keep in the glove compartment for the days after a rainstorm, so I could bail the car out in times of trouble as if it were a sinking ship.

Suffice to say, we haven't taken the Wunder-Baum off the mirror. That little pine tree is fighting a losing battle against the scent of perpetual dampness.

But Katie was right. The car's name is now clear to us. It came to me in a flash of inspiration.

We've taken to calling it... The Swamp Thing.

Click here for a few more pictures of the soppy mess we call a car.

All the News That Fits

I pretend to be a newspaper person, so I can say with some assurance that the newspapers here, with the exception of the Mail & Guardian and Business Day, are pretty mediocre. They're frequently saved from looking totally useless by their regular use of wire copy. Media critics here blame it on bad management: on massive cutbacks and the departure of senior journalists and editors. Sounds like a familiar lament from back home.

But there's one newspaper, a new one published in Cape Town called the Voice, that is unabashedly bad. And I mean baaaaad. It's so bad, it pushes against that barrier of being so-bad-it's-good until it breaks through the other side and becomes downright bad again.

I read an article in one of the other newspapers about the Voice, and the Voice editors made the point that there are massive segments of the South African population that aren't regular newspaper readers, and if their trashy rag is getting them to pick up the paper, then it's a good thing. And, they said, they don't just write about the outlying shacktowns and settlements when there's an outlandish crime story there. Point taken.

The Voice is a true tabloid, of the British model, complete with Page 3 girls. How closely does it hew to the tabloid formula? They put a story on their front page about a woman who had a divine image appear on her bathroom window. The headline, in something like 78-point text:

JESUS LIVES IN MY TOILET.

Don't believe me? You should NEVER doubt a journalist, of all things. Click here for proof.

I love this newspaper. Its reporters assume that its readers understand both English and Afrikaans, which is the first language of many in this corner of the country--black and white, but mostly the so-called "coloured," or people of mixed heritage. So the Voice uses Afrikaans words in the headlines when English words just won't do.

It also publishes jokes sent in by readers. Here's a sample from today's paper:

Q: What should you do if you see your ex-husband rolling around in pain on the ground?
A: Shoot him again.
Q: What do you call a dead blonde sitting in a cupboard?
A: Last year's winner of the annual hide-and-seek contest.

The nice woman at the corner shop, who knows I'm a wanna-be foreign correspondent, can't get over the fact that I keep buying the Voice. "This is not good journalism," she warns me about twice a week. But this morning she and another customer were pouring over a Voice story about a zebra that fell in love with a donkey in Barbados. Their offspring has been dubbed a zonkey.

Another paper, the Argus, has a daily feature between the crosswords on the back page of the classifieds. The feature is called Scribble Space. It's just an empty square. It stands to reason, I suppose, that it's designed for people to work out clues for the crossword puzzles in that space, but with trees at a premium, you would think they would make better use of their news hole than this.

Now, in what is of course a non sequitur, since I was speaking just now of bad management and nonsensical graphics, here's a picture of the Newsday Pyramid, a powerpoint slide that was distributed along with a memo in the newsroom of my former employer the other day. If anyone out there can help me make heads or tails of it, I would deeply appreciate it:



Click to see a larger version of The Newsday Pyramid.

At the Mall

It's gotten a little chilly lately, and our apartment, for all its shiny newness, doesn't have heat. I think it's the rare apartment in Cape Town that does have central heat, actually. So over the last several days, Katie and I went out and bought a little space heater and a bunch of sweaters in a series of trips to the mall.

We can't seem to stay away from the mall, truth be told. That's where we went today, and yesterday, and Friday. And Wednesday. And Tuesday. And last Sunday. Maybe it's a lack of knowing where else to go that leads us back there so often, but I don't think so. The malls are always full of (usually white) South Africans, and you can do your grocery shopping and your book buying and fine dining there, so I think it's just where people go.

And the malls are NICE, too. The first one that shocked us was out in Constantia, the fancy suburb that makes all the other fancy suburbs feel bad about themselves. It was quite pleasant, but small. It was just a warm up. Our next stop was the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, which is like San Francisco's Pier 39 in that it's a major tourist destination, but now that the tourists have all gone home for the season, it's still crowded with local shoppers. We keep going back there too, despite warnings from a well-intentioned friend of mine who wrote up a city-wide guide of all the places to eat, shop and hang out. She topped her guide with a caveat about what was missing:

“WARNING: None of this stuff is located in the Waterfront because I hate the Waterfront,” she wrote.

“It is super touristy, overpriced, and overrated for what it is. While I recognize at some point you may have to or (god forbid), want to visit the Waterfront, you are going to have to do it without my help as I refuse to enable anyone who wants to spend time there. You will thank me for this some day.”

Sorry, Carly. We keep going back. I mean, there's TWO movie theaters. And a fantastic kitchen-and-curtains store called @Home that makes Katie drool.

We're dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers. We're not mall people. Not back home, anyway. Malls mean you're consuming the test-marketed, safe and easy stuff from the national chains. There's no sense of discovery, and it takes all the fun out of things. Right? Right?

Lately, we've found yet another one, a four-story spectacular that's closer to where we live. I think it's called Cavendish. This thing is sparkly and shiny and new and always seems just about ready to burst from all the people inside, and it takes the very Americanized version of the mall and pushes it up a notch. I mean, there's a concierge. Even if you're a mall-skeptic, you could appreciate the outlet of a small chain that markets the cutting-edge designs from young South African fashion designers. There's gourmet food. And another @Home.

Katie and I have speculated that the reason South Africans go to malls is because malls are controlled and well-guarded, and we think people here are always unnecessarily convinced that they're going to get shot or stabbed or something. The shoppers are always disproportionately white and Indian compared to the actual population of the country (though, sadly, probably representative of the income distribution), and the parking is also safe. The whole thing is sanitized.

Outside the Cavendish mall is a long street full of local merchants, where it's loud and just a little bit dirty, and that's where we managed to acquire all of our sparse furniture collection. But now when we try to think of where we need to go to get all the other little stuff we require, we always think of the malls.

We didn't realize how bad we were getting until we stopped at the Mother of All Malls for the first time last weekend. This one is far away from where we live, but it was on the way home from the Winelands, where we had gone for some research for a travel story I'm writing. We actually got lost inside this thing. It had a whole amusement park just outside. It was so large that it couldn't settle for just one architectural theme. It had medieval-looking stuff in one part, and an art nouveau wing, and a lot of plain old gigantism elsewhere. It was called Canal Walk, but the one thing we didn't see was a canal. Still, it wouldn't have surprised me to see one running down the middle of one of the wings of shops.

After getting lost, and shoved, and lost again, and hiking for 10 minutes to get back to the car, we decided we were never going back to that particular venue. It was the most American thing we'd seen here yet, the mall to the nth degree, and it cured any longing for home that I might have been feeling.

Six Lanes and Three Zebras

Driving back to the apartment after another in a long string of trips to Home Affairs, South Africa's version of the INS (or whatever they changed the name of the INS to lately), stuck in traffic in the worst afternoon bottleneck I've found in this city yet, I happened to glance over at the hill where Katie first spotted that zebra several days ago.

Since that day, we've seen several of them nearly every time we've driven past the spot, just off the highway and over a cyclone fence, grazing there quietly alongside dozens of antelope-type creatures that we've been unable to classify due to our sub-par knowledge of antelope-type creatures.

They were there again this afternoon, heads down, munching happily. There were at least three, this time a few steps apart from the antelope-type creatures.

I spotted a sign about the zebras a few weeks ago when we were at the Rhodes Memorial, a massive Lincoln Memorial-looking monument to a dead guy of questionable worthiness for that type of structure. The zebra sign said that the ones we saw, with stripes that only cover about the front half of their body, were once very common but had vanished. Now, through breeding zebras that had the recessive gene, they'd revived the sub-species. Even in that short explanation, I probably butchered the biology or the genetics involved in the process, but the point is, they're rare.

We had dinner with my friend Alex and his wife Toni last night. It was at a really nice place, as they were here for the start of their honeymoon, having gotten married just this past weekend, and we were celebrating. It was interesting to talk to them about their initial impressions of the city, viewed through the haze of their jet-lag. They were as surprised as we were at how unlike the Africa of their imaginations it was. In fact, they were a little down on the place.

And though Katie and I continue to laugh at how everyone thinks we've gone off to rough it for a year, I was a little defensive. We love it here. And the fact is, even if we're not living in the bush, it is an adventure. And it IS Africa. In that six-lanes-wide traffic jam, where two of the cities major highways come together, I just had to look up and to my right for proof.

We've Got Style

Katie's too modest to say anything, but she was featured in two New York newspapers on Sunday. The first one doesn't really count, since I wrote it, and we knew about it in advance. On the web, you can't see the pictures, but I'm told one of them is of Katie. And the story starts with the words, "Ask Katie Lane, if you ever meet her..."

Then there's this second one, which came as something of a surprise. Apparently, both of us are stylish and hip and right of the moment--who knew? certainly not us--because a phototgrapher at our local illegal restaurant caught us on film and put us in the New York Times Sunday style magazine. We're sitting with our friend Nicole, who spotted the picture, scanned it in and sent it to us. You can't see too much of her, but she notes that at least her hair is now famous.



Larger image in which we are nearly actually discernable here