Having a car is wonderful

Well it has definitely been an exciting two days. Yesterday was all about the food. I met Jenny at UCT after her class was over and we had lunch at the food stand that is run by Hare Krishnas. It's vegan and amazingly yummy. They give you these big pieces of dairy free carrot cake for dessert that is easily the best I have ever had. The whole meal costs the equivalent of like $4. We hung out on campus for a while to use the computers and visited with Jenny's friend Kende during his office hours. He works in Jenny's program (he's studying something else) and is a visiting student from Ethiopia. Sometime next week I think we're all going to go for Ethiopian food nearby. He's really fabulous and lots of fun. Afterwards we came home to wait for the car rental place to drop off the car, which took forever. Everything here works on a very slow clock. When we finally got the car (it's a Daihatsu), we picked up Jenny's friend Sadie and went to the African Cafe for dinner. It's this very touristy restaurant where the serve dishes from all across Africa. Each different room is decorated based on different tribes or themes. There are 16 different courses and you get served some of each. Pretty much everything was fantastic. After you are served each thing, you can order more of anything you want, however you basically never want to eat again from all the food. There is also entertainment, with singers and people with drums who come through to the different rooms. All in all a very enjoyable experience. Now that we have the car, we decided to head for wine country today. It was pouring rain here when we left, but fortunately rather sunny where we were headed (general Stellenbosch, Paarl area). If yesterday was about food, today was definitely about drinking and driving :) . In total we visited 5 vineyards, which means 25-30 wine tastings. I may have been slightly tipsy at certain points. I got a couple of really good bottles of wine for less than it would cost me to get some Cochon Mignon at Provigo in Montreal. We also got to do some cheese tasting and I picked up some really yummy cream cheese for breakfast that has fresh apricot mixed in. South African wines are fantastic. It's fairly easy to get a sweeter wine (which are the ones I like) because of the length of the growing season. We tried all sorts of different things. There was even one (that I really did not enjoy) that had a sort of lingering flavour of bacon. In between our wine tasting excursions and whilst sobering up a little, we headed towards the Taal monument. Here, that name translates to mean the Africaans Language Monument. Basically, It's a large phallic statue representing white supremacy that sits on top of a mountain for the entire countryside to see. The whole idea was rather strange. We took a wrong turn at one point and drove along a poorly paved road, which we took to mean that the government was making a statement and not fixing the roads to get to the racism monument, when really we had just turned left instead of right. Once we got there it was actually in a really beautiful area in a nature reserve with an amazing view of the wine valley. So far today has been the highlight of the trip, but that may be partially a result of the large amounts of wine consumed. (Just a side note, the Hotel that runs the wine tours in the area is called the Stumble Inn! Hehe) We got some great Indian food for dinner and are pretty much just vegging tonight, so I thought I'd let everyone know what's going on!