Weekend #3

Saturday dawned another beautiful day. So there’s this group of guys who always heckle me a bit on my Saturday morning walks to the gym (usually I drive as that 5 minutes makes all the difference in getting to work in the morning). This morning, after what turned out to be a very enjoyable workout (“Barbara”) they repeated their usual questioning: “Do you play hockey?”
“No.”
“Rugby?”
???? “No.” Seriously, rugby??
“Do you kick ass?”
“Hahaha, yes, that I do!”

Next up a bunch of us piled into my car and hit up the Neighbor Goods Market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock. Sadly I did not bring my camera but I won’t make that mistake next week. Aside from the prices, Table Mountain in the background and the fact that the people were almost all white, I would have thought I was in Berkeley. This market is a bit like a farmer’s market on steroids, minus the farmers. Imagine the food stands from the San Francisco farmer’s market – except for a whole food court of them! For some reason it seemed as though there was mostly only one vendor of a given kind (i.e. one veggie stand), but there were three places selling meat (one of which sells the Spier biodynamic chickens, therefore removing my problem of procuring such chickens), and one selling SASSI-approved fish, one selling a ton of different kinds of wild mushrooms, freshly-baked bread … the list goes on. At the food court there was even a “Boston Beer Company” selling something called Boston Lager. I didn’t try it (still on the endorphin high from the workout) but I’m intrigued.

Apparently this is the place to be Saturday morning as about probably 15 people from our building showed up at one point or another. Since the day was warm and sunny, and this was one of the last chances we’ll probably get for a while we headed over to Camps Bay beach. This was somewhat amusing as the rental car barely made it up the gap between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head in second gear! I let my crew out on the beach as I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to park. Amazingly, I found a spot at the far end of the beach right on the beach road. Not wanting to give it up, I bit the bullet and tried parallel parking for the first time on the other side of the car (and, usually I’m parallel parking on the right side of the road and not the left). I am proud to report that this was one of the best parallel parking jobs I have ever done – thanks in large part to the incredible turning radius of the otherwise-POS-Renault. Front wheel drive, FTW!

The water was quite cold so there were only two of us who went swimming. Boy that was bracing … but I wanted to be able to say I’d done it! Mainly I just lay around reading until it got cold, and was time to go back.

A bunch of us (mostly people from the UK, but me and one other American) went out for dinner at this restaurant called Pepenero (the seafood platter was amazing!), and then to the lounge to watch the UEFA Champion’s League Final, won handily by Inter Milan.

And then the fun began! We piled into a cab to a club called Jade where the bouncer was just thrilled to see Dami, for some reason. Ha! Well, what can I say, 5 hours and probably a good bottle of coffee Patron later we headed to Long Street, to the Dubliner. There we briefly saw one of our coworkers, also out pretty late, and wound up closing the place down at 4am before moving on to Marvel. I had stopped drinking much earlier than this but all that I really remember of Marvel was going up to this guy who was wearing a Cal shirt, asking him if he’d gone there (he hadn’t), and then talking to him for the next hour. I headed home after that bar closed, and slept until 11am, because a bunch of us were meeting up to head to Mzoli’s.

We were a bit disorganized leaving so we didn’t get there until nearly 1pm by which time it was a mission to find a table! Some of us headed off to buy the food. I was prepared and had beers with me, so we drank them while waiting in line. It was great fun to see the inner workings of Mzoli’s. We tipped one of the guys doing the braai, so it was only about 40 minutes until we got our food. In the meantime we went and danced to this fabulous live band that was there – the woman singer had one of the most amazing voices I’d ever heard! And the food was, as always, just fabulous! Of course by the time dinner rolled around all I could eat was salad …