First Days in Cape Town

We are in Cape Town South Africa!!! What a cool city. Everyone compares it to San Francisco, Napa, Monterrey… and we can see some of those comparisons. We are definitely enjoying that there are malls, fast food, good restaurants for reasonable prices, and that we aren’t in Angola working (or Jeff isn’t working).

We left Saturday on the 2 pm flight to Johannesburg… that flight was about 45 minutes late. But we made it in time for our connecting flight (which was 30 minutes late). Somehow when we checked in for our flight to Cape Town we were upgraded to Business Class… yea for us! It just made Jeff a little happier… and he was pretty happy to be leaving for vacation in the first place!

We got to our hotel nice and late, and slept in late enough to miss breakfast! We headed to the waterfront (about a 15 minute walk from our hotel) and had a pretty good burger and walked around the mall and the craft market. The waterfront is beautiful and pretty touristy, but so pretty. The first picture has a boat in the background named “Sophie B.”

We also found a cool farmers market area that reminded me of the Ferry Building in SF… good food, and an artisan feel. We got ourselves some smoothies with real fruit in them (we don’t get too much fruit besides bananas in Angola… 6 strawberries cost us more than 9 dollars… this is also the reason that we bought a whole carton of strawberries at the grocery store… they were gone in an hour!). We also found a really delicious beef jerky place. Outside the farmers market was a statue of Nelson Mandela… so we posed for a pic.

Next we headed over to a place called the “Scratch Patch.” My friend, Jane, recommended it to us. It is a rock/gem place. You can buy a bag or cup and then you get to go into the rock garden place and pick as many rocks as will fit into the cup/bag. The girls had so much fun… they searched everywhere for their favorite rocks- they asked when they can come back!

We headed to the hotel and had ourselves a little rest (we had walked around for about 6 hours, and the girls had done great… but we still needed a break). We had dinner at this little place with good food and had delicious shakes… I had a cherry chocolate shake that was so good… I took a picture.

Today we picked up our rental car. There was no address on the car rental agreement… and there were a few spots. So we sat at one hotel while the lady tried to figure out why she couldn’t find our rental! While the girls and I waited they took pictures in front of the tree and lights. They were having a fun time posing!

We finally found the car, at a different car rental place… they drive on the left side of the road here, it keeps us on our toes… and I am sure that Jeff loves all my gentle reminders of how he should drive in a new different place! We headed up to Table Mountain, which is one of the must do things here… but the cable cars were closed because of all the wind. So we took some pictures of the Cape Town cityscape and walked around a little bit. We will have to go back another day to try again.

We walked around downtown looking at some local booths (it was a serious trip away from the touristy area we saw yesterday…). Then we headed back to the waterfront for dinner. It was really nice and fun. There were these 4 tenors singing when we arrived, they sang “O Holy Night” and it was quite beautiful. You can see the waterfront area and how crowded it is. The restaurant that we ate at had a great view of the water and Table Mountain. It was a good night!