Cape Point, Cape of Good Hope, Penguins, Apartheid

This is Cape Point, the "most southwesterly" point in Africa. A lot of people wrongly assume its the lowest point in South Africa, but that is Cape Agulhas (I think thats Portuguese for "Needles," just a guess though). Its beautiful and there's water on both sides of this peninsula. It takes about an hour and a half from Cape TOwn's city center.




This is Cape of Good Hope. It's about an hour and a half walk from Cape Point; both are on the same peninsula.


This is my host father cutting a cricket bat for his youngest son, Mayeer. They are "Cape Malays," who are mostly originally from Indonesia. They are Muslim, and think they are probably originally from India. He does look really Indian, and they feed us lots of neo-Indian food.


Boulders (Point? Town? Beach?) in Simons Town, between Cape Town and Cape Point. Its famous for its African penguins. They used to be called Jackass penguins, because of their donkey-like braying mating call. Apparently someone decided that a species of penguins in South America also had a donkey-like bray, so the Jackass penguins of South Africa are now merely African penguins. They're pretty funny to watch. You could walk up just a few feet, sometimes less than a foot of some of them nesting. This one gave me a look.







This is an underexposed picture of the Bo Kaap, the area where I'm staying.

Ok, I've been meaning to talk about apartheid, because it's something I really didn't understand before coming here (and to a large extent, still don't understand). So when the Nationalist Party was voted in in 1948, they basically started putting into legislation a set of laws similar to the Jim Crow laws in the South-- segregating races in South Africa. The Nationalist Party was composed completely of whites, and as far as I can tell, Afrikaaners, whites that originated from the Netherlands. Blacks were prevented from voting of course (for if they could vote, they would vote out the Nationalist party-- Blacks compose about 80% of the population). Blacks were also forced into townships, like Zwelethemba (see previous entry), which were basically shantytowns outside of major towns/cities. The City of Cape Town was thus almost completely white, and "Coloureds" (not Black or White, this included the Cape Malay population from Indonesia and South Asia) were forced into segregated districts such as Bo Kaapand Coloured townships, not too different from the Black townships. Bo Kaap is a Muslim neighborhood in the hills overlooking the city, separated from the center where whites were allowed. Whites were allowed to live in the city and suburbs. By separating these different non-white populations, the NP created a system in which there was little solidarity among these oppressed groups.
Even today, many "Blacks" and "Coloureds" and "Whites" hold resentment against other racial groups. Conquer and Divide, just like the British in India. Even today, with the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, the effects of segregating populations is still felt in all parts of South Africa.


Your humble correspondent,

South Africa pictures, finally

These are from the Zwelethemba township outside of Worcester, about an hour or two north of Cape Town, where I was this past week. No more commentary. sorry.

Out of Cape Town

On Monday we're off to Zwelethemba, a rural township outside of Worcester. I think Worcester is about an hour or two northeast of Cape Town, where we flew into yesterday and we're spending the weekend resting.

No pictures, unfortunately, since I don't have the cables on me now. We went to Camps Bay, which is a beautiful beach in Cape Town. We've been staying in Sea Point, which isn't quite as fancy, but is still a nice area. The area by the beach reminds me a lot of San Diego-- it's dry and hot under the sun, but gets cool at night. My number here is: 0786068771. The country code is 27, and I'm a little unclear on how to call from abroad, but I think you might drop the first zero. It's free to receive calls but really expensive to make them, even within South Africa.

Much of Cape Town seems like a little European colony. Things are expensive and there are rich people in their walled-off compounds. It's strange to imagine that apartheid existed just over ten years ago, during my lifetime. You wonder, too, how much has actually changed. One of my classmates observed as we were descending into the airport that the houses got progressively smaller and run-down as we flew towards the airport from the Cape area, until they were just a mess of shacks without roads. Right outside the airport.

Oh yeah, this morning we went to an Easter service at St. George's Cathedral near Bo Kaap in downtown Cape Town. It was a pretty nice church, and they held services in English primarily, but also in Afrikaans and Xhosa, the other two official languages of Cape Town (South Africa has 11 official languages).

So, this coming week I probably won't have internet access. Just warning you.

Cape Town

After a 27-hour marathon journey, we made it to Cape Town safely. Too tired to comment further, but I am very happy.

The New Socialist Countryside, and something else

I know I have a dog/animal fan club out there, and it doesn't get much better than this big fluffy dog in this village we visited last weekend. I think he may have been half polar bear. He was so big and acted like a king; he was never walked, he walked us.


So now that China is industralising the urban rich need to escape the pollution and what not, so they go to the countryside. But the problem is that the countryside is still very poor; urban-rural disparities are increasing, as everyone is acknowledging (including the Chinese government ::cough::). Anyways, they've decided to create these little mountain hamlets where there's AC, hot water, karoake, even bumper cars so wealthy Beijingers can feel at home in the rural areas. They call it "The New Socialist Countryside."





While at the New Socialist Countryside, we climbed an unrestored section of the Great Wall. At times it thinned out to nothing more than a pile of stones-- and it seemed like we were walking on some stonewall in Concord, except for the deadly valleys on either side.





Since I have no other pictures of me, you've no option but to see me shake the flowers off this tree on the Great Wall.

Group picture atop the Great wall. That's our country coordinator, Hong, leaning over my shoulder.

After about two hours of hiking, we reached this tower. There were two main "types" of Great Wall-- the ones where the towers had three windows, and the other ones with four. The ones with three, such as this one, were constructed during the Qin dynasty around 220 BC. The Qin dynasty is often referred to as the "First dynasty of China," since the emperor Qinshi huangdi, united a bunch of the warring states and unified the Chinese script. He was a pretty cruel guy and his dynasty didn't last long, but he certainly left his mark on China. Interestingly enough, I think Mao admired him-- he sacrificed a lot (mostly, people) for "The Greater Good" of the nation.
In case you're curious, the four-holed towers were constructed during the Ming dynasty(1300? - 1644). Super cool.


These loudspeakers would go on at 6:30 AM and go on and on. I didn't bother trying to figure out what they were saying; that would've require too much effort. The propaganda was well salted with words like "MaKeSi ZhuYi" (Marxism), "GongChanDang" (Communist Party), "MaoZhuXi" (Chairman Mao), and "SheHuiZhuYi" (Socialism), so I think I can justify my laziness in listening.

Remember what I said about rich Beijingers?

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, (Monty Python, anyone?)











So I was looking to get some old Mao-era Chinese cameras, and found out about a camera market on the West Fourth Ring Road. Well, imagine a middle school-aged girl going to a mall. That was me yesterday. Except before I went in, I saw this crowd gathering, and all these (quite hideously-dressed) models just sort of milling around, and a bunch of people with their new fancy cameras taking pictures of them. I wanted to try to capture the oddness of the event, but I'm not sure if I did a very good job. Trust me though, it was WEIRD.

Afterwards, I went in, and saw all these cool cameras, including the one I posted a picture of above. It's a super rare rangefinder with an f-stop of 0.95 (I know, super nerdy, but really cool), a huge spanking lens. They had all these old cameras, of course I couldn't afford any, but I did end up buying two Mao-era rangefinders. I forgot to take pictures of them before I came here, but they were pretty neat little critters for not that much (about twenty bucks a pop). Who knows whether they'll work, I'm going to use them in South Africa so I don't have to carry around my big expensive digital camera. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I need to justify the purchase somehow, right?

Beijing, Panjiayuan

There's a very good chance that taking pictures of soldiers is illegal in China. I snuck this one in near Tiananmen Square. Today I got yelled out for taking pictures of a construction site. Perhaps the Chinese really do know the power of the photograph, how easily political they can be.


On the Beijing subway.


They sell these little mangos that are like pebbles. They are so cute, they're worth every bite even if you spend 10 minutes peeling the skin for just a sliver.


A horse at the Panjiayuan Antiques market. I wanted to get a statue but ended up getting two pre-Great Leap Forward posters, one encouraing the Chinese to help out North Korea during the "War of American Aggression in Korea" (I'm not actually sure if that's the exact name, but it's something to that effect), and another one pre-1960 when Mao was still friendly with the Soviets.


More at Panjiayuan.


These gramaphones (is that what they are?) were in the exact same place as they were last summer when I came here with Annalisa. I remember because I took a picture of them then, too, except last summer there wasn't that pig. Happy Year of the Pig! That means my sister is 24!


I'm trying to figure out this picture but it was all cut up and scratched and really beautiful.


Beijing.