attention whoring

I am lit from within, through my face.

a waterfall binne in my huis

kan jy dit glo? oh November, the month of madness. What with our geysey deciding to burst at a time when we actually decided to move out of our 80-year old house. It seems the house, like any relationship, does not want us to leave without scaring us emotionally. So my poor friend, lets call her "the housemate" had to contend with water gushing from the broken geyser all over the wooden floors and leaking so heavily from the roof that it could only rival Victoria Falls in it's intensity as the water made it way, through the ceiling from upstairs into the kitchen, where the housemate was washing dishes. Our landlord, who is a bit of a drama horse, came though in a panic, pacing up and down the stairs saying something incoherent about the wooden floors. "my wooden fLOORS!!!!". Ah the madness. The insurance guys came, and the electrician, and the moisture extractors and whoever else felt like randomly walking into the house under the guise of "fixing" something. My bedroom had to stay open so they can plug in these moisture extractors and as I sat at work I imagined these fat electricians going through my photos and clothes and lying (sweat and all) on my clean sheets, while they take a break. So now, the old hag (our beloved house) needs to be re-painted, re-wired and whatever else is necessary to make it habbitable again. All this just in time for Christmas Silly Season, when everyone remembers that they have a Nemesis in Cape Town and want to come stay over, FOR FREE. The housemate and i laughed about this as we looked at the spectacular view we have of the harbour, drinking black coffee and thinking of how fitting Sarah Vaughn's song "black Coffee" fits in with the mood we were in.

my walls are naked

this is supposed to be my "reading room" or desk or whatever this one is self explanotory hahaha let me see ur grillz!

the caption says "he's got the whole world in his hands".

and u thought only the Ndebele women wore these around their necks...

One day I will get around to framing these photographs I have on my wall but till then I will immortalise them on my blog just in case they get torn up in the BIG move of 2009. I got them from a calendar this friend of mine gave me. A friend of hers is married to a photographer who went to Cambodia, Tibet and I forgot I think Thailand to take pics of the locals for this calendar and I think the point was to either raise money for them or give the money to whomever hired him. So I am really sorry I didnt credit the photographer but I lost the calendar a while ago but still love the pictures, hope u do too.

A wine fest in Gugs, just what the liver ordered...

Journalist get a bad rap about drinking too much. Some of us have no choice but to wear it as a badge of honour even though we don't drink that much *cough, cough*.

One Sunday afternoon not long ago, a very good friend of mine who is from Gugulethu told me about the Itownship Wine Festival being held there and so I jumped onto a taxi, can u believe it costs only R7?

I was a bit nostalgic because part of me always feels guilty that I don't go to the township more besides the fact that I live in shitty neighbourhood with lots of hippies, drug-dens and tik-heads, I never go to the hood. So as I sat there waiting for the taxi to fill up, with a toddler kicking my seat (so I rock back and forth like a useless drunk) I was very excited. I was smiling at everyone, and not once during the entire taxi ride did I feel like choking the seat-kicking toddler or her parents.

With that overated monument of the Cape, Table Mountain, slowly receding behind, we sped off though the N2 heading towards Gugulethu (or Gugs if u trying to sound like a local). My only snag was that my friend's directions were a bit vague, something like "it is in a white tent behind the mall, you will see it man, the new shopping mall". It obviously did not occur to him that I had no idea what Gugs looked like (during the day *giggles*)? where this bloody mall was but hey I got there safe.

I paid R50 for my ticket (yes, journalists don't always freeload at least we pay at the end of the month) and I got a free glass (by the time I left I had a set of these) and hit the ground running. Really low turnout but who cares? more red wine for me. I decided to be civil and ask the lady how to "taste" the wine properly, what the proper etiquette was etc. She gave me a blank stare so I swallowed the Pink Shiraz and carried on like that for the rest of the afternoon till I bumped into my friends.

They were in the thick of things, buying wine and asking all sorts of relevant questions. I just handed my glass over and depending on how interesting the person at the stall looked and sounded, I stuck around to hear about the "tannins" and "aging processes" and "grapes" and all that stuff the wine-snobs like to bore us with at dinner parties. After some Shiraz, Merlot, Port and Champagne.

No actually I lie, because I leant at the Wine Fest from the laBourie lady that Champange is a region in France and so our stuff can't be called Champagne, so it may taste the same but basically u look retarded to wine-snobs if calling it Chamgapne with confidence. So we might as well call our stuff "Gugulethu or Paarl or whatever" just not Champagne, don't U just love how anal the French are about their alcohol?

At the end we went to Mzoli's. Mzoli's is very famous. Everyone excepr me has been there. It is on the list of things to do when u get to Cape Town. And that is why I hadn't been. Because it is a bit like every other hang-out spot "chisa nyama" I have been to in SA, be it Mamelodi, Attridgeville, Mabopane hell at some point the rowdy people reminded me a bit of Pimville in Soweto and even Hammanskraal.

So there, all hoods are the same, it is just that the Cape Town people speak Xhosa and we speak Tswana etc. So Mzoli's was a bit of a "been there, done that" experience, "nothing new in the hood". But I had samp and veges and while they will never taste as good an my my sisters it wasn't bad either...