Day 2 – Walking Around Cape Town

SOUTH AFRICA

Day 2 – Walking Around Cape Town

The morning greeted us with a completely different weather pattern than the previous day. What was a bright, beautiful, and cloudless Sunday was now an overcast and rainy Monday. That meant that any thought of going up to Table Mountain for a bird’s eye view of Cape Town and the surrounding area would have to be postponed for at least another day. The alternative: walking around the central district of Cape Town and seeing what the city had to offer.

Discounting the shanty towns observed on the way to the hotel the previous day, the city centre, waterfront, and surrounding areas could easily be considered to part of any other Western metropolitan city. Skyscrapers, shopping malls, convention centers, public parks and gardens, and a lively urban scene can be transplanted into any one of the large cities in the US or western Europe, and still feel like home.

The day was most spent walking around the central and financial areas of Cape Town. The most dramatic, and historical, building here is the Castle of Good Hope – the oldest standing building in all of South Africa. It was completed in 1679 and was used as the Dutch administration and military building for over 150 years. It’s not set in the most ideal of locations being sandwiched between the train station and City Hall building, but the renovations over the past decade have certainly made the interior buildings and grounds of the castle a nice place to explore while in the city. The admission price to get into the castle is R25 per adult.

The city hall building is diagonally adjacent to the Castle of Good Hope, and is an impressive looking Edwardian building. The city hall faces a large open area across the street called the Grand Parade. It was from the balcony of the City Hall building that Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd of over 100,000 people where he made his first speech after being released from prison on February 11, 1990. Also, just recently during the FIFA 2010 World Cup Soccer matches played throughout South Africa, dozens of large screens were set up around the Grand Parade as a Fan Park where spectators could watch the matches as they were played.

In the evening, we decided to have a nice, authentic South African dinner. Taking the recommendation of the hotel’s concierge, we headed to the waterfront area and dined at the Karibu Restaurant. One of the things I’ve had an inkling for since my first trip to Africa in 2001 was ostrich meat. So, I was pretty happy to find out that Karibu had a few different menu items available for this item. I chose the fillet skewer cooked to a medium well. As the waiter told me, ostrich meat has some of the lowest fat, saturated fat, and one of the lowest cholesterol in comparison to other red meats. Also, it has one of the highest amounts of iron available as well. That’s all nice, but the question was how did it taste. Well, it was certainly one of the best tasting meat dishes I have ever had! It tastes a lot more like beef than chicken, which is what most people think since it is a bird. However, since it doesn’t have the marbled fat that beef has, there is a lot more flavor that jumps out at you when you first bite into it. The ostrich came with a side of chocolate chili sauce which gave it a bizarre spicy flavor, but it did have the effect of enhancing the taste of the bar-be-qued meat.