Biscuit millin' and Beachin'

On Saturday most of our housemates took a walk over to The Old Biscuit Mill. It’s located in a part of town called Woodstock, about a 20-30 minute walk from our house—close to my work actually—and has a bunch of little shops, boutiques, a couple cafes and every Saturday a CRAZY food tent. After walking through the shops we headed for the food area where food stands create a path through a massive tent. Hand made bread, smoothies, cheese, dips and dried fruit everywhere. From this tent you can walk into another food tent that has restaurant style booths set up with food from all over the world. I got an incredible ostrich burger with guacamole and tziki sauce on it and washed it down with a nice hard cider (while not as popular as it was in Ireland, South Africans are down with the hard cider too…which I’m definitely down with). I also bought a loaf of amazing wheat, barley and rosemary bread, which I’m still working on. While pretty expensive, the shops in the biscuit mill have a bunch of really nice jewellery and gifts and stuff. The food was definitely the best part though.

A weird thing that I noticed, which also shows how I have changed already, is that once we got inside of the biscuit mill there were TONS of white people. I didn’t even see any black people in there until we got to the food area and even then I think there were about 10 or so. Observatory has a lot of white people living and working in it, I think partly due to its popularity among international students and interns, but I have really gotten used to being a minority here. What was so strange about the dynamics of the biscuit mill was that it’s located in Woodstock. That part of town is regarded as pretty sketchy, and pretty poor. Walking over to this expensive area of whiteness we had to step over homeless people baking on the streets, which was really disturbing and once again displayed this weird, troubling, disparity that exists everywhere here.

After getting back from the Biscuit Mill we hopped a train and headed for the beach. It was about an hour train ride over to the other side towards Simonstown. We got off the train and realized we had gotten off a little early but the walk to find the perfect beach was soooo beautiful and well worth it. We decided to stop at Fish Hoek. This beach was fairly empty but incredibly gorgeous. A big part of why it was empty was due to the fact that on January 12 of this year (like a week ago) a man was eaten by a shark at this beach. No joke. All they found were his goggles. It didn’t faze us though…if anything it made it more exciting to be there. It was pretty windy but it was nice to relax, lie out and catch a little late afternoon sun. Pretty soon we saw a guy kite boarding, which was really incredible. It looked like so much fun and we watched him get some pretty good air!

We caught the last train back around 6 or 7 and despite not seeing any sharks or shark attacks I did get a little color, which is a step towards my goal of looking like an African by the time I come home.