21st century heartbeat

10 days left in the motherland.
Yesterday I arrived back in Stellenbosch, tomorrow we embark on a little road trip past Gansbaai to Cape Agulhas and then on to Waenhuiskrans. The names of places ring bells for being where one goes to shark cage dive, the southernmost tip of Africa, and the town where Madel Terreblanche in the soap 7de Laan had a beach house. More than that I do not know.

Europeans have often asked me how many African countries I have visited, probably presuming that going from Kenia to Ghana to Swaziland is equal in distance and ease to travelling across their own continent. But Africa is an enormous continent with unequalled diversity and cultural differences, and travelling here means accepting hours (if not days) in the car or bus just to get from one side of the country to the other. When we were little my mom would drive the 12+ hours from Pretoria to Jeffrey's Bay all by herself while we would count different coloured cars, play I-spy-with-my-little-eye, suck on Dirkie condensed milk tubes and wait to see who could spot the ocean first.

Much of long distance driving to me still holds the fascination of looking out of the window and seeing another world go by. I know the golden afternoon sunlight in the Free State, the sudden spot of green as one approaches the Orange river, the soccer statue on the back roads in the small town of Richmond, or where the speed cameras between George and Wilderness are. My mother has taken us on a road trip to Swaziland, Lesotho and Kwa-Zulu Natal, where we stayed over in a monastery, ate cup a soup and drank wine after having gone up on Durban's Moses Mabidha stadium. In Swaziland we walked through the woods or saw hundreds of schoolchildren walking along the roads. To get up into the mountains of Lesotho we clambered into a Land Rover and held onto our seats whilst driving up the Sani Pass.

Other trips have included detours to the Owl House in Nieu Bethesda or visiting Sutherland's Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) to see the stars of the African sky (but then having the visit cancelled due to a magnificent display of clouds at sunset that sadly prevented any real star gazing). We've gone up Table Mountain, we've traced the history of our family at Franschhoek's Huguenot Memorial Museum or surveyed the land in the Valley of Desolation.

Once, my mother and I took the train from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth and got stuck somewhere in the middle of the Free State, which turned a 20-hour trip into a 36-hour adventure. After a midnight arrival in P.E. we stayed over in a hotel before heading off to the Addo Elephant National Park and then visiting my grandmother in Jeffrey's Bay.

Tomorrow we embark again, to see the world in one country.

Sugar

For a while there everyone seemed to be talking about food trucks, with it culminating in the food-truck-film Chef about a chef losing his restaurant job and going on the road throughout select cities in the US. The only time I remember eating something truckishly was a childhood holiday to the Virgin Islands, where we stopped to grab the best frozen yoghurt ever from a turquoise caravan. All I can remember is hundreds of hundreds-and-thousands, which at that time equalled happiness.

However, this gaping hole in my foodie history was filled last week as we first went to Le Food Market, located between the Metro stations Menilmontant and Couronnes. Various sellers offer dishes from all over the world and in between the food stands there are benches to sit at and enjoy your meal. The aim is to make the market a monthly event and to promote good quality food at reasonable prices. All of the dishes were priced between 6-12€, which is about equal to what you would pay for a 'petit plat' at lunchtime in a restaurant.

We queued at the Cafe Chilango to get tacos filled with beef and chicken, and one of the girls had a burger from Burgers de l'Amour. We also grabbed some pasteis de nata for breakfast the next morning before heading to the absolute highlight: the ice-cream rolls. I had seen videos online about people on an Asian vacation (Thailand perhaps? I can't remember exactly) getting ice-cream rolls. Luckily, the trend has travelled to Paris so BOOM ice-cream rolls at Le Food Market. You choose your flavour (chocolate-pear, thank you kindly), which gets squirted in different layers onto a freezing plate. By quickly scraping together and then spreading apart the mixture, the liquid becomes solidified quite quickly. The last step is then to said scraper to create four or five individual ice-cream rolls, which are then topped with either chocolate or caramel sauce and a choice of nuts or pralines.

I had expected the ice-cream to be more of a novelty and not necessarily to be particularly tasty. The assumption was that the rapid freezing would perhaps cause more ice crystals to form and thus the ice-cream to be crunchier than expected. It was not. It was delicious. Easy as that. Delicious. 

Saturday evening was spent at an actual food truck event, where the Carreau du Temple had local trucks outside and French-Korean food inside (in light of it being the French-Korean year). It was difficult to decide what to get, but I ended up with great grilled cheeses and L had a Mexican wrap. No ice cream this time though.

Most interesting is the astounding lack of vegetarian options at both events. Even the grilled cheeses only came in poulet or boeuf (chicken or beef), which I find a bit difficult. Certainly, one could probably ask for a vegetarian version (it's grilled cheese, so...), it was just rather evident that the majority of trucks and stands simply did not offer it on their menus. After bringing this up with the other interns, all of them agree that being vegetarian or vegan in France is much harder as products are difficult to come by and/or excessively expensive. Whereas in Germany one can easily find soy and other substitutes at more or less affordable prices, the supermarkets here rarely have soy mince or rice milk or whatever it is you'd need. Even the two vegans in the group are ordering steaks and burgers here, stating the lack of options both in the supermarkets and when going out. So for now I have entered into an uneasy compromise with myself: eating out means eating everything, eating in means meat-free dishes. I think the best solution to this would just be living off of ice-cream rolls.

I could drink a case of you darling/ I would still be on my feet

Paris is a filthy place. People living in a constant state of cramping: apartments are tiny, the metro is packed and the streets overflow with people, so even if this is big city living it should rather be called small space surviving. For now I live in a small studio on the 7th floor, which consists of two rooms. The one contains the bed and a small table, whereas the other has a shower, a sink and two stove plates. All you need, basically. Oh, the toilet is outside on the corridor and is shared between the 4(?) studios on this floor. The building sits between sex shops and small supermarkets near Pigalle in the 10th arrondissement. When I stand on a chair and look out of one of the windows I can spot the Eiffel tower in the distance. There is constant noise, even though I am at the back of the building: in my room itself the fridge makes alarm-like sounds whilst the electricity metre is an eternally spinning circular silver thing that sounds like an eternally spinning circular silver thing. Then there is the school next door whose electronic bell rings at strange intervals and the kids playing basketball on the court in the road behind the house. This cacophony is expanded by occasional squeals of a siren, hearing my neighbours through the walls and on weekends the music from the clubs in the area combine into an audible mess in the ever colder turning air.

First there was sound, and then there were the masses of people. MASSES of people. Endless streams of humans everywhere, always moving somewhere in haste. In a city of millions, the individual disappears. It is like an amoeba, swallowing up everyone into anonymity. Paris is a bit of a depressing city in this regard. All of living on top of one another and yet no one and nothing matters, all replaceable, all just cogs in a machine.

And yet there have been moments where the myth that is this city presented itself. On a bad day, as I was leaving the metro, a man on roller skates with ballerina lacing whizzed past. Another time, an Algerian man helped a woman from the French Antilles with her suitcases and after 6 metro stations they exchanged business cards. Another intern keeps buying a begging woman food for lunch. On Wednesday I walked to the Seine, met a friend for a McFlurry, and walked back. Yesterday we went to a food market and had rolled ice cream (ok, I like any type of ice cream, rolled, flurried, scooped...). Tomorrow there is the Anish Kapoor exhibit in Versailles. On Sunday the city is partially car-free. Last weekend the journées du patrimoine (cultural heritage days?) enabled anyone with an ID to get into the Élysée Palace (and other no-go ministeries and museums and and and) and check out the president's office (more on the 6.5 hours of queuing I'd like to get back in another post).

So despite a waft of urine on occasion hitting your nostrils, despite the millions of others trying to eek out a living here, despite excessively high costs and tiny spaces, well, despite all the negativity, I'd gobble it all up again, come back for seconds and even thirds. I'd drink a case of this place because nowhere else is misery this closely accompanied by magic.

L'ombelico del Mondo

I subscribe to the notion of "Why not?", rather than limiting myself to possibilities that fit neatly into boxes. So when I saw a banner online advertising the opportunity to volunteer at the Expo in Milan, I applied, not really thinking that it would work out. It did, and for two weeks at the beginning of August this one rolled her suitcase to Italy to eat pasta, meet new people and be in a place where she did not know the language.

The first hurdle was getting there: as we had to attend an introductory meeting on the Thursday and there were no suitable flights from Hamburg (18h layover in Bruxelles, anyone?), I took the train to Berlin, spent an evening there and left early the next morning. Since Ryanair lands at Malpensa Airport, it takes another hour by bus to reach the city. Berlin had been cool enough to wear a leather jacket over a blazer, but any layering proved detrimental as soon as I stumbled onto the sidewalk next to the central station - beads of sweat started pearling on my top lip and the feeling of sweating what could well fill a swimming pool didn't stop until I boarded a different plane heading back to Germany.

At the central station, I embarked on a linguistic adventure by trying to buy a two-week pass for the underground. None of the four tellers could speak anything except Italian (being multilingual this was very annoying, as normally I can get by with jumbling all Romance or Germanic languages), but after half an hour of drawing images and pointing at a calendar the friendly man and I seemed to have reached an agreement on what I wanted, and I walked out with a metro card. Sadly, it turned out to be only for the inner city, and the Expo is situated riiiiight outside of this. So near, and yet so far. The linguistic-ticket adventure continued the next day with the help of Italian volunteer Anna, who sacrificed some time to help me with the ticketing dilemma, but it all worked out (basically because I just nodded and Anna told me when to pay).

From there I rolled my suitcase to a bench near where our meet up would be. Ever so often a whiff of dog piss would waft over and pigeons were trying to camp out on my suitcase, but I feared moving since I'd probably get lost. When I did walk the last metres to the Fondazione Stelline where our group would be meeting up, I noticed that the bench I had been chilling on was right next to Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church where Da Vinci's Last Supper is housed. Despite efforts during the following weeks to get an appointment to go in, everything had been booked solid weeks in advance and sadly I never managed to see it (but am finding solace is knowing I had kind of lain near a masterpiece).

After meeting everyone, getting various passes and official outfits, the group headed to a student residence just south of the Duomo, which would be our accommodation during our stay. The next two weeks had a similar daily rhythm: the first shift would meet up in the lobby, take the train to the Expo together, work the shift, have lunch together and then little groups would explore different pavilions or head into the city. For dinner we'd sometimes could something together or those on the upper floor would hang out on the terrace. Then the same thing would happen again the next day.

Empty Expo site.

Ecuadorian National Day.

Wicked headdress in even worse heat. 

Going to the Expo, I had no idea what I was in for. I pictured it like working at Disneyland, perhaps with a few more serious tasks as this was the EU pavilion and not Space Mountain. Working there provided the chance to see the inner workings of such an enormous gathering (it runs from May to October, with 154 countries represented and 29 million visitors expected) and thus also question its relevance and validity. The construction of the Crystal Palace in 1851 in London or erecting the Eiffel Tower in 1889 in Paris was a feat of human endeavour, and represented the rapid advancements that came with industrialisation, colonialism and a general restructuring of the Western world as it had to accommodate both the masses of people flocking to the cities and the ideologies they were bringing with them. Naturally, the 19th century is also a time of questionable morality, as during the Expos people from the different colonies were exhibited like animals for the amusement of the visitors. And yet I consider them to represent a sort of Internet of the times, where everything new and miraculous and exotic could be found under one roof. The Expos then made sense as they represented a brave new world to millions of people that otherwise would not have had the opportunity to expand their worldviews (albeit that this presentation was a feat of political manipulation to underline the power of various Western empires at the time).

Pavilion Zero, where the history of food is traced. 

But after spending two weeks visiting various pavilions, the Expo seems redundant and more a space for showing off who has better financial means than an honest interaction with this year's theme of "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life". The central idea was to interrogate how we could ensure food for the 9 billion people that will be weighing down the planet come 2050. Some pavilions did a great job at questioning this: Germany handed out cartons that turned into displays as one progressed through the exhibit and held them under various lights. I appreciated the information being presented in a way that was interesting both for children and for adults, and also the matter-of-fact approach (this is the problem, this is what we are doing/planning to do). As the only African country not being stuck somewhere in a cluster and pedalling wooden craftsmanship, Angola had different levels explaining the basics foods consumed in the country and the important role that women play in Angolan society. The UK combined art and beekeeping in the shape of a metal beehive whose sounds echoed those of a real one in some British city. Their emphasis was on the necessity of bees to human survival, as without them we would die out in four years.

German cartons making sense. 

Germany: practical advice to take home.

Germany, still. 

The UK

The UK Hive

From the outside. 

Angolan Ladies. 

In contrast, Qatar had creepy holograms and showed how they had to import everything. Kazakhstan was very popular as it had a 5D film, which, I will not lie, was amazeballs. And yet, despite them stating at the entrance that they had the "resources to feed the world", the visitors were rushed quickly through the content area (all I could see was that they had run our of horse milk and had some strange fish in a pond) to the film, which then took you on a magical carpet ride through the country whilst also providing tidbits of information (9th largest country in the world, conservation area the size of Belgium). Austria illustrated how we cannot survive without air (true, but this was a food expo). The US had vertical gardens, where I wondered who ever went up and picked the berries and chillies hanging there.

Kazakhstan in 5D

The Czech Republic's great pool. 

Austria.

Still Austria.

The USA.

Pick me. 

Naturally, I have a limited interpretation as I didn't view nearly as many pavilions as some of the other volunteers or visitors and am also not familiar enough with the political and cultural histories of the various countries to make a fair and accurate judgement. Perhaps I am naive in my interpretation of what an Expo should be for, perhaps there are just too many players here gunning for the same ball, or perhaps it is evolution and the planet is simply not meant to feed 9 billion people. But whilst working at the EU pavilion, I was faced daily with the unhappy statistic of 1/3 of all food in Europe being wasted yearly as it flashed onto the screen in between people from all 28 countries saying "Hello, welcome, oi oi savaloy". Now knowing about this wastage, consider the World Food Programme's hunger statistics of 1 in 9 people going hungry everyday, or of 1 in 4 in Africa being undernourished, or (inner feminist shuddering) that "if women farmers had the same access to resources as men, the number of hungry in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million". Is this not what we should be talking about? Is this not the point of "Feeding the Planet"? Is this not what the 28 million visitors are coming through the gates for?

Listen, I am not all doom and darkness. The weeks at the EU pavilion provided the opportunity to gain valuable insights into how the Union works, on how delicate political relationships need to be handled (case in point: India being absent from the Expo as there is some beef with Italy for Italian marines having mistaken Indian fishermen for pirates and thus shooting them dead. Now India wishes the marines to be tried in India, as they were in Indian waters, but Italy is refusing to hand them over. Something like that) and how human error seeps in everywhere, especially into events of this magnitude. I also learned what Snapchat was for (ok, I still don't get it, but I have downloaded it), how to say bad words in Italian and how to compromise when my personal desires contradict with what the group wants to do. This was a great group of enthusiastic young adults who want to make the world a better, more accepting, more integrated place and who were all very willing to both share their own culture and learn from others (yay EU).

But on the last night of our stay, we all gather on the roof of the pavilion to witness the marvel that is the Tree of Life, an interplay of light, water and music that makes the crowd cheer every time (and every half hour if I remember correctly). Everyone was tired but exited as we drank Aperol Spritz or beer and looked down on the masses that had gathered below to see this display. People were taking uncountable group photos and already reminiscing about how we'd stay in contact and never forget this.

Aperol for all. 

And that is when I realised that the simple answer is no. No, people do not want to pay to be informed of hard truths. They want to come to marvel at human innovation, they want to be astounded, they want to see that despite the world rushing forward at the heart of humanity there always beats the hope that we, with our ingenuity and mastery of machines, can handle whatever comes next. And despite me thinking that when shit hits the fan it'll all be a somewhat different story, for one moment there I could believe that all one needs to achieve happiness is an amazing choreography of lights and water bursts to the sounds of Ombelico del Mondo.

Shine baby shine. 

Now you're lost/Lost in the heat of it all/Girl you know you're lost/Lost in the thrill of it all

I grew up leaving, always leaving. Packing bags, moving again. New place, new friends. Not a bad life, right?!

But it also made me think that leaving was the only place I could go. After school all I wanted was to leave, to not see this city, these friends, this family, not seeing what had raised me. There was so much more to discover, there was this world of experiences that I wanted to have and which I imagined wouldn't be possible in Pretoria. 

I hadn't yet learned that leaving is a lonely endeavour. It involves a host of questions ranging from the banal to the life-altering: Where to go? For how long? What to pack? What administrative documents would be necessary? Would I be missed? Should the favourite books really come along? It also shifts between an attachment to things and an attachment to people. Leaving is selfish, leaving is choosing what you want above what others might need from you in staying.  

I didn't care. Because you see, I needed, desperately, to see - see anything, everything, absorb all the visual cues possible. These past two years, I have had my fill. There have been countless concerts, festivals and trips across Europe. I have spent hours in buses, trains and other public transport. I have lugged around my luggage and bought items as reminders of these travels. I have seen cities, gone to their tourist attractions, visited exhibitions, eaten the specialities and gotten lost. I have had films developed after a few months that spanned all of these roads taken. As I said, I have tried to gobble down this place because coming here needed to have mattered.

And it has. I may not have done much academically, but even the darkest days here have been a learning curve. Sure, I still don't know where or as what I'll find gainful employment after these wanderings. I still struggle with being an adult. But there has been a settling of my person, a certainty that comes with knowing who you are, what you like and being unafraid of wanting a particular life. Just as the centre of gravity shifted downwards to the pelvis from the Australopithecus to modern Homo Sapiens to enable bipedalism, my own sense of self seems to have reached an agreement with my insecurities. I know that I am not without value, not without wit and humour and talent (even if all it amounts to is quoting rap lyrics at appropriate times). What a thing, to start liking oneself at 27.

As I write, most of my furniture has been sold off and I am packing my things. Leaving, again. This time for Paris, again with just a suitcase and the hope of being a better version of myself in a new but familiar place. After three months, two flights will take me home to contemplate what comes next. All I know is I want to stop leaving.

I walk until

We ate Paris. There is no way around it. We turned the city of love into the city of a love for food.

It already started on the train ride to Hamburg: all I had were some delicious cherries and a chocolate flavoured milk, still bought the evening before in Denmark. The cold had not left Germany yet, so I was dressed warmly in jeans, sweater and leather jacket. Upon my arrival in Paris, the layers had to come off. Finally, it was hot.

The first night was spent reuniting with an old friend and her fiancé, in the city by coincidence. We bought a baguette and cheese (and wine), headed to the Ile de la Cité and sat down amongst Parisian youngsters also enjoying the heat, the river and some impromptu jamming on a guitar. B and JH and I just fell easily into old conversation, caught up on gossip and contemplated our futures. After having spent six weeks in Nantes shooting a TV series, both of them were ready to go home, and as she said it, be around 'our people'. By my mense. Another friend, also from SA but now in Toronto, posted something about how all we are is the communities we surround ourselves with. I don't know what it is, but we all seem to have a strong sense that were we are is not home. We long for long dinners that end in the kitchen at 4AM, for cheap wine, for boerewors and braais, for speaking Afrikaans, for fresh fruit that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, we long for our people.

But how do you reconcile wanting to be there with also wanting more than that? I don't miss the crime, I don't miss having to have a car, I don't miss enormous shopping malls and traffic and fear and poverty and politics and problems. Yesterday I went to a free film screening at the university and at 1AM cycled home all by my lonesome. The impossibility of this at home! This nomadic lifestyle is walking the line between missing home but knowing there are other choices one could make.

Choices like what to eat next, haha. The rest of the week was spent hanging out with my friend L. Even buying groceries together was a tiny adventure: we went to Lidl, but getting there involved walking through a couple of streets where it seems all the hair and nail studios of Paris have lined up. They cater for African hair, so we weren't really eligible for getting our hair done. But even more fascinating were the guys hanging out in front of the salons: fit young men with gold chains would approach women on the street to get their nails and hair done. What would the job description be? Hustler? Nail-pimp?In Lidl itself we were treated to the spectacle of an older couple (75ish) being accused by a younger lady of being inhuman, and then shouting at one another whilst the rest of the store looked on. Not a bad start to the week, I think.

Lidl lunch. 

Our culinary tour took us to L'As du Fallafel, which was a lot of garlicky sauce with a couple of fallafels tossed in a pita bread, and which L really liked and I really did not. After having stalked Jamie Oliver's head pastry chef on Instagram, I insisted on going to L'Éclaire de Génie, which has fabulous looking éclairs and barquettes with wonderful flavour combinations. L wanted some froyo instead, but as we found none in the Marais she settled for a McFlurry. I should have maybe saved my 7€ and gone for a McFlurry, too, since the berry barquette was somewhat disappointing.

There was a queue of 30 people at l'As du Fallafel, and at the place right across the street just one lady.

Éclaire de génie. 

We explored the Marché des Enfants Rouges (oldest market in Paris), which hosts an arrangement of food stalls, but as we were there rather early we didn't sample anything. Instead, we headed back to our quartier to get some ice cream at Baci Bisou, a place near the Quai St Martin. I got fleur de lait and noisette topped with Nutella and white chocolate (all in mofos), soooo good.

We tried some really terrible spring rolls (none of the Chinese eateries we saw make them fresh, they are pre-deep fried and then heated up in the microwave), some decent baguettes, some great pains au chocolat, a great Mars cheesecake at Berko and probably some things I can't remember right now.

Berko cupcakes

Food choice for other Fête de la Musique attendants quite obvious...

On Sunday night we were exhausted from the Fête de la Musique, and the place we had intended to go to was already closed. Instead we ambled into a Pakistani/Indian place called Sheezan which turned out to be the best thing we ate all week: the prices were incredibly affordable, the food authentic and well-spiced and it was a very comfortable atmosphere to eat in, almost like being in your mother's kitchen. Also, they had mango lassi, so I was pretty much sold from the get-go.

Sheezan

Mango Lassi

Lamb Korma

Our last supper was at a Mexican joint whose name I can't recall. They have a set meal where you can choose three different tacos or tortillas with a drink, or a burrito. The tortillas are either with maize-meal or normal flour, and were well proportioned. Sadly they got my order wrong, so instead of the tortilla with nopales and cheese I got mushrooms and cheese, but they were tasty nonetheless. I remember eating nopales (cactus leaves) only once before, when our gardener in Mexico showed us how to prepare them and made a delicious meal. I mean, it must be quite a feat to get an 8-year-old to like cactus leaves.

Viva Mexico cabrones.

It was good to be back in Paris, blanketed in anonymity, free to disappear among the crowd.