South Africa - 4.1

Bradley picked me up at quarter to nine. He was taking me to the U.S. Consulate and downtown Cape Town. They’d invited me there because of the video contest I won. The State Department had paid for my whole trip.

We drove in on another sunny clear day, past the vineyards and farms, past the ostriches and horses, past the prostitutes, past the still-being-built hangars of Cape Town Film Studios.

I told Bradley about the sand on the highway the day before. We turned off onto the N2, one of the big highways that go downtown.

We got in to the city, past the two big cooling towers of the old power plant, past a golf course. Bradley pointed out the neighborhood he lives in. Its old name used to be Driekoppen, which means “three heads”. A white colonist was murdered there in the 1700’s by three slaves. The slaves were caught. Their heads were put on pikes as a reminder.

We drove south around Table Mountain and got to the consulate by ten. We called ahead to let them know we were getting close. I said now they could light the sparklers for our arrival.

We pulled into the lot and got waved to a parking spot. A guy in a uniform came over and made us pop the hood. They call the hood a bonnet in South Africa. A lady came over too with a shammy cloth and stroked the trim of the car door and the handle.

We got out and I tucked in my shirt and Bradley put on a sport coat. We walked up, got buzzed in, emptied our pockets, went through the metal detector. We slid our passports to a man behind a glass panel. He gave us laminated clip-on badges. We had to leave our stuff, cell phones too, in little wood lockers in the entryway.

Our meeting was short. We sat at a circular table in the café/canteen, in a tall bright geometrically-arrayed-wood-design decorated atrium.

I was offered coffee. I refused. The person who offered seemed confused. How about a glass of water, she asked. I said OK. A couple other people came and talked with us. One man gave me his card. Another man ordered a panini and sat with it while we spoke then wrapped it in napkins when we finished.

I tried to explain why I was there. Who Frithjof Bergmann was, what he was doing, why I was going to Johannesburg to find him. I wasn’t able to give a simple answer, and they didn’t quite seem to buy it.

I talked about the video I made, for the contest I’d won. They said they hadn’t seen the video; it wasn’t coming up on their computers. Flash wasn't working.

They asked the person I came there with a lot of questions about what he was up to, where he was living these days, who he’s working with.

They invited me to come back the next day and meet with somebody else there. The man who’d given me his card said let me you give my card and gave me another one. I said OK I’d come back.

We were led out and opened up our lockers and got our stuff and traded our ID badges for our passports.

We drove back to the city center. The Table Blanket cloud was settling over Table Mountain and covered the sun and made it a gray day.

We drove through a rich neighborhood on the east side of the mountain, where even some European royalty have homes, where some other consulates are. Bradley said the Italian consulate’s in a mansion in this neighborhood. The street it’s on is one letter different from the street he lives on a few miles away. He said very regal and wax-sealed envelopes sometimes show up in his mailbox, especially around the holidays. He’s tried to say something to the post office, but it keeps getting messed up.

We drove up to Kirstenbosch Gardens, a big botanical garden at the base of the mountain. It’s got trails that slope up toward the mountain with beds of flowers and grasses and trees from around the country. We hiked up to the fynbos section, which is shrubland that only grows in the Western Cape. It’s so diverse that it forms one of the six floral kingdoms. Fynbos has got so many so many unique species it’s diverse as tropical rainforests.

We walked up to a lawn. A tour guide was coming down a trail with a few hikers. Bradley knew her. If clouds come up over Table Mountain the tours get cancelled and the hikers have to come down emergency routes.

The sky was blue and clear away from the mountain. The lawns of Kirstenbosch were trim and tidy and psychotropically green.

We walked back down and past a music pavilion. There’s a summer music series – sunset concerts on Sunday nights. There’s a big pitched lawn running down to a band shell. The concert that Sunday was going to be Lira Molapo with HHP and RJ Benjamin. Bradley was bringing his study abroad students there for it.

The place reminded me of Ravinia in Highland park, near Chicago. For the second time in Cape Town I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

We left and drove into the city. There were guys selling complex reptilian beaded sculptures at the stoplights just outside the garden.

We got lunch at Mariam’s, a Cape Malay Halal restaurant. We got salomis, which have got curries baked inside roti, a flaky flatbread.

I asked Bradley where the bathroom was. He pointed me to the back of the place. I walked in there and saw a sink, then a floor and some mats. No toilet. It was the prayer room. I walked back out and sat down.

We ate lunch and made a plan for the rest of the afternoon. Some of Bradley’s students were taking the train into town and were going to meet us at night to see a new movie that’d come out at the V&A Waterfront theater.

We were thinking of going to Robben Island but we called and tickets were sold-out. We left and headed for the Slave Lodge.