Wednesday, November 21, 2007

BEING HERE




Lots of people have been asking what it is like here, so here are some great pics I got from the capetown tourist sites (google for them) and it really does look like this, I'm somewhere to the left of the big picture, and everywhere you look around Cape Town, there's a mountain. The big mountain, Table Mountain, is the distinctive feature, and the waterfront harbour in the big picture is where I was the other day.

ACTIVITIES

Well, time has flown by and the lack of posting on my blog has a lot to do with the fact that I didn't have email access for a while; and when I did I had to restrict it to mostly academic purposes. Having turned up late in the year, I've had to launch into catching up with everyone else who has been here since February. I'm still hunting for a car but hope to have one soon, and then I'll be FREE!

BEWARE OF GREAT WHITES

I'm referring here to the ginormous sharks that lurk the coast and gobble up seals that act as tourist attractions. Well the sharks too are tourist attractions; tourists enjoy being dangled in shark cages, pretending to be bait, as they survey the giant teeth and mouths of the great whites who apparently are not that interested in the tourists. However, if you wear a wetsuit or are on a surfboard then you really do look like bait, resembling a seal, and there have been cases of great whites mistakenly chewing on humans instead of seals. I'm not sure actually why I'm writing about these, except that I did get the chance to go on a friend's (very little) yacht and I decided to fish, dangling a spinner on a line attached to a hoop I hung from my arm. After catching a very large piece of deceptive seaweed, and an equally convincing white plastic bag that slithered through the sea at the end of my spinner as I pulled in my line, I returned catch-less to shore. I then found out that the type of fish that go for spinners are the giant tuna and yellowtail, twice my size, the kind they strap sports fishermen to chairs when they fish for them, and if one had got my spinner I would have been yanked into the sea, no doubt into the welcoming mouth of a great white after my respective yellowtail/tuna. So it's lucky I'm a terrible, if optimistic, fisherman(woman).

BEWARE OF STILETTO HEELS

[Image: copyright Jade Gibson 2007]

I feel obliged to warn would-be salsa dancers of this extreme health hazard, especially in crowded places. It is a salsa dancer's lot to be repeatedly stabbed in the very painful surface of each foot by stiletto heels or the back of the leg. You can spot a salsa dancer due to the numerous healing bruises on the tops of their feet or the sides of their legs. At the moment the floor at Buena Vista Social Cafe where I dance on Sundays is caving in, the floorboards individually settling at different heights. There is a hole in one of the floorboards however, where ones stilettos tend to go through and get stuck, revenge I reckon from the Almighty for the repeated battering of other dancers.

I am going to post a picture of me dancing, but it seems I must put in a new blog post to upload the picture, so I will do so now.

2 comments:

The Cultural Diarist said...

There are some fabulous images of great white sharks [quite scary!] on this site: http://www.allposters.com/
-st/Sharks-Photography-Posters
_c56907_.htm

Katrin (Kitty) Dorje said...

This is great .