More Wine, Food and Loadshedding

The rest of our week in Stellenbosch consisted of more winetasting and more fabulous food.  On Wednesday, Kelly's professor Marc Zimmer and his wife Diane, native South Africans, took us to out into the countryside for a lunch and a wine tasting at a couple of high end vineyards.

Kelly had dinner plans, so Cheryl and I went out into our neighborhood at a streetfront cafe and had dinner.  Once again, loadshedding kicked in at 8pm, and it was rather marvelous how the life in the community didn't skip a beat.  Candles were lit, and LED lights already hanging about kept a glow over the tables.  If anything, the activity became more festive when the power went out.  In the USA, scheduled power outages would cause collective madness, but here in South Africa people simply incorporate this into their life.

Our adjustment was to watch another downloaded movie on the laptop.  I would note the 2 hour outage works nicely with a 2 hour movie.

On Thursday, in anticipation of our weekend in Cape Town, we rented a car.  We signed up for both of us as drivers, but Cheryl quickly became the driver and I the navigator.  That has always been our relative strengths (we won a road rally that way when we were dating).  This time around it had more to do with my pretty complete lack of comfort with driving a) in a foreign country and b) on the left side of the road.  Cheryl handles it with aplomb.

We picked up Kelly and took her to Lanzerac, the vineyard where a Pinotage was first bottled, and had another fabulous lunch in a stunning setting.

That night we managed to score a table at Stellenbosch's somewhat exclusive Fat Butcher (they recommend reservations days in advance) and we can attest that their meat lives up to the hype.  We made it an early night, as we are off to Cape Town for Easter Weekend.