Monday, November 27, 2006

Wednesday, March 30th, 2005- Cape Town, South Africa

I headed out with Ari, Amanda, and Karen to grab a taxi to go to the base of Table Mountain. At the taxi stand we came across this driver named Arrol Crocker who ended up being a fine chap, among other things telling us that he wouldn’t rip us off. He shared with us that he was 65 years and 11months old, an ultra marathoner, and had hiked Table Mountain about 100 times in his 14 years in Cape Town. He dropped us off at a nice spot and gave us his business card.

Hiking up the mountain was a totally awesome experience. The hike was pretty steep and quite strenuous. The higher we went the closer we came to the layer of clouds covering the mountain. When we finally reached the top we were engulfed by clouds and were unable to see anything.

After a while the clouds began to move away and we were able to see just the most magnificent view of the coast. We ate lunch on top at the restaurant and then took the cable car down.

We called Arrol who then dropped Ari, Karen and I off downtown and brought Amanda back to the ship. We ended up walking down a street where I saw a very weird occurrence when I was coming out of a store. I came out behind these two black girls who were begging for money and one of them went up to this white girl that was passing them by and ripped her earring out of her ear and threw it on the ground and kept walking. As they walked a little further they were acting a little bit more strange by going up to employees at a music store and hugging them, while the employees looked confused. After this occurrence we headed back to the ship a little bewildered.

Following a little relaxing on the ship, Ari and I decided to go see a show at the Baxter Theater called Jesus Hopped the “A” Train which just so happened to be partially produced by the U.S. Consulate. The setting was Riker’s Island (prison) in New York. I felt that the story poorly depicted American culture for being produced by the U.S. Consulate. Besides the storyline not being all that great, the accents weren’t that good either. When one character was speaking in her “New York” accent she then all of a sudden changed to a “western” accent when she was trying to relate what someone else said. We ended up leaving at intermission; that’s how good it was.

The evening ended with us just walking around the Waterfront for a little bit.


No comments: