Strand Day 6¶
477 words on Travel
When waking up this morning the sun was shining again. Just as it should be. My dad went to university and my mum and me went for another walk along the beach. It was high tide today, so the actual beach had been reduced to a rather narrow bit of sand. This made it easy to see that having a flood or waves that go just a single meter above the normal level will be enough to cover the whole town in water. I haven’t heard of any problems they had so far, but it just seems a bit risky.
But at this time the only problem was that at once place we had to leave the beach and walk a bit on the sidewalk. While this isn’t a problem for South African feet which seem to handle every kind of ground effortlessly – European feet don’t like walking on the hot pavement very well. It’s hot and it’s not very smooth. It is surprising, though, how different various pieces of sidewalk can be in temperature and smoothness.
I took the camera today, hoping to take some nice photos of the sea and the seagulls. But that turned out to be too hard. While being used to people, the seagulls still try to walk away when being approached. And a 3x zoom just isn’t good enough to get reasonably large photos of them from a distance. Similarly, taking photos of the sea didn’t work too well. To begin with, colours in the mid day sun just look better through sunglasses. But more importantly, my mum’s camera only has a two megapixel resolution. This suffices for many things. But for landscapes you’d want a proper wide angle lens and a massive resolution. From the results I saw, I suspect that even doubling or quadrupling the number of pixels will not give impressive results as you’re trying to take a photo of a large area with many details.
Still, I managed to make a nice photo on our way back.
We braaied for dinner, in the sort of elaborate braai on our balcony. In addition to being built right into the wall and having a proper chimney of its own, it even has a built-in light, so you can see what you’re doing.
While the food we got was generally OK, it wasn’t perfect. Particularly the steaks were too light in colour. Not what we used to have. Along with the braai we had my favourite braai snack. It’s very easy to make and I recommend it to everyone. It’s a simple sandwich that’s made of buttered toast on top and the bottom and sliced (fresh) tomatoes and onion rings on the inside. After preparing these sandwiches, you place them over the fire for a short time so they are nicely roasted (careful, it’s really easy to burn them!).
