Kat's Weekends: Episode One

The ongoing adventures of our tactless, gullible, and adventure seeking heroine, K, and her attempts to eke out a living on her own in Cape Town, South Africa. Where going outside after dark (approximately 6 pm, season winter) is never a good idea.

Day of the week: Saturday

Woke up planning to head out at 9 am, hah! If I can barely wake up for work by 9 am I wonder what compelled me to believe I could do so for a weekend. By 9:45 am my flatmate, A, an assertive woman with a head full of curly orangish-brown hair who is living in Cape Town to study english, was knocking adamantly on my door insisting that I wake up. And what A wants, A gets.

We walked over to the train station and rode a minibus. To enlighten those of you who have never been to South Africa, a mini-bus takes after the first half of the name much more than the second. Mini, cramped, smelly, loud it is. Bus-like (in the spacious and regulated sense of the word) it is not. Imagine a soccer mom transporting, say, the entire soccer team in one mini van. Then turn the mom into a driver who could give a Shanghai taxi driver a run for their money and one of the kids into a scrawny guy who yells out destinations really loudly. Next stop... biscuit mill market....

Once at the actual biscuit mill my day brightened considerably. It was a market of the best kind - free samples everywhere and delicious food for cheap! There were bales of hay lying around for people to lounge on and different vendors selling food from around the world.

Oh, yum.

It was shaping up to be an average day at the market until we meandered over to another bakery stand and was stopped by a guy who started the conversation with general questions: where are you from? What are you doing in Cape Town? - Questions I answer every day. And a proposition: Now it's your turn to ask me three questions, and if you like the answers then you will let me take you out for dinner and some drinks tomorrow. Without waiting for the third question he took down my number and A and I bid him farewell, thinking to ourselves that we would most likely never hear from him again.

After wandering around the market for an hour or so more we decided it was time to head over to the France vs. South Africa rugby match that we had been given free tickets to by the French rugby players we had met at a club the other night. Unfortunately this meant getting back into the transit they call the mini-bus. Oddly enough, as we started our wait on the street outside the market, who should we run into but the guy from the bakery stand. He offered us a ride to the hotel where we were to pick up our rugby tickets - not only that but also a ride to the stadium which was apparently much further away than we had originally anticipated. This proved to be an interesting experience. Though my entirety experience with this person consisted of a 45 minute car ride, and as a social anthro concentrator I would hate to generalize... (or do anthropologists love to generalize, I can't ever remember), but A and I succinctly summed him up with a new word that I was honored to add to A's english vocabulary - narcissistic. More subtly though I would say he's eccentrically self absorbed. To his credit he did drive us to the rugby stadium in traffic. +2 gentleman points.

I could see their expressions as they "scrubbed"

Have you ever watched rubgy? It is the strangest sport - a mix between soccer, football, and utter mind numbing scrambling. Turns out this match was actually a rather important one as the stadium was pretty much packed and cars were parked all the way until into the freeway exit. Shame I didn't quite get the sport since I was six rows up from the field. In the end, despite my "Alles les bleus!" chants that I had learned in France during the 2004 world cup, the score was 45-17 South Africa.

After the game, as I was getting on the train I had a run in with a pick pocket. He literally reached into my jacket pocket and went for my new camera. Luckily I was fast enough to stop him from grabbing anything and the security guards nearly jumped the man. In my fervor to save my beloved camera I also ended up stripping the man of his jacket. Who's the pick pocket now!

From the Cape Town train station we mini-bussed it (sigh) over to Sea Point.

Now I'm writing on Sunday and much has happened between then and now. Ah, curses, I'll never be able to catch up and get decent amounts of sleep. I suppose I'll just resort to something I do often and well: Lists & bullet points

- Met a guy at a gas station who took my number

- Ate less than satisfactory Soondobu

• one minus points for asian food in cape town

- US & England tied

• We deserved the win because English goalies actually do suck we're awesome

- Said farewell to French rugby players who provided us with the free tickets to the game

• Next stop for them is Argentina - hope they fare better there

- Craziest part of my whole day

• Walk/ran the 5 blocks distance from the bar to home at 12 am. Could have been shot/mugged/raped/any and all of the above, but arrived home safely and out of breath.

Our next episode, Sunday, will not be aired, but it involved shinanigans ranging from 5,000R dresses to 2 soccer teams packed onto one mini bus to good chinese food (one + pt for cape town) to salsa dancing to germany beating the shit out of the australians. Till next time,

fin