Day Ten

Last night was great.

Nothing is impossible: when needing to wear green for St. Paddy's  and having only a black dress do not fear! Get Nicole's step-mom's Polo Sport tank top and customise your dress until you have a skirt! Problem....what problem?!

It involved the opening of corked wine bottles with knives, the cleaning of the wine splatters from all over the walls because of the knife opening, the pinning  of size 14 dresses on the Jammie Shuttle while trying to hold the hidden (and open) wine between your boots.  And then stopping off for our own artwork creation with plastic glasses and an R. Mutt sticker in the Hiddingh loo of course.

R. Mutt. (Famous work on urinals by Duchamp, a Dadaism artist).

Our edition to Duchamp's work and Dadaism (making useful object useless).

"Engaged". 

(What sort of immature people laugh at engagement you may ask...)

Nicole and I did the whole thing. We went to Dubliners, the home of the Guiness beer and green drinks with 80’s music to singalong to. We went to Mr Pickwick’s for a moment of marvel. We went to goodnessknowswhere and had goodnessknowswhat and had goodnesknowshow the best of fun!

All in all, everybody was out to celebrate.

This morning left us with smells of smoke, cut feet and tired eyes, but the enthusiasm to get up and prepare for tonight’s fun nevertheless! Wine under oaks with friends on blankets, an old VW van to Chinese food (with the most realest Chinese person) and famouslookalike friends denying their similarities based on homophobic views found us having the best of an evening!

Home now, and to bed we go (after watching Garden State, of course!)

(Still) Day Nine

Before I go out into the wild rush of the Saint of all Patrick's, I'd like to share with you The Most Awesome (Green) Shoes In The Entire World.

The most awesome Be Delicious pose in the world:

Not this one.

This one.

The best (and most stereotyped) poster St. Paddy's Day poster in the world:

Have a good one!

Day Nine

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Now it's just after 2am and I'm exhausted so excuse the typos and the general sense of non-sense going on here. But today is a nonsense-filled day! We just came back from an epicccc night at Zula!

It is on Long St. (which is arguably the best street in Cape Town, come day, come night. It's the sort of street you walk down and people are leaning against a lumpy old car with a guitar, a girl is singing along and the other members of the group are smoking and listening quietly while leaning against the car and nearby shop windows. It's just wonderful.) www.zulabar.co.za. 

Anyway, we sat at a table on the balcony watching gourmet pizzas pass us as we sipped our aperitifs in the hot humid heat. With vanilla cigarettes fuming the air, we looked across to the bead shop, watched a topless middle-aged man quizzically and generally waited eagerly...to watch Step Dog perform.

They have, in my opinion, a The Kooks-meets-Kings of Leon-with-a-bit-of-Bubléontheside sort of a sound. 

They are stunning.

After a quick stop at Maccy Dee's, we went on to catch the bus back home. In celebration of St. Patrick's Day, we decided to make card cut outs of a Four Leafed Clover and stick them in the green traffic lights outside res. (I got the idea from my friend, Georga, who photographed a heart made in the red light.) I found some old Simba chips box outside Mac Donald's and away we went.

Cynthia had a pencil in her bag (luckily!) and with it I drew a terrible shape. With a little help from everyone, the clover came into being. We arrived back at res and quickly made the cut-outs and coloured them in (with my awesome crayons: Ferbies!) Thanks to Graeme's tallness and a handy unused crate, we stuck (with the scavenged prestick that Cynthia and I gathered) the cards up fairly easily.

Drive down Main Road past Lower Campus to see them today!

Day Seven and Eight

The latest Facebook Japan debate.


Sorry for the combo, I've been working and testing and essaying. But now that that's all done, I am blogging. Again.


And I want to address an interesting little fight between the human rights activists and the animal rights activists. (I know, mistake number one that they make is to think that you have to choose one of the causes only.) They're getting hot and steamy on peoples' walls, throwing irrational conclusions at one another and generally creating a war against those who think the Japanese community got what they deserved.


Call me a purist but I think that no matter how much you don't like someone, or someones, they do not deserve to suffer the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives. They are not "getting what's coming to them" nor is it "karma". I hereby dub it A Natural Disaster, with disaster having the nasty connotation of being the ruining and altering of lives, land, luxury and lotssofmoney.


So if you haven't heard, someone brought the phrase "The Cove" into an earthquake/tsunami/radioactive Japan. The Cove is a documentary on the massacre of over 23 000 dolphins off Japan's coast each year. It is not legal and is underhand. This meat is sold as whale meat and in which toxic levels of mercury are found.

(This video is ohkay for the squeemish.)

Basically, due to this immoral act, outspoken nobody's are saying that Japan deserved the Natural Disaster. I love dolphins, and am strongly for the protest against dolphin slaughter. And I love people. The key issue in this argument is that people want you choose a side: either the dolphins or the people. People choosing the dolphins generally are the ones saying that they will not pray for Japan and Japan and its people deserved it. People for Japan, are more open-minded.






To settle this argument, take The Most Famous Dr. Seuss's words, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." Use these words and get involved in these two worthy causes! 


Here's the link to help the Japanese Red Cross Relief: http://www.jrc.or.jp/english/relief/l4/Vcms4_00002070.html


And here's the link to The Cove's page: www.ecojoia.com

Day Six

Google translate. Who knew?


A blackberry, while annoying with people constantly on theirs, is absolutely indispensable to a language student. Take, for instance, this morning.


I planned to have read through Antony and Cleopatra which we were going to discuss in English today, on the weekend. Instead I focused on our two 800-words-a-pop essays on the short stories and plays, which is due on Wednesday, the same day as my Philosophy test (and yes. I do have a waitressing shift on Tuesday evening.) Last night I stayed up doing philosophy homework, after the dresswashing, and went to bed after 12. 


So basically, walking to English from my Philosophy tut, I had no real grasp of the play. Google: "Antony and Cleopatra". Second search result: Sparknotes. In the ten minutes before class started I gathered what the play was about and probably in a better extent than those who had struggled through Shakespeare's words. That's not to say that I won't read it, only that I haven't. Yet. Also, when asked to follow Act I Scene I, I could. Word for word and heavybook free!


Next up was French conversation. Emanuelle, our lecturer, wanted us to focus on: Mon rever et mon passion. My dreams and passions. Gosh.

So the only thing that came to mind was the most amazing, world renown concert about which I have heard and read many wonderful things. Glastonbury.

It is biggest music concert in the world, with all my favourite bands playing, and more. And more. And more. It is mind boggling.
I want to go soooooo badly!

This is Vampire Weekend at Glastonbury 2010.

So this was my dream in French for today. To sound like a natural, and a smart arse, me and Google Translate did our thing and voilá! I was oh-so-knowledgeable when it was my turn to speak. Again, in my French tutorial later on, I was describing my day with nifty little phrases. To top it all off, I responded in length to a friend's French wall post in highly efficient and completely grammatical-error-free text! 

Tonight, while I'm learning for Philosophy, I send a thought out to Nick and Wesley and the rest of our Ikey Tigers, and wish them well in their match against UJ!

Day Five

I worked yesterday. In my dress...


As with any waitressing job, when starting off at a new place you start at the bottom of the food chain, aka. 
A runner.
A runner does all things knitty gritty. So I was polishing glasses, folding napkins and pizza boxes, sending the dumb waitor up. And down. And up again. Emptying and loading and polishing and wiping...


Nam-learning and pizza-glancing and wine-looking and stairs-climbing left me exhausted but satisfied. The pizza, pasta and grill style of Basilico (http://www.basilico.co.za/) combined with its child-friendly (with dough and shape cutters and plastic rollers for the kids!) and friendly managers makes the ambiance of this newly redone restaurant.

This is Basilico's famous pizza, the Basilico.

A R20 taxi fare back to granny's, desperate supper-stuffing and crawling into bed left me thoroughly exhausted, in a satisfied sort of way.


Today was essay-writing and church-going. Sat in on the youth group at my church, St. Andrews, of which I may take charge and tried out an awesome church of my friends', Church on Main, for their evening service. Great people, a message to increase preaching and coffee served me well! I think I'm going to head back to that one. A long stop at friends' digs for supper and chilling, leaves me exhausted as I get shipped back to res.


Superwashing awaits my dear dresses as soon as I get back!


Sweet dreams to all of you still out there!

Day Four

I had a lot planned for today. I was going to read Antony and Cleopatra (at least once), learn how to ride my bike in my dress, go for a swim, tidy my room, go running, camp off at granny's...and get a job.

I expected a lot from myself on this Saturday.

Instead. I woke up at 10 am.

My roommate and I, in a just-missed-breakfast-daze, wondered aimlessly what to do with ourselves. Luckily, someone had organised this for us: yes. We were going to the market at the Labia Theatre! Overjoyed that we could take a free Jammie Shuttle there, we agreed to meet at 11:40, the time that the bus was due to leave. Polly (roomie) and I get down there at 11:43.

Aimlessly wondering has never been more effective. We in the end, pooled with an art student and taxied down to the theatre. Once there, having met up with our friends, downing a strawberry slushie, having a peek into the oldest theatre in Cape Town (which, behind the heavy ochre curtain, was busy showing 127 Hours..) we became completely and utterly lost in second-hand glory.

The market was a bustle of indie. Records were playing from an old gramophone, the flocking pigeons flew overhead like they did for Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, people were trailing clothes to the loo (used as a make-shift change room), store owners were hiding from the sun under umbrellas and hats, and playing cards in the shade of the clothes racks on the ground.

A place for bargains, there were shorts for R50 and jackets for R130. We caught the Jammie back at 2pm, and I'm quickly packing for my planned trek to granny's. Going to have a trial shirt at a restaurant called "Basilico" tonight. They said dress in black. How appropriate.

Fingerscrossed.