Cape Town in May

While I wait for more pics off K's camera - here is one of him on Atlantic Beach taking pictures of rock pools.

The Cape Town trip was all I hoped it would be, nostalgic, comfortable, surprising and all the shopping you could dream of! It is actually amazing how much cheaper everything there is compared to whk. We stayed with M, Mom stayed with Aunty T and so we spent quite a lot of time driving around. Which turned out to be a lovely way to re-familiarise ourselves with the mother city I don't think that I would ever choose to live there permanently but I could see us spending another couple of years there. The population of the city has grown ridiculously but the city hasn't and so now it really feels like it is overfull. No matter what time you are driving on the highways or when you are in the malls, on the beach, walking around downtown, there are SO many people around all the time. To the point where you are constantly asking yourself: don't these people have jobs to go to?? Having lived in DC and now in WHK where it never feels like the town is overflowing with people, it was very suffocating and oppressive to know that so many people were doing the same thing and wanting the same thing from the same small space that you are occupying. I guess we all had a little culture shock.

Of course all the good things about CT are still good. The best day I had was wondering around downtown, up and down Long street and in the Botanical gardens. We were in and out of second hand book shops where the books were piled high on the shelves, floors and and all surfaces available. We stopped in one of our old-time favourite coffee shops and had milkshakes. Although we had forgotten how much people smoke in CT and now that we have not been exposed to it, it really is obnoxious and interfered with our milkshakes to the point that we went and sat outside!

I think the best experience of the trip was catching up with old acquaintances. People have changed and yet still stayed the same, so that the visits were full of curiousity about the new parts of them and the comfort and warmth of the recognisable ones.

more photos to come.