We arrived in Cape Town at 5:45 in the morning, flying South Africa Airlines. We found an airport shuttle that turned out to be operated by a tour guide, and by 6:30 we had arranged a full day personal guided tour around the end of Cape Horn, with stops wherever we thought there might be something interesting to see. At 9:00 a friendly little woman showed up in a tiny Mercedes, and away we went. As it turned out, everyone's ideas about my stamina far surpassed the reality, but we did manage to get to about a dozen memorable locations before we cut the trip short and returned to the Fire and Ice Hotel by about 5:00 pm. Since at noon I had taken a dose of whatever they use in South Africa instead of gravol, the second half of the trip passed for me in a kind of strobe-like delirium, where I would blink my eyes and find that half an hour had gone by, and I was variously staring at an exhibit on species of protea, riding again in the car, standing looking at a mountain view, or sipping a cooling drink.
The Fire and Ice Hotel
But first of all, who the heck calls their hotel "Fire and Ice"? Well, the Extreme Hotel chain, of course, which is intended to attract the kind of young people who might be interested in Extreme sports. The hotel slogan is "having a little fun" and it shows in everything they do, from the five-storey climbing wall attached to the outside of the building to the matches for the candles, which include the phone number for the Pyromaniacs Help Line. Each of the elevators has an internal cage and a theme. One is a shark cage. Another is a cable car. There are also five different lobby bathrooms, each with its own theme. "Performance Anxiety," for example, has wallpaper showing a studio audience sitting there to watch you pee. I liked the Lou Rawls bathroom, which has forty single toilet paper rolls covering one of the walls and a wall-sized portrait of the musician on another. I liked it, that is, until I realized the pun on the singer's name-you have to pronounce his last name like "rolls" and realize that his first name is "Loo."
The Coughing Room
They accommodate smokers here at the Fire and Ice Hotel, but if you want to smoke, you have to sit on a couch shaped like a coffin, next to a coffee table shaped like a coffin, underneath a ceiling mural that shows people looking down at you through a hole in the dirt. There's also a tombstone etched into the glass beside the door.
Penguins
One of the highlights of our drive was that we got to see a great many South African Penguins, who are living in the wild, but at a location where the government has built an elaborate set of boardwalks. You pay an entry fee, then brave a gale force wind kicking up fine white sand into your face, until you finally reach a little cove just littered with these little guys. They are about a third the size of emperor penguins, and just about as cute as you can bloody well stick. Most of them are lying on their bellies in the sun, but a few of them are digging holes or walking around or humping another penguin.
Seals
For about five dollars a head and a thorough soaking in a spray of salt sea water, you can ride a boat over to a little island where the seals like to hang out. There they were, sitting around on the rocks, flopping clumsily in and out of the ocean, and swimming like the dickens. They could fling themselves right out of the water when they wanted to, but mostly they seemed to want to float just beneath the surface, with one flipper or maybe a tail sticking up in the air. The effect is a bit like a bed of kelp, until one of them turns over and contemplates you with his whiskers drooping down.
One Baboon
As we zipped through one of the suburbs outside Cape Town, I saw a big old baboon sitting by himself on top of someone's fence. It was a sufficiently surreal thing to see that I assumed he was some kind of lawn ornament or sculpture, but when I mentioned him to our tour guide, she said, oh yeah, this was an area where there are baboons. Then I spotted some warning signs telling people not to feed them, since it makes them too bold, like the bears in the Rockies, except smaller, more numerous, and with opposable thumbs.
Two Ostriches
I don't think we had planned to stop at the South African Ostrich Farm, but I'd been feeling a bit zwooped by the winding mountain roads, so we turned in to get a slice of bread and a few minutes off the roller coaster. While we were there, I also got to see a lot of ostriches at a distance and two of them up close. They could have reached across the fence and eaten out of my outstretched palm, as they did with the man and his little girl ahead of us, except of course I didn't have a bag of whatever it is that ostriches eat. The female of the species is quite large, with grey plumage, and the male is smaller and meaner, with the black feathers and white tail I tend to think of when I imagine an ostrich. Their eyes are incredibly huge and their lashes are Drew Barrymore long, but the unnerving thing really is their strong and supple neck, which seems to have no rational limit on where it can go or what it can do.
Country of Elmers
As some of you know, when I was a teenager, my Dad was forever trying to remove my plate before I was done eating. He wanted to take it away and wash it. So I spent many of my formative years trying to capture a last forkful of food off a rapidly retreating plate. We've subsequently memorialized this behaviour with the verb "to elmer," and I have to say I've never seen such world-class elmering as there is here in Cape Town. I have yet to actually swallow my last mouthful before I find myself sitting in front of an empty table. Different people appear to be competing for the prize, so that setting down a glass, for instance, will provide a chance to score a few points for a waiter zipping past on another errand, while looking briefly away from your side plate conjures a waitress who removes it, the remnants of your butter, and the last half of your scone. I had to summon my chi this morning to face down someone who wanted to claim half my breakfast cereal, after I took an ill-timed sip of coffee.
Table Mountain
One of the most dramatically striking features of this city is that there is a mountain in the middle of it. Table Mountain rises sufficiently high above Cape Town that the summit is often obscured by a thick white cloud, which comes rolling down the slopes, dissipating before it reaches the tallest buildings. According to our tour guide, they call this cloud the tablecloth. This strikes me as most likely something they made up for tourists, but you never know.
The Cape Doctor
Another factor to keep in mind is the prevailing wind, which blows across the city. It might be more difficult to deal with it, our cab driver said, if people here didn’t have the occasional experience of having it stop for a while. When that happens, the temperature rises, and so does the level of air pollution, which is otherwise swept out to sea. For that reason, again according to our cab driver, they call this wind the Cape Doctor. For my opinion, please see the entry above on the subject of the tablecloth on table mountain.
Band of Alcoholics
When you are waiting to get on the boat to see the seals, you can’t help but notice a weathered-looking group of middle-aged men, all dressed in shabby yellow matching costumes, with daubs of paint on their faces. They sang and danced on the wharf, while the leader held out his hat in the hopes of getting a donation from each debarking passenger. It impressed me no end that these unshaven men, shambling a little, reeking of alcohol from the night before, could still manage to assemble themselves by ten in the morning into a performing troupe, for the purposes of cajoling the tourists out of a few rand.
Eleven Official Languages
South Africa has not one, not two, but 11 official languages. How cool is that? On our city tour this evening, the guide pointed out one of the buildings that has statues representing the tribes responsible for 9 of those languages. On the radio this morning, someone was speaking one of these languages and I have no idea what it was, except that somewhere in the middle of what I think was the weather report they had to use a word with a click in it. There’s something about a morning show with a click in it that just makes it that much easier to take.
Killed by Sharks
The Designing Interactive Systems conference is one of my favourites, and this year they once again did a super job. Tonight we had a 90-minute “topless bus” tour of the city, ending in a reception outside the predator tank at the Cape Town Aquarium. There’s a great “rethink the shark” campaign going on there, with posters showing objects like chairs and toasters with one corner above the water, looking a bit like shark fins. The posters have stats like “Last year, 700 people were killed by defective toasters. 4 people were killed by sharks.” It turns out, of course, that 100 million sharks are killed each year by people. I loved the idea of a conference reception somewhere interesting. They also threw in a marimba band.
Personal Funicular
Down at the beaches off the Atlantic Ocean, there is some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Several of these properties are perched somewhat precariously on very steep slopes, and also include personal funiculars. They looked like little glass boxes, with only one or two seats inside. The tour guide pointed out that you could keep track of which ones were currently in use if you passed by several times a day, because you could see whether the car was at the top or the bottom of the slope.
Design Indaba
Concurrent with the Designing Interactive Systems conference, and held in the same convention centre, is the annual national design trade show called Design Indaba. Our conference badges gave us free entrance on Tuesday afternoon, to an event where entrance is carefully monitored. Design of all kinds in South Africa is an emerging area of excellence for the country, and we saw an amazing range of wonderful ideas and products, from wooden bookshelves built of component boxes held together by magnets, to condoms with handles for easy application. I was particularly struck by a hatstand that looks like the silhouette of an African tree, and Milena fell in love with a life-sized decorative sheep made out of wire and beads.
What We Ate
I had hoped there would be food here that I didn’t know much about, and I haven’t been disappointed. The breakfast buffet includes slices of the tiny local pineapple, yellower and more flavourful than the ones we are used to from Hawaii. There are also pitchers of fresh guava juice, thick and pink, and a huge panful of fried mushrooms that aren’t a kind of mushrooms I know, but are inkier and more delicious. Ostrich is available almost everywhere, and for lunch one day Milena had a delectable corned ostrich sandwich. A popular South African line fish is the kingclip, which has large white flakes. Tonight for dinner I ate a flank of springbok, who I understand is a bit like an antelope. His left lower quarter was very tasty, and came roasted with rosemary on the end of a bone that would have caught the interest of Fred Flintstone.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Berlin
Art Hotel Luise
Our designer friend Bernie Roessler loves Berlin, so I asked him where he stayed when he was here. His hotel of choice turned out to be an "art hotel" in the centre of the city, where a different artist has designed each of the rooms, and they get a commission when you stay in one. Apparently this is increasingly common, and there are art hotels in many cities. Our room was modeled on the idea of a cave left behind by retreating glaciers. In the centre was a floor-to-ceiling scaffold with a massive hanging sculpture made of broken panes of glass, variously printed and spray-painted and so on, along with a lot of braids of human hair and small glittery objects and other detritus. The table had a head-size rock strapped on top by twine that also suspended a second rock beneath. The walls and picture frames were adorned with found objects spray-painted gold. The ceiling was about eighteen feet high, and vaulted in the middle. If you've never worried about getting up to pee in the middle of the night and poking your eye out on the broken glass sculpture suspended over your bed, you obviously aren't a friend of Bernie Roessler's.
Window in the Ground
One of the nefarious activities committed by the Nazis was a bookburning in the city centre. They didn't just burn fiction, but a lot of research output too, from various fields. This bookburning has been memorialized by one of the most subtle monuments I've ever seen. As you walk past the square at night, you notice a window of light cut into the pavement at the centre. When you look down into the window, you see a completely white room lined with white bookshelves, all empty.
Field of Stones
There is a memorial here that occupies a considerable city block. It consists of grey, rectangular stone monoliths, each one slightly larger than the dimensions of a coffin. Milena reminds me that these are the standard size for a European grave, like the ones in Krakow and Cuba. They are spaced far enough apart that you can walk comfortably between them. At the edge they are flush with the pavement, then they rise to knee height, waist height and so on up as you enter the maze, until in the middle they are at least twice my height. It is impressive just to look at from a distance, but it's not until you walk inside that you really get the full oppressive effect. I am not particularly sensitive to this kind of monument, but I have to say that even I began to feel the claustrophobic weight when we'd entered far enough. Some of the effect is the result of the looming quality of the stones, which aren't all set perfectly aligned or square, but are instead just slightly off kilter. Very powerful.
Brother Can You Spare Five Euros?
The first person we spoke to outside the Berlin Tegel airport was a young woman who asked if we could accommodate her with some Euros. I thought that might set a tone, but in fact the beggars in Berlin were few and far between. There were some buskers, including a saxophonist on the U-Bahn (U for Underground, I think), and an entire brass section in Alexander Platz. Like the panhandlers in Montreal, many of the ones in Berlin seemed to have pets, usually very well behaved dogs sleeping near them on blankets. On a couple of occasions I didn't even spot the panhandler; there was just the mournful-looking dog lying there.
Remnants of the Berlin Wall
There are a few pieces left standing here and there as yet one more set of bleak freaking Berlin memorials, and there's also a discoloured strip on the ground, maybe a foot wide, that runs disturbingly off into the distance in both directions. Milena took my picture standing on one side and putting my toe across to the other. The wall was made of L-shaped pieces of concrete, and the surfaces are completely coated in graffiti. People have also entirely covered the edge in pieces of chewing gum.
Turkish Quarter
In the 1970s there was an economic boom, and hundreds of thousands of cheap labourers were imported from Turkey. They weren't well assimilated with the rest of Berlin, and now form a quarter where we went for a delicious dinner. The area was originally at the edge of West Berlin, but after the wall came down it became central, so it has become increasingly popular with the Bohemian crowd, in part because artist studios are still affordable. We stopped for a few minutes at a comic book store that seemed to go on forever into the interior, with at least three separate rooms. We admired the graphic novel version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a Wonder Woman action figure, and the many Ugly Dolls of various sizes. There was also a stuffed toy cigarette named Smokey, whose slogan was "Your best and only friend."
Potsdammer Platz
This was where the four powers met to divide the city after the war. It was basically an open field for many years, but after reunification it became the largest construction site in the country. It is now home to a wide range of impressive buildings and shops, one of which is the Sony Centre, which has a roof like a set of sails that can be opened or closed to accommodate the weather. At night it creates a very beautiful interior, with lights at all different levels.
Alexander Platz
Formerly the centre of East Berlin, it is still home to the largest building in the city, a kind of radio tower spire complete with a revolving restaurant. We spent enough time there to see the punks, who were genuine tough hombres hanging around the central fountain. Milena of course made a beeline for them with her digital camera, and we had to rein her in and sit on her head.
Blue Man Group Berlin
I had seen the Blue Man Group on television and thought they were a US phenomenon, so imagine my surprise when Rosan walked us past the Blue Man Max, which is a theatre here with its own trio of blue men. For those of you who don't know about them, they are primarily percussionists but also a kind of performance artists, if that's the right word for someone who throws marshmallows across the stage into someone else's mouth. And by marshmallows, I mean a lot of marshmallows, until the poor guy's mouth is packed full. Then he spits them out onto a pedestal as a kind of mouth sculpture, and attaches a for-sale sign. Blue men, the philosophy goes, aren't white or black but are instead just blue, and they are primarily characterized by being co-operative. So when someone proposes something, the others go along with it until it reaches some kind of absurd extreme. For instance, they open with three of them standing behind two drums. The central blue man is drumming. When he glances right, the one on the left surreptitiously pours some paint on the drum head. Hitting that drum now produces a fountain of paint. Soon both drums are pools of paint, and before the scenario is over, they have produced a blank canvas and made a painting by positioning it above the spraying fountains. That sketch took maybe five minutes of a solid two hour show, so you can imagine some of the hijinks they got up to. By the end, the paint was coming out of spigots in the centre of their chests, and they were alternately drumming on it and eating it. We lost some of the performance because it required you to be able to speak or read German, but a lot of it translated well enough. We were seated at the back of the theatre, and when the rolls of paper started unrolling from the ceiling at the end of the show, it was so much fun that we practically became hysterical. You pass the ends of the paper along down the audience, until there's a river of white streamers, each about a foot wide, flowing down from the seats to the stage.
Our designer friend Bernie Roessler loves Berlin, so I asked him where he stayed when he was here. His hotel of choice turned out to be an "art hotel" in the centre of the city, where a different artist has designed each of the rooms, and they get a commission when you stay in one. Apparently this is increasingly common, and there are art hotels in many cities. Our room was modeled on the idea of a cave left behind by retreating glaciers. In the centre was a floor-to-ceiling scaffold with a massive hanging sculpture made of broken panes of glass, variously printed and spray-painted and so on, along with a lot of braids of human hair and small glittery objects and other detritus. The table had a head-size rock strapped on top by twine that also suspended a second rock beneath. The walls and picture frames were adorned with found objects spray-painted gold. The ceiling was about eighteen feet high, and vaulted in the middle. If you've never worried about getting up to pee in the middle of the night and poking your eye out on the broken glass sculpture suspended over your bed, you obviously aren't a friend of Bernie Roessler's.
Window in the Ground
One of the nefarious activities committed by the Nazis was a bookburning in the city centre. They didn't just burn fiction, but a lot of research output too, from various fields. This bookburning has been memorialized by one of the most subtle monuments I've ever seen. As you walk past the square at night, you notice a window of light cut into the pavement at the centre. When you look down into the window, you see a completely white room lined with white bookshelves, all empty.
Field of Stones
There is a memorial here that occupies a considerable city block. It consists of grey, rectangular stone monoliths, each one slightly larger than the dimensions of a coffin. Milena reminds me that these are the standard size for a European grave, like the ones in Krakow and Cuba. They are spaced far enough apart that you can walk comfortably between them. At the edge they are flush with the pavement, then they rise to knee height, waist height and so on up as you enter the maze, until in the middle they are at least twice my height. It is impressive just to look at from a distance, but it's not until you walk inside that you really get the full oppressive effect. I am not particularly sensitive to this kind of monument, but I have to say that even I began to feel the claustrophobic weight when we'd entered far enough. Some of the effect is the result of the looming quality of the stones, which aren't all set perfectly aligned or square, but are instead just slightly off kilter. Very powerful.
Brother Can You Spare Five Euros?
The first person we spoke to outside the Berlin Tegel airport was a young woman who asked if we could accommodate her with some Euros. I thought that might set a tone, but in fact the beggars in Berlin were few and far between. There were some buskers, including a saxophonist on the U-Bahn (U for Underground, I think), and an entire brass section in Alexander Platz. Like the panhandlers in Montreal, many of the ones in Berlin seemed to have pets, usually very well behaved dogs sleeping near them on blankets. On a couple of occasions I didn't even spot the panhandler; there was just the mournful-looking dog lying there.
Remnants of the Berlin Wall
There are a few pieces left standing here and there as yet one more set of bleak freaking Berlin memorials, and there's also a discoloured strip on the ground, maybe a foot wide, that runs disturbingly off into the distance in both directions. Milena took my picture standing on one side and putting my toe across to the other. The wall was made of L-shaped pieces of concrete, and the surfaces are completely coated in graffiti. People have also entirely covered the edge in pieces of chewing gum.
Turkish Quarter
In the 1970s there was an economic boom, and hundreds of thousands of cheap labourers were imported from Turkey. They weren't well assimilated with the rest of Berlin, and now form a quarter where we went for a delicious dinner. The area was originally at the edge of West Berlin, but after the wall came down it became central, so it has become increasingly popular with the Bohemian crowd, in part because artist studios are still affordable. We stopped for a few minutes at a comic book store that seemed to go on forever into the interior, with at least three separate rooms. We admired the graphic novel version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a Wonder Woman action figure, and the many Ugly Dolls of various sizes. There was also a stuffed toy cigarette named Smokey, whose slogan was "Your best and only friend."
Potsdammer Platz
This was where the four powers met to divide the city after the war. It was basically an open field for many years, but after reunification it became the largest construction site in the country. It is now home to a wide range of impressive buildings and shops, one of which is the Sony Centre, which has a roof like a set of sails that can be opened or closed to accommodate the weather. At night it creates a very beautiful interior, with lights at all different levels.
Alexander Platz
Formerly the centre of East Berlin, it is still home to the largest building in the city, a kind of radio tower spire complete with a revolving restaurant. We spent enough time there to see the punks, who were genuine tough hombres hanging around the central fountain. Milena of course made a beeline for them with her digital camera, and we had to rein her in and sit on her head.
Blue Man Group Berlin
I had seen the Blue Man Group on television and thought they were a US phenomenon, so imagine my surprise when Rosan walked us past the Blue Man Max, which is a theatre here with its own trio of blue men. For those of you who don't know about them, they are primarily percussionists but also a kind of performance artists, if that's the right word for someone who throws marshmallows across the stage into someone else's mouth. And by marshmallows, I mean a lot of marshmallows, until the poor guy's mouth is packed full. Then he spits them out onto a pedestal as a kind of mouth sculpture, and attaches a for-sale sign. Blue men, the philosophy goes, aren't white or black but are instead just blue, and they are primarily characterized by being co-operative. So when someone proposes something, the others go along with it until it reaches some kind of absurd extreme. For instance, they open with three of them standing behind two drums. The central blue man is drumming. When he glances right, the one on the left surreptitiously pours some paint on the drum head. Hitting that drum now produces a fountain of paint. Soon both drums are pools of paint, and before the scenario is over, they have produced a blank canvas and made a painting by positioning it above the spraying fountains. That sketch took maybe five minutes of a solid two hour show, so you can imagine some of the hijinks they got up to. By the end, the paint was coming out of spigots in the centre of their chests, and they were alternately drumming on it and eating it. We lost some of the performance because it required you to be able to speak or read German, but a lot of it translated well enough. We were seated at the back of the theatre, and when the rolls of paper started unrolling from the ceiling at the end of the show, it was so much fun that we practically became hysterical. You pass the ends of the paper along down the audience, until there's a river of white streamers, each about a foot wide, flowing down from the seats to the stage.
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