Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz

The car I learned to drive in was more of a ship than a car. I steered a ship on the road, not some plastic sardine box. The old white Merc 190 from the late 80s was my great-uncle's car, which my father had bought off him somewhere when we were living in Geneva. The car traveled with us to Mexico, and then was placed in a container and shipped back to South Africa, full of cases of red wine if I remember correctly.

The problem with this is that the Mercedes is a left-hand drive, and South Africa has right-hand drive cars. So any time the driver would have to turn right, seeing the oncoming traffic was made harder than necessary. Before the white Mercedes there was the blue station wagon, also a Mercedes, and much more of a ship to steer than the 190. It was a solid steel block, relentless in its stability. Someone clipped the station wagon while my sister was waiting at a robot and she barely felt it (probably an exaggeration, but I quite like the idea of her not noticing she is in a car accident).

Beyond these two cars there was another green Merc somewhere in the dark recesses of my childhood memories. My father still drives a silver Merc station wagon, and the white ship was my ride in Cape Town during last year's holidays. Somehow, we have remained fairly loyal to the brand.

Sticking with the horse. 

In Stuttgart, we had the option of going to the Mercedes Benz Museum or to the Porsche one. Since Mercedes has an older history, we headed there on Wednesday morning. The percentage of Mercedes cars increases exponentially the closer one gets to the imposing building that hosts the museum. The idea is to start at the top and then spiral one's way down automobile and world history whilst also seeing the various cars from different eras. Nina and I are both not car obsessed and I think one could spend a lot longer in the museum than we did. It is beautifully done, but after having spent two hours on the top three floors alone we speedwalked through the remaining six levels. In any case, the classic cars seemed more appealing due to their Great-Gatsby looks than the ones that appear from the 1970s onwards.

First patent. 

In the end we got slightly lost on the sales floor (where no one tried to sell us a car, wonder why) before eventually having to go up two floors again to escape the gigantic museum. Next time I might stick to art again.

Wait on the brink

With many travels coming up in the next few months I realised I had never spoken about the get-away to Stuttgart at the end of March.

We never wanted to go to Stuttgart. My friend Nina came over one night and we spoke about Germanwings' bling booking option. We were both feeling drowned by this place and in need of different air, so on the spur of the moment we booked a flight to an exotic place. Or so we thought. For an agonising 45 seconds we were giddy with excitement at ending up in Budapest, Manchester, Geneva or Paris. We spoke about acquaintances in those cities that we could stay with, and what adventures we would have. Then the site showed us our destination: Stuttgart. We wouldn't even be leaving the country. Getting to the airport in Hamburg from here would take longer than the actual flight. Disappointment washed over us, and the need to say that we'd make the best of it. Hell, we'd both not been there before. And we'd get away, at least.

So on a Monday morning we boarded a plane to Stuttgart, where we spent the first two days at Andrea's place. Andrea is in his early forties, has an enormous bush of black ringlets streaked with grey that frame his face and speaks a strange German that is tinged with both his native Italian and the local Swabian dialect. He has lived in Stuttgart for 17 years and works at some IT company. The first night he showed us around a bit and made a great supper consisting of pasta with broccoli, raisins, pine nuts, generous helpings of olive oil and even more generous helpings of Parmesan. The raisins complemented the dish fantastically, as did the wine he generously offered us (his entire kitchen is stocked with wine since his friends keep bringing him some and he does not drink).

Tuesday was spent exploring the city. Since I am slightly OCD about seeing things in new places whilst not spending any money, I had trip-advisored myself though the Internet and written down what might be interesting to see. Our Tuesday started off with walking up the inclining hill to the Corbusier house in the Weissenhof neighbourhood. but the trip was rather pointless since the Curbusier museum was closed and we both aren't so interested in his five points of architecture to truly appreciate the areas designated style.

Corbusier House. 

So we went back down the hill and into the city library, which is often featured online for its distinctive design. It was wonderful simply being in a library with a large collection, so we investigated the different sections and then went to the roof terrace. I was expecting benches and maybe a roof garden, but it was just concrete and steel-mesh flooring, with a view of half a dozen cranes.

Books books books. 

Our walk continued through the business district towards the central station and then to the Hans im Glück fountain, which is surrounded by little restaurants. In the hopes of finding something similar to Hamburg's Sternschanze or Joburg's Braamfontein we went to the Bohnenviertel (Bean District), but were sadly disappointed in finding only a handful of interesting stores and quaint restaurants in the entire area. Our quest to find the beating heart of this city led us onwards to the Feuerseeplatz with its lake and then we took the S-Bahn out of the city into the winelands. Thinking we'd go on a drinking tour of different vineyards we started climbing the Rotenberg. Again, we were mistaken: none of the wineries were open yet because spring hadn't really started and there was not a grape in sight, never mind some wine. We soldiered on in what felt like sweltering heat, conquering the mountain in wingtips. At some point we took a short-cut up an endless row of tiny stairs between the vines, and collapsed at the top. The time it took to recover from the vertical incline would've probably amounted to the same time it would have taken had we snaked our way up the hill like normal people.

Feuerseeplatz

"No time, I have to live!"

Upon reaching the top we sat down in front of the memorial site of some dead Wüttembergian queen and enjoyed the view. No ocean in sight, just a sea of hills. Late afternoon lead us down the mountain again where we bought a cold beer and relaxed next to the river. When it started raining we took the train back to the city and indulged in a Swabian meal of Spätzle with cheese or Geschnetzeltes (strips of meat in a creamy mushroom sauce). Spätzle is a dish I associate with various parts of my family: when I was younger we'd sometimes visit distant relatives in Wiesenbach (a tiny town in Baden-Württemberg) where they'd often make Spätzle with Geschnetzeltes. My German grandmother also fed us Spätzle with Rouladen the few times we visited her and my grandfather in Paarl. Lastly, my mom would make double the amount of Spätzle and bake one dish with cheese in the oven whilst freezing the other one for the times that she could not be there. Strange how a noodle is more than a noodle at times.

Love never ends.

View from the top. 

Beer time. 

Dinner: Spätzle with Geschnetzeltes. 

Tuesday left us exhaused, so we headed home.
I'm also exhaused, so I'll continue the tall tales of adventure time in Stuttgart tomorrow :)

Step out

It's a weird time of the year.
Idealised memories of Christmas spent with cousins cluster like grapes around the realities of the non-season here. In one we are all at my grandmother's first house, the one with the patio above the garage (above some other room?) where one had a startling view of the sea. My aunt asked someone to play Santa Claus and to a pack of preschoolers the man in the red suit arriving at our doorstep was everything.

In another memory we are again at the beach, always at the beach, and my grandmother has tossed the traditional idea of a Christmas tree by using the long branch-bloom that extends from the middle of some type of succulent. She has made little packets for each grandchild containing a host of tiny 'onbenullighede', things she has picked up at farm stalls and convenience stores during the past year in her pursuit to be fair to us all. The families are all there, the aunts and uncles and my mother and sister.

A different year sees my grandmother, always my grandmother, with us in 2000, the first one without my father. I remember him gifting me a Celine Dion CD, a sign that he had not noticed I had moved away from 'My Heart Will Go On' to falling for my sister's Backstreet Boys collection.

Then there was the one year my sister and I spent Christmas alone. The sad year, the bad year, the one where we fought and ended up in our separate rooms.

But it is the Christmases of my 20s that I yearn for now. I miss planning how to get my grandmother to wherever the celebration will be; coordinating a menu with everyone doing different dishes; thinking up cool presents; bickering and fighting and the feeling of needing distance from the overdose of family; having everyone unpack each present individually, stretching the time spent with one another; hanging out with cousins that are so very different from me and still so relatable; sitting outside in the sun with whomever is there at the moment, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up; and lastly, more than the event that is Christmas I miss the sense that blood is thicker than water.

This Christmas will surely be its own shrewd kind of miracle, and I look forward to spending it with people close to my heart. And last year was experiencing Christmas as an observer more than as a participant, by no fault of the kind family that hosted me. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed getting to know the little rituals of a family quite different from mine.

Nevertheless, none of this is Christmas. Forget about the religious aspect of the season, dismiss the name and the particular date all together, and center on what it is that makes the time spent together on those few days so memorable: the people. Sometimes, it is as simple as this - I long for my people.

Plansch

Yesterday I woke to dozens (hundreds?) of boats leaving the harbour at the same time. At the moment the Rum Regatta is taking place and it is a sea of masts when I look outside. When we were little and living in Geneva, my mother booked a summer sailing course for my sister and me. It was horribly traumatic. I think my sister did everything as I sat somewhere in the little boat praying for us to go slower. Somehow my sister must have been really good at sailing or interpreting the wind or whatever it was that made our boat speed away from the little group of about 10 tiny sailboats. But that is where my sailing experience started and ended.

Now I have the best view in town and can watch what happens on the water without getting out of my pajamas. After having lived far away from any great body of water for most of my life, it is quite a change to have it at my doorstep: when we don't have class and the weather is sunny, we'll head to the beach to tan and swim. When I go for a walk, I walk around the harbour and watch others strolling along the water's edge. Somehow, it is life at a different pace, not measured in kilometers but knots.

Red Bull Student Boat Battle

Knife Party

When my sister started school, I was very jealous. She is three years older than I am and it was my greatest pleasure to go with my mom to fetch her at school and carry her bag. She also did acrobatics and was part of the girl scouts. So many things for a little sister to be jealous of.

By the time I started school we were in a different country and I had no friends in Grade 1. The other children asked me once why I wasn't black if I came from Africa. There were also no extracurricular classes at school. My mom took us to a wonderful art class where someone drove a Porsche and one scaring summer my sister and I took part in a sailing course for children. It was terrifying.

I never did standard girly things like acrobatics or ballet, but I also never minded very much. Who needs girly things if you know how not to drown (after sailing lessons we moved again and eventually learnt how to swim properly, which is now my favourite sport)?! Instead, I'd like to see the performance below live:  



Javier Pérez - EN PUNTAS (extracts) from Javier Pérez on Vimeo.

Lucha de gigantes

A friend has come to visit from Mexico, and now it is as though my brain is playing an evil game of  hide and seek with any remnants of Spanish vocabulary. It hides all the correct words behind layers of French; it hands me verbs that sound right when pronounced differently but aren't; it makes me look up a lot in reflection; it forces me to speak slowly, as one does to a small child who has been woken by a nightmare and needs calming down; and it makes me go in search of something deeply buried beneath years of other languages and growing-up. 

I feel old not only because the wine I drank at yesterday's braai propelled me to my bed at 7.30, a time when my mother is still awake and torturing me by a) seeing her daughter drunk as a skunk and b) wanting me to look at photographs whilst all I wanted to do was sleep it off. No, I feel old because Spanish was a language learnt in innocence, when we went on holiday trips in the big grey Buick to find pyramids in jungles whilst listening to Celine Dion for the 100th time because I had only chosen her CDs to bring along. 

Spanish was something that came freely, that did not have to be learnt. Spanish is getting up in the dark to catch the school bus. Spanish is when my Spitzi was still alive, when we had a tiny garden but an enormous house, when my father ripped off his own finger (by accident), when children were dressed as clowns at traffic lights and when we went for horse riding lessons twice a week. Spanish, basically, was the bubble before it burst. 

In hindsight the end of the 'perfect family' was the better thing to have happened. It was not easy to suddenly be left à trois, but it meant no more fighting, no more patriarchy, no more lies, no more betrayal. Lives lived in separation was the right choice. 

And now Spanish is back, with a vengeance, in pursuit of past recollections. 

Come on brain, we don't mind remembering. 

The sky above us shoots to kill

At the Huguenot Monument in Franschhoek, an man in his seventies held what appeared to be his grandson upside down in order for him to smell all the roses. The child was squealing with delight, and the grandfather was smiling, too. A happy little postcard memory.

At Yoav's concert in the Kirstenbosch Gardens, a girl was playing with her mother's hair.

Another little girl told my sister she likes her because she has "dots" (freckles) on her face.

Also at Yoav, one could witness the worried measuring of height in the eyes of a mother turning around to the call of her son's voice and finding him in the branches of a tree.

There is this photograph of the two of us, I am around seven years old, all blond-blue-eyed innocence. I lie against the fold of his stomach, counting flowers, he provides the love to lean on.
That is what it should have been like, til death, not difference, do us apart.

A year and a continent later, he is running behind me as I dart down the stairwell, trying to catch me. My castle is outside, furnished with enough blankets and a high-chair for my dolls to block him from coming in. I reach it in time and build my fort. He paces around in front of it, telling me to come out, ordering me to come out. A dragon in waiting. I won't be fooled. For days we don't talk. Even when it is my birthday I won't forgive. And now, many years and continents and opinions later, well, for months we don't talk and there is nothing to forgive any more because of choices made and lives lived apart.


As children, we search for the hand that will guide us though shopping malls and crowded spaces and won't lose us. We rely on that hand to hold on to the bike when the training wheels have come off but we're still too scared to pedal onwards alone. There is the protective spell of innocence uncorrupted by the bad in each other which life will hurl at us soon enough. There is also the real time protection of parents and family and siblings and whomever is in our lives to guide us.

The best memories are not the presents I got or the places we visited, but rather being treated to a strawberry milkshake at Wimpy by my grandmother because I ran errands with her all day, or my mom driving all the way from Pretoria to Jeffrey's while we were sleeping on the backseat of the Merc, or identifying cars in Geneva's morning rush hour, or building a tipi under the giant oak, or listening to Celine Dion for the millionth time. The best memories stem from being enveloped by love, and not worrying whether or not the hand would hold on.

 

We will become silhouettes

Dit reen te heerlik hier vandag. Voorheen toe ek gery het en die druppels hoor val het, julle weet, daai sagte storting van water, toe moes ek dink aan my 6-jarige self en die geluk wat daai geluid saam met hom bring.

Toe ons klein was in Genève het my ma ons altyd saamgevat na die karwas toe, by die een spesefieke garage. Ons het in die kar bly sit terwyl die water van self oor die kar gespuit het en die enorme rollers hom skoon gepiets het. Daarna het 'n geheimsinnige wind die Merc drooggeblaas. Daai geluid van in die kar sit en die water hoor, van nie nat word nie as die buitewêreld net deur n wasem van druppels te sien is, is nog steeds vir my wonderlik. En na die tyd het ons altyd 'n Kinder-Überraschungsei gekry en kon die speelding in die middel uitpak en die sjokolade verslind op pad huis toe. Dis nie daai simpel eiers van vandag nie, waar mens twee balletjies in 'n sous aan die een kant het en die speelgoed aan die ander kant. Ne ne. Hierdie was nog in tye van ordentlike sjokolade eiers. Mens wens seker te baie dat goed nie verander nie, en tog verander dinge nie vinnig genoeg nie party keer.

Noudiedag was ek op my eie by die karwas, vir meer as twee ure. My ma hou van 'n skoon kar, so dit moes gedoen word voor sy weer terug by die huis was. Maar hierdie was nie soos Genève nie, hier was geen masjiene wat die kar binne 10 minute skoon gemaak het, alles word hier met mensehand gedoen. Ek was binne in die kar toe die water ons tref, ek toe moes ek weer dink aan vroeer, aan die gemak van die reuke binne in die kar en die reendruppels buite, en aan Kinder sjokolade eiers.

Bulle

Almal skreeu vir die skerm, bier in die hand. Ek sien net blou truie. Dis my eerste rugby match, en ek's nie juis seker wie teen wie speel nie. My vriende ondersteun die Bulle, met blou truie en toppies en grimering, so ek ondersteun maar saam. In die ou einde verloor hulle. Almal gee 10 minute voor die finale fluitjie op en loop want die Bulle so sleg speel en die verskill nie meer kan inhaal nie. Daar is 'n laaste teenslag maar niks kom daarvan nie. Dis 23.26. ( die tyd, nie die telling nie). Is my bloed net blou as hulle wen?

Die treurige glimlag van teleurstelling word gekontrasteer met mense wat hul fuiste in die lug gooi en mekaar 'n druk gee.
celebration devastation, alles dieselfde tyd.

Maar: almal sal Suid Afrika ondersteun.

________________________________________________________________________

Ek het dié laas jaar geskryf toe die Bulle uit die Curry Cup uit is, dink ek teen minste. Nou sien ek op die nuus, met Riaan, dat die Bulle dié saterdag teen die Sharks of Stormers of iemand speel. Dis al 'n jaar terug, Suid Afrika het toe nie die wêreldbeker in Nieu-Seeland  gewen nie, teen spyte van baie ondersteuning en hoop. Ek weet mens sê dit baie, en dat dit niks met rugby te doen het nie, maar as mens besig is hardloop die tyd net so veel vinniger.




As 'n bonus, vandag is my Stadstapper foto van Pretoria die keuse van die dag by A Postcard a Day from Gauteng. What whaaaat ( baie gangster haha).