This Side of Amy: Simon’s Town, South Africa

We are now in Simon’s Town, a small village near Cape Town, South Africa about 15 minutes away from our first apartment in Muizenberg. I get to sit at the kitchen table in this stunning house and write my post about Sevilla. As I do, my eyes drift from the computer screen over to the ocean view out the window. My heart leaps with the hope for a view of a dolphin and then falls as the ocean reveals only a dark rock in the near distance. How many times am I going to fall for her trick? Or will that rock turn into a dolphin if I stare at it long enough? There are also Great White Sharks in these waters. Is it the mixing of the Atlantic and Indian oceans that draw them to this bay? Or do the flocks of seagulls that circle in the air and drop like bombs into the water in their death defying fishing technique bring the sharks salivating for a taste of bird? There are professional shark watchers, paid to sit atop the mountain and scan the sea for the Great Whites. The property manager told us that just last week the siren blared shouting at the swimmers and surfers to get out of the water. My eyes widened as she spoke but she just shrugged it off.

Ah, just another day in Cape Town.

This will only be a temporary house for us. Initially, we planned to stay only a week in Cape Town but due to unforeseen circumstances we now plan to stay for three months. The owner of the apartment we stayed in for the last several days had already promised it to other renters for the week after our stay and then would be returning to it themselves after their three-week holiday in New Zealand. Due to the Easter Holiday, it was an incredible challenge to find affordable accommodation. The city is also hosting a large marathon for the same weekend; therefore, the best we could find for the dates we needed was an apartment 40 minutes from my doctor and the girls school and it is unavailable until the 24^th. Leaving us homeless for four days.

Acts of kindness come in many different packages. The rental company said they had a house we could use and offered it to us for the same price/night as the much smaller apartment we would be moving into on the 24th. They were battling with the electricity company as the ownership of the house had recently changed hands. It was a risky agreement, book the apartment for the 24^th and hope for the electricity to come on in the “stop gap” house. However, now we are here in this huge house the management company kindly opened up for us. It is decorated with antique, colonial fixtures and has way more space than we need; although, the girls have already spread into all of it. They made quick work of exploring this house, running out onto the porch to tell me all about it before I had even stepped foot inside. It is strange to think that this house feels like more space than we need since it is smaller than the house we sold in Denver. I am grateful for my change in viewpoint.

While our stress to find housing to fit our budget and timing was very real, the barbed awareness of my first world problems pierces my consciousness as we drive around the city passing from gorgeous beach homes to corrugated tin shantytowns. I am filled with a growing curiosity about Apartheid and how much its impact on the people here still lingers. I can’t help but assume it is significant when I watch from across the ocean the continued struggle for equality in my own country of the US. The amount of sadness I feel about how horrible humans can be to one another fills me; a victim of my own cognitive dissonance, my mind focuses once again on the beauty of the ocean scene and my eyes drift back to my writing about lovely Sevilla.