Pervasive pinkness

There’s something about pink that I never could like, even as a little girl. I’m not sure if it’s the colour itself, or the connotations associated with it: ‘Pink is for girls, pink is feminine, pink is frilly’. Oh alright, sometimes I wish I was a bit fluffier, but it if its to involve Pinkishness, I’d rather continue being as cuddly as a sea-urchin and have done with it.

Then again, perhaps it’s the way pink stands out – I don’t wear neon orange either – I’ve no desire to be seen coming over the horizon like a rising sunset. I like being able to fade into the background at will with chameleon-like cunning.

Perhaps its just my sense of aesthetics: the idea that bright colours should be used sparingly if at all, or the temptation to whip on a pair of sunglasses becomes overwhelming.

As for painting whole rooms pink, its awfully unsettling, like being cocooned in candy-floss: so sweet its sickening. Cape Town presented me with the pinkest room I’ve ever seen, and since it was a ladies’ restroom and my need was great, I entered this roseate room of pervasive pinkness – the trauma will no doubt remain with me eternally.

Apart from the pink walls, the floor was painted a particularly noxious shade of green. I usually like green, but not like this, and not with all that pink! The toilet seats were the piece de resistance: glittery transparent purple plastic things with plastic butterflies and flowers set into them like gruesome Disney fossils on whom the wrath of China has been inflicted. Delightful: and so tasteful! Ah, and I love spreading delight around, so you may share with me… Perhaps you too will prance forth with a manic grin.

Pink, pinker, pinkest.

Relative affluence

The city of Cape town is quite a culture shock for a small-town person, and one of the things I always find the most striking, is the way it feeds off itself. A city consists of people: all sorts of people, and the relativity of affluence is almost painfully apparent.

I drove through the leafy suburb of Bishop’s court: all stately homes and luxury cars. The place smells of money and debt (or would, if money and debt had a fragrance). I found myself wondering what it must be like to have so much money that ostentation is second nature, the way to live. I don’t think there’s anywhere to go from there but downhill. You’re bobbing about on the top of society, you have everything of the ‘best’. If you’re lucky, you’ll stay there, because the only direction in which movement is possible, is downwards.

My route took me past the squatter camps too: shanty towns of wood and corrugated iron perched cheek-by-jowl beside the freeway. You’re on rock bottom over there, and even someone with a RDP house is pretty well-off. (Note to foreigners: The Reconstruction and development program – the government build little houses and give them away - long waiting list.). The RDP houses are nearly as tightly-packed as the shanties, row on row of them, and to their occupants, even someone as precariously lower middle class as I am is wealthy by comparison.

Now here’s the funny thing: in terms of the bottom line in cash (let’s ignore ‘assets’ for now), looking at how much credit is left when debit is subtracted, the shanty dwellers are probably in the best shape. After all, no-one’s going to give them credit. My bottom line falls below zero, squarely in the red, and that of the Bishop’s court folk, is probably way, way below that. Money: most of it is imaginary. Wish I could dream up a bit of it, mind you…

Now here’s where the food chain comes into the equation, because everybody is trying to sell something to the rest: be it consumables or time or South African flags from China. Round and round it goes, you buy this from me, then I have money so that I can buy that from someone else. No-one cares if you’re rock-bottom or upper crust, as long as you’re buying, because buying means money and money means spending for its recipient. It’s a bit like being in the middle of a school of hungry piranhas in full feeding-frenzy.

Sure, deep in the countryside, the cycle of getting and spending continues, but in the City, its so intense, so aggressive. People become faceless, its daunting. There’s constant sensory bombardment, so you have to ‘switch off’ certain things you’re accustomed to perceiving in full or you’d end up gibbering. It reminds me of one of the reasons why, though having grown up in a large city, I worked very hard in order to never have to live in one again.

Thing is, it… like… really stresses me out, you know? Maybe I’m a hippie after all.

The joy of coffee

Its wonderful, wonderful stuff, and I’ll freely admit that I’m addicted to it. If I don’t get my cuppa in the morning, I’m as cross as crabs all day. In South Africa, most people drink those awful chicory / coffee blends that taste like pencil lead – can’t abide the stuff – I’d rather go without.

Anyway, as you can imagine after reading the previous post about my delightful accommodations, there wasn’t so much as a whiff of decent coffee to be found anywhere in the place. ‘No problem’ you’re saying (or should be if you’re paying attention) ‘She’s in the big city, she’ll find coffee shops on every corner’. Well, yes and no, but mostly no.

The problem with Cape Town, if you don’t know it (which I don’t), is that one wrong turning can take you miles out of your way before you can turn back. Not wanting to end up in the Antipodes, I had to hope to find a filling station on one of the routes I happened to be following and look for coffee there, but oh! What a joy it was to find that grail in a paper cup after hours of questing, to sit back and enjoy the heady elixir on the grass outside (I need to smoke when I drink coffee, so of course, out I go) and to feel it seeping into the blood stream like… like… really good coffee.

Oh coffee thou art my true delight

You keep me awake into the night

You make my ulcers burn so hot

But I’d rather have you than.. er

Not?

See? True inspiration!

A room with a view

Doing things on the cheap can sometimes be entertaining in a semi-disastrous sort of way. This trip to Cape Town is a case in point. Last time I went somewhere on business, I was lodged in a backpackers, and it was very comfortable, commodious and all the things a weary traveler could wish for. So this time, I booked at a backpackers too, and as you can see, I got a room with a view!

The showers are the most comical of all, they’re communal showers, not a problem in itself, but the cubicle doors don’t close, and there’s nowhere to put your clothes where they’ll stay dry. The trick is, to take the shower while the place is fairly empty in the afternoon, holding the door closed with one’s foot while getting a quick rinse off. You hang your towel over the cubicle door, since there’s nowhere else to put it, and when you’re done with the balancing act involving said door, you wrap yourself up securely in the towel, and streak down the corridor to the room.

The building itself is rather intriguing, and should be good for a few photos. It’s some pensioned-off institutional building next to Falkenberg mental hospital. There are broken windows on the upper floor, and the guttering hangs precariously in places. Despite the unprepossessing façade with its chipped and peeling paint facing a railway line, and the equally unprepossessing interior with its painted concrete floors, there’s a rather pleasant, grassy quadrangle lined with Avocado and banana trees, which is where I sat as I wrote this.

One other, vital factor in its favour is that its clean: the linen is spotless, and the floors are clean enough to eat off, supposing that you’ve a yen to eat off the floor, in which case you probably belong at the mental hospital next door, but that’s beside the point.

Names are also misleading: although the place is called 'River Lodge', there isn't a river to be seen. Most remarkable of all, is the fact that its situated in an 'Eco village'. I haven't an idea what could be 'Eco' about it: the railway line? Yes! Come to South Africa and view the wild railway trains - bigger than any of the big five! Something like that, perhaps.

To tell you the truth, I rather enjoyed my stay in a perverse sort of way, I always feel out of place in plush places, as if I should be waiting on tables instead of eating at them. So, what’s the most surreal place you’ve ever slept in?

Trip Troubles

So you think you're organized: everything's ready for the road-trip and then... and then... some stupid thing happens, that prevents you from doing things as planned. Its happening to me right now, and I'm having a great deal of difficulty in dealing with it in a good humored way, in fact, my first reaction is a strong urge to throw a temper tantrum: Wanna! Wanna! Wanna! Waaaaaah!

The point is that my plans have been overset in a small way only: I'll be leaving late because, despite having booked the vehicle in advance, my firm has decided to do something else with it for the morning. All it really means is that I'll be arriving at my destination at eight or nine tonight instead of six or seven. Apart from the fact that I'm terribly nervous about driving in the big city at night, there's no real reason why it should be a problem, but it feels like a problem. In fact, I want to grab my boss by the throat and shake her, while having the tantrum mentioned above, but all I've done is to mutter a bit and look sour. Do I deserve sainthood? Surely!

Only please, someone, tell me I'm not the only person who feels like a werewolf when things like this happen?

** I'll illustrate this with a car pic: This would get me to Cape Town double quick!

Mythbuster

I've heard it said that women with husky voices sound sexy. Well, that's to my benefit, because I've got one of those chocolate and gravel voices, and of course, I really like thinking I'm sexy. So what's my problem? Simply this: I've been doing one of those pillar-to-post batches of phoning about a banking problem, I've spoken to four operators and EVERY ONE of them called me 'Sir'.

Now just how on earth is this supposed to make me feel feminine let alone sexy? Let's say that its another myth debunked shall we?

Distance, Age or Colour

I'm going to make you cringe today, check this out:

'Remember that distance,age or colour does not matter in a reall relationship but love matters alot'

You've had these? If you've ever advertised for pen friends, you will have. And you've probably noticed the pattern too. The letter begins by saying that the writer is a 'beautiful young girl' or some variant on that theme. At this point, I think one's supposed to get all excited. Wow! A beautiful young girl is writing to me!

Next comes a statement saying that (s)he has 'read your profile' although she manifestly hasn't, because if (s)he had (s)he'd have noticed that I'm a woman, and have requested a pen friend who is proficient in English and can write a decent letter, adding that offers of heart or other anatomical parts are unwelcome.

The impression that your profile never got so much as a glance is reinforced by the standard of English, the charming line I started with and the signing off 'Forever yours'. Before closing, the writer suggests that pictures can be exchanged. Wow! I'm trembling here.

Occasional variants are offers of marriage, or a declaration that the writer is 'looking for love'.

Alright, you know all about this, so why am I rabbiting on about it? The answer is this: I've been thinking about the format of these letters, each so similar to the other, all containing the dreadful 'distance, age and colour' line, the same 'information' placed in exactly the same order time after time with only minor variations in the wording, and I'm convinced that they're the work of one person or a ring of people working in co-operation.

This really gets my goat (which has a bristly beard and those weird slot-shaped pupils and yellow irises and looks like the devil incarnate when its roused especially when steam starts issuing from its nostrils and ears). The thing is, this highly prolific person or persons is giving all Africans a bad name online.

Its hardly surprising that people now think that Africa has more than its fair share of scammers, when in truth, its probably a handful of people that spend all day trawling for email addresses and sending out what amounts to being exactly the same letter over and over.

Being African, I know my fair share of Africans, and they're just like people everywhere: the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful shaken together like liquorice allsorts and just as colourful. I don't know any Nigerians, because they have just as bad a name here as they do elsewhere in the world. I'm sure that some of them aren't drug traffickers, gangsters and con-men, but sadly, it seems to be the bad eggs that get about as a rule.

What's really disturbing is that somewhere, somehow, there must be people who are naive enough to take those letters seriously: who think that beautiful girls will fall in love with them on the basis of a pen-friend advert, that job offers in the hotel industry appear out of the blue and that there is such a thing as money for nothing. I don't know whether to feel sorry for them or whether to be cross with them. If scamming wasn't lucrative, people wouldn't do it, would they?

** Seeing as I'm being patriotic today, I'll post a pic of an African who looks more African than I do.