Hi Everyone,
Carla and I (and 8 students) are still hanging out in this great city. I've been exploring my neighborhood, the Bo-Kaap, and the peripheral areas. Bo-Kaap is largely Moslem; the prayer calls resonate five times a day, but there seems to be an extra one at 4:30 a.m. (I remember one such in Lamu) that I think of as the get-ready-for-prayer wake-up. The buildings are two-storey or one-storey cement structures painted in five shades of pastel: pink, yellow, blue, gray, green and a few white. The paint is fresh everywhere and even though some of the area is poor, the look is pleasing. Bo-Kaap goes up a hill, called Signal Hill that overlooks the city and the harbor and from where a canon is still shot off at noon everyday. We ate lunch yesterday in a local Cape Malay restaurant three blocks up Wale Street. It was Friday, a special prayer day, and the locals were walking from the mosque in their robes and kofias...men and boys, mostly. I ate something called potato wada (cardamom seeded little potato ball) and some dal. The Malays are mixed race---married over the decades with local Africans and Indians.
Went to the South African Jewish Mueseum yesterday morning which was disappointing (especially compared with the Jewish Museum in NYC). Its mostly historical, with documentary and newsreel info, a replica of a shtetl, and some antique menorahs and candlesticks. I learned a lot about the Jewish settlement here (similar to the NY settlement---waves of immigrants in about 1880). They came to Cape Town and started businesses (eventually diamond, ostrich farms, coal mines) and stayed until WWII when the Nazi racial politics were adopted by some Afrikaners. Others left during apartheid. Ninety thousand still live in South Africa. There is a Holocaust Museum connected to the Jewish Museum, with documentation of the European years as well as films made by survivors who ended up in South Africa.
It doesn't feel like winter holiday time---Chanukkah or Christmas because we have beach weather (Laura, Tim, and Chris went two days ago and might even be there now----it's a 20-minute bus ride.) Hope you are all well. Take care. Let me know how you are.
love, Betty