What I did on Wednesday!

Old Parliament building where Nelson Mandela gave his first speech as a freed man!!


So today I got to learn a lot more about the history of Cape Town. Sounds like a boring day right? Wrong. Spent the morning exploring and touring the “District 6” museum in downtown Cape Town. In case you were wondering what District 6 is let me tell you! It’s one of the 9 districts in cape town that was established in the 1800s and for many years people of colour and whites both lived there if they could afford too. Then in the 1960s many new acts were established that determined that whites and coloured people should no longer live together and therefore forced the non-whites to leave their well established homes close to their jobs that many of them had lived in all their lives. They were forced to move to what is known as “the cape flats” a very under-developed area no where near their jobs and very impoverished. The abandoned homes in district 6 were then demolished in order to build up a “better” white area.

We toured a museum in memory of the district 6 before it got demolished and were given the tour by an amazing cape-townian named Joe who grew up in district 6 and had many great stories to share with us. He was actually at the jazz club last night and is a pretty ridiculously good jazz singer!

After the museum tour we went to Charly’s bakery for lunch. Charly’s is pretty much Willy Wonka’s factory in the heart of Cape Town. AKA paradise. We all had delicious quiches and pies for lunch but really it was all about the dessert!! Earlier this morning I had called Charly’s and organized to have two cakes (a wicked chocolate cake and double chocolate cheese cake) premade and decorated for Vernon (our wonderful guide/teacher) and his birthday we had just missed. He absolutely loved it!!! So glad we were able to do that for him because he is soooo great and good to us!

After a delicious binge lunch we spent the afternoon walking around downtown cape town and getting to know the area.(( There are so many options for transportation in Cape town and we were introduced to all of them. There are taxis, giant coach buses used to tranaport workers from the townships into the city, “mini-buses” or crazy bus-taxis that pack up with people and speed around the city (mildly terrifying). For the most part I’ll be using metered taxis to get into the city I think! The markets were amazing and I bought a South Africa flag that I hung in my room after bartering with the market worker!

For dinner we went to an Ethiopian restaurant, which we were told meant we definitely had to eat with our hands, but aside from that I did not know what to expect! The restaurant was beautiful and the food was amazing!!! We all sat around one communal table where they served us a sampler of Ethiopian food on a special kind of sour dough which we could end up eating as well. They poured the food out of the bowls so that we could all dig in together! We each had our own rolled up portion of sour dough that we used to pick up the different kinds of food and eat with our hands. SO GOOD. And not as messy as I expected actually!! All in all a great night!!