Wednesday pick-me-up

In less than 48 hours we leave our lovely little cottage in Wynberg. As delightful as spending the summer by the sea will be (and I am certain it will be), I'm feeling bummed out about the move. This place has been an amazing home for the last 15 months. It is full of such happy memories of incredible feasts, good times with so many friends (those just stopping by and those who stayed days and weeks in our guest room), holidays, visits with all the sweet babies our friends and family have had (and one particularly memorable babysitting experience), the birth of Becky Brown, and too many other things to list here. It has been the most perfect first home for us in Cape Town and we will miss it and living just down the road from our very wonderful neighbors Anna, Graham & Juno dearly. Plus moving is just a pain in the neck...no two ways about that. Exhibit A:

This is the state of our home at the moment. Oy! This amount of upheaval just wears me down. Enter Exhibit B:

I got the most awesome pick-me-up package from my Dad and Diane today. Halloween themed mini spatulas and Thanksgiving themed cupcake decorations. The perfect thing for this little ex-pat/baker. Turkeys dressed as pilgrims?! What is better than that, and who is better than them? Now I'm even more excited for turkey day!! 

domestic danger

Sometimes staying at home can be dangerous. Like the other morning. I was minding my own business, putting away dishes, being all nice and domestic when

GASP

our cutting board became unsteady in the drying rack and

BAM

it fell on my toe and smashed the end of it to smithereens.

These pics are from about a week post-injury because, to be perfectly honest, the dang toe just looked too gruesome up to this point. I'll be hop-a-long Maughan-Brown for the next several weeks. My wonderful brother-in-law Andreas (a doctor) has said it will be about a month until I can comfortably put weight on my left foot, and two months until I am fully recovered. Considering it is only ten weeks until we leave for Nepal this is bad news. I think Brendan is keen to make me eat dinner while doing wall squats to keep my thighs strong. I think I'm keen to have him piggy-back me along the Annapurna Circuit instead. Either way, the Nepal trip just got a little more memorable.

home tour

Let's just pretend we aren't one week away from celebrating three months of living in Cape Town, because then the fact that I am only now getting around to posting some pics of our house wouldn't seem so lame. There were reasons, of course, for delaying: I wanted the ceiling painting to be done so there was not scaffolding around, I wanted our crate to arrive so our beloved belongings would be in the pictures, I wanted to get our art hung on the walls first. None the less, here we are at long last.

Our humble adobe at 32 Mortimer Road.

You are now through the front door. The study (aka: the room where we keep all the boxed stuff belonging to the woman we are renting from and the boxed stuff we are keeping stored until we have a house) is on the right. The guest bedroom is on the left.

(please use your imagination to make this room look far tidier than it is)

The lounge, complete with a fireplace.

The super cool display case in the lounge, full of wedding pressies, cookbooks, and little treasures from our travels. A note on the walls: the owner had recently damp-proofed the house and was going to paint the walls until she needed to leave the country and care for her father. So what you see isn't the result of some crazy home painting trend in Cape Town but merely a job not fully done.

Continuing through the house, you reach the kitchen (my favorite room). The food on the counter is in preparation for our supper of Balinese chicken curry and desert of pumpkin tea cake (from the Tartine cookbook...heaven!). Also, note the demi-fridge. It keeps one from over-buying, that's for sure. It also currently smells strongly of guava, which is not a bad thing.

From the kitchen you can continue back into the bathroom...

...or exit left into the courtyard.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of our happy home and that you'll come visit it soon.

incommunicado

First off, thanks to everyone who has posted lovely comments, sent emails, called, and otherwise shown some love. We had a wobbly transition period into our new home due to some problems with the alarm system and needing to organize pre-scheduled work with some repair men and painters. Nothing major, but such things delay the process of making someone else's house feel like your home. To top it off, we have no internet at home currently and have been feeling a little too out of communication and cut off from the world for our tastes. Soon all this will be resolved and you won't be able to make us shut our pie holes. Consider yourself warned. 

Despite the housing hiccups, the last few days have been plenty full of good times. 

We moved in officially on Monday, but by Tuesday morning had no bowls, spoons, etc unpacked for morning breakfast. So Brendan got creative with his raisin bran. We are now much more settled and have graduated beyond such rustic modes of consumption. Last night we ate a delish vegetable risotto on real plates with real forks and had a glass of our wedding wine in real wine glasses. And this was in front of our first fire in our fireplace. It was all very charming and wonderful.

Parky-pants is settling into his new digs as well. In his prissier moments, he fancies himself as a striking mantelpiece decoration.

 

In moments of relaxation, he makes himself one with the arm of the sofa (this is a classic Parker maneuver, and I'm happy to see it is intercontinentally transferable).

We went on our first real date in Cape Town to Bella Lucia, a darling little restaurant in our neighborhood of Wynberg. 

The food was inspirational: lamb and chickpea stew, pasta rolls filled with butternut and goat cheese topped with arugula, pine nuts, parmesan, and brown butter, and amarula panacotta with carmelized naartjies (a South African tangerine). Heaven.

I've also started my driving lessons. 

It was largely uneventful- a few stalls, a few exasperated drivers stuck behind me, crazy South African taxi drivers giving me heart palpitations...the usual. I did, however, hit a curb at the end of my two hour lesson and managed to scuff the hubcaps on my instructor's brand new teaching car. Oops. She should be thankful that was the worst of my offenses. I am still finding having to make space in my brain to think about a clutch rather exhausting and will continue to fight the good fight toward investing in a manual transmission vehicle. Any support given would be greatly accepted :) 

An then, of course, there is sweet little Hannah.

I think this is probably the best note to end on.

first days in Cape Town

We have been living a very charmed life during our first few days in Cape Town, and this charmed life has not been conducive to blog posts. We've enjoyed settling in, eating all our favorite South African treats, seeing friends, and waking up to views of Table Mountain and Lion's Head each morning.

But let's start at the beginning...

My parents met us at JFK to see us off. We arrived at the airport hotel after a bit of a fistfight with our car battery. It decided to be difficult and stop working the day we were leaving. The nice AAA man who replaced it got a big hug and a tip from me.

Away we went. This photo was taken approximately two hours before the nasty man in the seat behind me decided to shove my seat as hard as he could (causing my forehead to nearly collide with the seat in front of me). When I spun around to ask him what the heck his problem was, he informed me that I could not put my seat back because he did not have enough room. I gave him an earful, with some backup from the South African Airways flight attendant. I also tried to plead my way into an upgrade. Sadly, those efforts bore no fruit. 18 hours, 2 inflight movies, and a complimentary mini-bottle of sparking wine later we were in Cape Town. 

Two hours after our arrival we returned to the airport to fetch Parker. He was delayed, so we went and got a red latte to share. They are lattes made with a rooibus tea "espresso" and are just fabulous. We thought it was a bit of a good omen that the barista used the foam and honey to draw a cat face on ours. 

These are our views from our bedroom windows each morning. It isn't possible to wake up and see Table Mountain and Lion's Head and not feel happy to be alive and in Cape Town. 

Our darling cat had perhaps the most harrowing of all our trips. Thankfully he is settling in wonderfully, even if he is a little bewildered by the new view. I took him out onto Candice's balcony to scope out his new hood. 

Here is evidence of Parker's happy state. Candice's work seat is his new favorite spot to sun himself. It is a race to see who gets their bum into the chair to claim it first for the day. 

This past Sunday we went to Kalk Bay, a lovely bohemian little town on the sea. We went with a singular vision: breakfast at Olympia Cafe. My word, this place is like Cape Town's version of the lovely Tartine in San Francisco. We shared a mushroom and mozzarella croissant with some scrambled eggs, and then another croissant with jam for dessert. 

Swoon. It was too good for words. My face hurt when we left because I was smiling so much. 

After breakfast, we walked down the main road and window shopped. We ended with a walk along the pier, looking at the boats and chatting to a fisherman here and there. 

And this little house? This place, dear friends, is the the result of good fortune smiling upon us once more, because this is the house we are moving into next week. A colleague of Brendan's at the University has to leave suddenly for England to care for an ailing family member and has offered to rent her darling Victorian house to us. It has a wonderful sunny courtyard, a spare bedroom (book your tickets, folks), and a new kitchen. And there is a bathtub!! We haven't had one of those for 3 years. We are feeling so happy and fortunate and thrilled. Update addresses and such will follow, along with a virtual tour next week.

So life is great. We are embracing life in the Mother City in a big way, and there is no sight of decreased excitement in the near future. The weeks ahead will bring driving lessons for me (should be good for a comical blog post), settling into work life, a new sweet little baby niece, a visit from Brendan's parents, and lots and lots more guava yogurt for yours truly. Man, I just can't get enough of the stuff.