Also saw the small ‘Cities of the World’ exhibition with paintings by Titus Matiyane. He paints ‘maps’ of cities. They are huge and quite rough but still rather detailed and capturing a lot about the cities on them. Of course this is even cooler if you’ve lived in the cities in question or at least been there.

(Small part of the Pretoria map, featuring the city centre)

…

• sweet: Little bistro in Stellenbosch with proper breads run by Swedes. Nice if you want a solid bread but I found the ‘fillings’ a bit uninspired. And the traffic on the road next to it a bit too heavy when sitting outside.

• Eikendal wine farm: Their restaurant is situated quite close to a road but by the magic of elevation and a lake just in front of it, you won’t notice. The springbok carpaccio was probably a bit thick for carpaccio but still nice. And hooray for daytime drinking.

  

  We were also highly amused by finding Thüringer Bratwürste among their daily specials. Correctly spelled. Those Germans are everywhere.

  

• Mama Africa is a widely recommended restaurant in downtown Cape Town. With my parents being reluctant to travel there and back at night it took a bit of nagging to go there. The place was packed and the food was neither particularly exciting nor particularly good. I tried the crocodile sosati which tasted like chicken (with my memory of crocodile being more like fish but that may be because of different preparation) and had a Kudu steak which was rather dry.

  

  The place isn’t just a restaurant but also doubles as a bar. Many people came and went and there was live music playing which made things a bit too busy and loud for having dinner. The band was playing what I’d consider ‘Caribbean’ version of pop songs. I actually thought they were quite good but it’s a shame they didn’t do anything original.

  

  While it may just be a tourist trap after all, I’d say that just coming to Mama Africa for a drink and some music rather than a meal should be much more fun

• La Petite Ferme: Situated on the hills behind Franschhoek (the demise of whose great pancake restaurant keeps making me sad), doing only lunches and being fully booked doesn’t make this restaurant the most convenient one. But it was the best one during my whole holiday. We had to wait a bit for the table to be cleared and sat down in the sunshine of their garden with a view on the valley for the time being, ordering some wine.

  I had the rice paper with greens and pine nuts as a starter which was nice. The mussels with creamy white wine sauce were rather good as well.

  

  As a main dish I had the idea of staying lean by having the open ravioli which essentially meant sheets of noodle with plenty of tomato, feta, herbs and walnuts among them. Doesn’t sound too exciting but tasted good. The trout was very good as well and the seared tuna on green asparagus was such a generous portion and so well done that I may have regretted my choice after all.

  

  After that I had to have a dessert as well and went for a tarte, fruit, ice thingy. Quite nice particularly the fresh berries in it.

  

• The Guinea Fowl: The restaurant on the Saxenburg wine farm is quite good as well although many of their dishes suffer from being overly sauced and decorated as well as being fancy for the sake of being fancy rather than being downright good. Sitting on the stoep may give you a view all the way to Table Mountain.

  

• 96 Winery Road: This one has been a favourite with the family for a while. Not just for the meat platter they carry around to show off the different cuts and pieces but also for the rest of the menu. I had some oysters as a starter and, while OK, I keep wondering what the fuss is about. I also remembered them to be less fleshy from when I had some as a kid (imagine the suffering of holidays at a place where oysters are cheaper than ice cream…), continental differences, perhaps?

• Dros: Another franchise where you can eat a steak with onion rings. We went there because the place had a great entertainment area for my friends’ kids. With games and the facilities for them to roll out, top and bake their own pizzas. I would have loved that as a kid…

[Also seen in cinema]

• Café in Gardens: The Gardens make a nice environment, but the food is nothing to write home about. I still managed to get the milkshake I couldn’t have the other day.

  

• Cape Town Fish Market: It’s a chain of fish restaurants with a decent reputation. The night we were at their Stellenbosch branch, things were very good. Nice starters (prawn tempura, tuna/salmon sashimi, Squid) and really good pieces of kingclip.

  

• Kauai: ‘Alternative’ fast food chain with interesting burgers and plenty of healthy/veggie stuff available. Nice smoothies as well.

  

• Spurs Steak Ranch: Not a particularly fancy place for eating out. Even a bit tacky with their decorations and a choice many people laugh about. Yet, they have good meat, good steaks and those fantastically thin onion rings on the side. The spare ribs aren’t bad either.

• Fairview: Wine farm with a taste for cheese. They have a tower with goats living in it and a nice option to sample cheeses for lunch.

  

• Cognito: Nice restaurant with a menu written by a marketing freak (too many exciting adjectives in there). The chicken liver with coriander as a starter was good and so was the rooibos flavoured crème brulée for dessert. Just the main dish – lamb with a sauce that allegedly had to do with rosemary along with sweet potatoes was disappointing.

  

[Continued…]

So I had to read some odd technology supplement of the Cape Times to find out for the first time that the event’s ‘name’ actually is nothing but an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design and that it’s really a bit like the Oscars – the article running a headline of

Accordingly the text contains paragraphs about Comedian Robin Williams […] Actress Cameron Diaz […] Queen Noor of Jordan […] Actor Forest Whitaker. Honourable mentions go to Serge Brin, actress Goldie hawen, Former US vice president Al Gore and Microsoft founder Steve Wozniak. No Segways were mentioned, though. Further choice quotes could be One performer’s instruments included a marble and a bowl or the downright mission statement-ish

The ‘TED community’ is perpetually tapped to fulfil visions such as ending poverty, nurturig the environment and fostering planetary harmony.

And all that in beanbags with massage therapists!

Perhaps not the greatest piece of journalism, but an interesting new view on the problem. A few pages later the more misanthropic and technophobe author Robert Greig did a better job at resonating with me in his ‘unplugged’ column. After an overture on conspiracy theorists:

[…] [t]hey feed on the credulity of generations brought up to scan, not read, to feel and not think. Who believe the internet is an encyclopaedia rather than a bazaar.

I’ll try to remember that one – dissing the wikistuff and the opentards in one go is very efficient. More goodness comes about the department of labour: The hall was a mass meeting of slow queues; people behind counters conferred with their tea or were holding merry strategic planning sessions to ‘address’ overcrowding while the mobs surged in and our friends, the banks who [l]aunched charm offensives saying how much they cared; they removed the chairs and plonked the populace on the streets to get mugged at ATMs.

Add to that a desk with [a] tangle of wires: telephone, power, cellphone because Bluetooth seems only to tell me when it’s disconnected, and I get the impression we may have one of the few tech writers who’s honest, experienced and not completely inane. Who would have thought…

Artificial, unhealthy and pretty addictive.

Bright, simple and useful for sitting in the sun.

• Trawler: beach-front seafood place in Gordon’s Bay. Simple but nice. Had the fried calamari steak which was nice and soft.
• Sosatis: African barbecue themed place in Stellenbosch. Had smoked Springbok carpaccio with a nice mustard-honey sauce and Kudu sosati. The latter could have been softer – and apparently it usually is.
• bodega on the Dornier wine farm (pre-booking necessary): Nice atmosphere on a cool stoep. Had feta cheese with a fig (nice, except for the slightly burned bread beneath) and a somewhat mediterranean ‘mezze platter’ which was OK, but not really exciting and with too many olives. Passionfruit ice cream for dessert was too creamy for my taste. Friends of mine made a far better sorbet of those ages ago. They also served Gazpacho which was cool but seemed to lack the cucumbers. The wine farm has some cool architecture which they tied in with their graphic design. Not entirely perfect but well above average.

Gratuitous Mac bitching:

• Apple’s USB modem seems to lack any localisation in Mac OS X.5.
• Attaching said modem will also display a sheet referring to a button on the window which doesn’t exist.
• From a hardware POV, it’s amazing to see the size of said modem and compare it with what we used a decade ago (a quarter the speed, twenty times the size, plus an external power supply). Obviously the built-in option of three years ago was even more amazing.
• On a really slow network connection where Mail may not have finished with downloading a message with a large attachment before the next time its check mail interval comes, would you expect it to simply not check for new mail again? I would. Apple disagree with that expectation.
• Apple managed to mis-spell Johannesburg as Johannisburg in (German, X.5) iCal.
• Do MacBook Pro cases need to have a ‘buzzing’ feeling when attached to the charger?
• Heh, I was even able to reproduce my long-standing MacBook Airport problem when connected to a PowerBook providing the connection via Internet Sharing. Which pretty much nails that the problem can be had with Apple software and hardware only.
• Now it just remains to figure out why the heck my MacBook doesn’t see the SLR camera via USB. That just doesn’t make any sense. — Ah, it seems because it prefers to ignore any USB device attached to it now. The next restart will show whether this is a stupid OS bug or YAHF.