Cape Town, South Africa (1 March 2008)
Sorry for not uploading a longer update yesterday (Friday). I ended up working on a more sophisticated posting environment. As you can see I can now also post pictures! yeah, I know, blogger, the blog service we are using, does this by default. But I’m an engineer and so I had to find the hard way to do it.
In case you haven’t figured it our, the numbers in the title are the coordinates of our place. If you fire up Google Earth and you type in the coordinates into the Fly-To thingy, it will take you to out location. Or use this kmz file. Let me know if it works (or not). You need Google Earth for it to work.
Our home phone number is +27-21-438-4059. So please call us! We would love to hear from you. Don’t remember if I mentioned already our flat has high-speed Internet! So we can browse all we want, talk on skype, chat on gmail, etc. At least for the next three weeks we are in Internet heaven. Oh, and we have a TV and a DVD player so we’ll have something to do at night.
The apartment complex is built from the road down to the beach and we are on the ground level, i.e. closest to the beach. We have designated parking, which is nice because Victoria Rd. is really busy and there is no parking at all. The parking garage is on the roof of the complex.
Inside our flat, the bedroom and bathroom are at the same level as the main entrance, with the kitchen and dinning/living room in a lower level. There is also a “sun room” off to the left side. We think it was meant to be an open balcony but the owner closed it off to make it easier to maintain. The apartment is nicely decorated and has a spectacular view. Though the photographer hasn’t taken a nice photo of the view, so you’ll have to take my word for now. If you have Google Earth you can look at the photos there.
Cape Town seems like a really nice place, though we haven’t seen much of it yet. We are enjoying having a home and not having to pack up every night. We had planned to stay home and do laundry today as the apartment complex has a laundry. But the laundry room is only open Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 18:00. You read that right, it’s not open during the weekend because it “disturbs the tenants”. How anybody who works gets their laundry done is besides me. Perhaps they assume if you can afford to live here you can Alford to have you laundry done for you. Oh well. So no laundry but we still stayed home all day resting and relaxing. Debby has been reading about Cape Town and I’ve been hacking on the computer.
We did take a ½ hour walk on Clifton Beach (which is right outside the door). The sand is really white and soft but the water is cold. We were told it is about 14°C.
My one achievement was to go running along Victoria Rd. up toward Sea Point. Sunrise is at 6:30 and by 7:00 the day was really bright. Anyway, it was nice to run along the coast. There were a lot of people out exercising; running, cycling, swimming. I was surprised to see several large groups of cyclists. It seems like a nice place to ride as it has the coast and also significant climbs. And it’s warm :).
Debby went walking in the afternoon to buy a few miscellaneous food items we forgot to buy yesterday. So at least we both got a little bit of exercise. I’m sure in a day or two we’ll be ready to explore the town.
Oh, I should mention after the ostrich farm we spent two days in the wine region east of Cape Town. We spent one night in Swellendam, in the Robertson’s Valley Region. The next day we stopped in Franschhoek, near Stellenbosch. Franschhoek is famous because it was settled by Huguenots (French Protestants). It is a quaint little town. The wine region is beautiful. Like Napa it is located in a fertile valley, surrounded by rugged mountains. Debby did a bit of wine tasting and bought two bottles to enjoy while we are in Cape Town.
R
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