Fresney and Glencairn

It looks like this is, or more likely the tail end of was, the Jewish section of town. There's a building a couple blocks from here with "Shalom" in the entranceway, the local office copy place will make invitations for a bar or bat mitzvah and the grocery stores have decent kosher sections. One has a sign saying "Ferrero Rocher Chocolates are kosher". Oh, and they stock pastrami and rye, though I think that's more a stereotype these days than being a strong indicator. I like p&rye. In Cape Town there are many restaurants which include mention on the sign that they are serve halal foods. I don't think I saw any places here with a similar mark for keeping kosher. I was in a scout troop growing up. The meetings were at Temple Judea in Coral Gables and some of the scouts were Jewish, but Reform Jewish like most on the US. Two of the scouts (Matt and Matthew) celebrated their bar mitzvah together and Matt invited me. Men and women sat together and I was not asked to wear a yarmulke. There was only one campout I can remember where we needed to keep kosher. As the meal was spaghetti it was mostly a matter of keeping the dishes and utensils separate.

Yesterday I went to Glencairn to visit Mariana and her husband. I think it's actually Glancairn Heights in the way that my grandparents lived in Sebastian Heights, where Sebastian was little more than a spot on the map. Their house is to the east of the 4-way intersection in the middle of http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-34.15575,18.431432&spn=0.002548,0.003428&t=k&om=1 . Zoom back and Glencairn is on the south side of the valley. Rather smaller than Sebastian.

Zoom back some more and look a bit south. That's Simon's Town. The jackass penguin flock is near there at Boulders Beach. Yes, one of the three current penguin colonies in South Africa. Simon's town is the base for two of South Africa's naval vessels. Both are moored in Google's satellite image. Look southwest, up the hill and due north of the small dirt airstrip is a radar installation. It used to be (and perhaps still is?) a law preventing people from taking photos of this area of South Africa. In 1982 the base commander, Dieter Gerhardt, and his wife were arrested and convicted of being Soviet spies.

There's a train which runs from downtown Cape Town all the way to Simon's Town, hugging the coast from Muizenberg on down. Where's Muizenberg? Follow the coastline up until you get to the wide sandy beach. That section in to the city is known as the Cape Flats. This peninsula is known as Cape Peninsula and is the east side of False Bay, so named because sailors coming from the east would confuse Cape Point (at the end of the peninsula) with Cape Hangklip (at the end of the Cape of Good Hope on the other side of the Bay) and think they were coming in to Table Bay.

People have said the train trip down is scenic. I can believe it, at least for the last bit. Especially if the whales are in the bay. Mariana said she say a Southern Right whale a few days ago, but none came by for a visit that Saturday. Cape Town does have mass transit. There are several train lines and various busses and minibusses. There's even a bus stop across the street from where I am but it does not come frequently. Cape Town's core is pretty compact, being from the pre-car era. It's sprawled since then and cars are the only way to get around unless you want to wait a long time or don't have money. Which is true for a lot of people.

One reason people don't take train even when it goes the right places at the right times is a nervous worry about crime. Everyone locks their doors, and often with multiple layers of locks. There are three between me and the outside - apartment door, complex door, and security door outside that, and the complex walls are topped with razorwire and electric fence. There's a fear - justifiable? - that taking mass transit is too much of a risk. Growing up in Miami I recall taking the bus once, in Cub Scouts to get back from the zoo. I had heard that a lot of strange people took the bus, but not that it was unsafe. My faint memory was of someone in the bus was curious about us - the pack of boys was the strange event.

The next World's Cup is scheduled for Cape Town. A big worry is, will there be enough infrastructure in place to host the event? There's talk of building new stadiums and improving the rail system to handle the .. hundreds of thousands? .. of fans expected to come. (If US college football teams can bring in 40,000 fans+ then world cup soccer can surely bring in more. And it's "soccer" in South Africa and not "football" like it is in the UK.)

Another facet to this story is that some of South Africa's infrastructure has gotten worse since the fall of apartheid because of switching funding to improve social services like, oh, education and health. There's an interesting tradeoff which I'll simplify thusly: should we spend less on the power grid so blackouts become more frequent and spend the money in education so the next generation will have better careers and be able to pay for and do the needed improvements? By how much? How long wlll it take?

In Sweden 4 of the country's 10 nuclear reactors were shut down lat week because of safety concerns about backup procedures. I think 2 of 4 backup generators failed at a plant when there was an electrical outage. While 50% of Sweden's power comes from nuclear plants, taking 20% of the production off-line didn't cause black-outs, only more expensive power. You can do that when you have money and planning. Lat summer here (February) one of the Cape Town generators was off-line with a hard-to-replace part and there were rolling backouts for several weeks. Then again in the US this summer (now) I'll guess there aren't many parts of the country which can take a 10-15% power loss. Everyone loves a/c. Though not my dad when growing up. We were one of the few places in Miami with no a/c. Lots of fans and windows but no a/c. We didn't have heat either but that's less of a surprise. Most modern houses are designed for a/c and are nasty hot and stuffy if you don't have it running in hot weather.

Here it's winter. I wouldn't mind trading a bit of that heat for some of the chill of my bedroom. Or mind using a sauna or hot tub.