Our new place on the golf course!

It's been a while since we put up a post, but that's because we don't do that much that is very interesting. Unless you want to see pictures of the millions of fish that I have caught. Matt only wishes he was so good. We did move into a new place. We are now officially country clubbers. We live across the street from a golf course and have a spectacular view of the golf course and then Table Mountain behind it. We have started wearing a lot of white and drinking cocktails all the time. We have lots of country clubbing friends. Now if only we could play some golf. So here are some pictures of our new place. We really like it overall. Number 1 fun thing is that we have an oven and I have been going crazy baking. And our landlord is this nice lady who lives next door with her mother and there are 2 people that work here during the day and one other guy that lives downstairs. I like to call it our little commune. We also have house geckos that come out at night. The are adorable little creatures. One of the pictures is from the golf course of our house. We have a key so we can get onto the course and walk around. Then one of the pictures is of the mountain at sunset from our porch.

In other news, Matt got me a job at an art gallery. Basically I just babysit the place because the owner is gone on vacation. I invite all the art gallery people over to hang out on the golf course and have cocktails. I start school next month and I am really excited to have some responsibility. The free time has been nice, but with no money, there is a limit to what we can do.

Matt has been fishing a lot and taking a lot of guided trips. He is making us some money. I call him Daddy Warbucks.

We really missed being home and Christmas. It was strange having Christmas in the summer. A big huge meal isn't as appetizing, or fun to cook, in the summer, but we toughed it out. We hope everyone had a merry christmas, and will have a happy new year.

My first African stream trout

To continue my birthday weekend...we went strawberry picking and I made a great strawberry crumble--amongst many other really awesome things. We were so excited to have an oven that we never went out to eat other than our picnic. I think we both agree the best dessert I baked were these chocolate peanutbutter cheesecake bars. They were insane. You can find the recipe at: http://www.jamieoliver.com/foodwise/article-view.php?id=3054

Seriously for any bakers out there, this is a keeper. But definitely one to share. It makes a lot of brownies and they are really rich. Oh and check out the flips flops that I am showing off in the first picture. Matt got me those for my birthday. They are the coolest flip flops I've ever had. BUt I guess when you normally get your flip flops at Walgreens, you can only take steps up.

I got to go out on the South African streams for the first time with Matt. He has been multiple times with other fishermen and he has started doing some guiding, but I have only been able to go out on the dams since we haven't had a car. Thank god for the car back. I am learning a lot and I improve every time I have a rod in my hands. THis stream was great and if Matt wasn't teaching me, he probably would have caught a millions fish. He still caught a handful and I caught one, seen in my pictures. He was so proud he was beaming...Matt, not the fish. Matt saw the fish and I casted to it and caught it on the first try. I had a couple of other bites, but I get pretty excited when I feel them, so sometimes I don't set the hook right. BUt I am getting better and my other birthday present from Matt was a pair of wading boots. THank god, because I was slipping and sliding all over that stream. Matt is telling me that I have to walk slowly and quietly through the stream and I feel like a toddler because I can't stay on my feet. So soon my wading boots will be coming in the mail.

Butterfly World

Matt was really sweet and dedicated our whole weekend at the winemakers house as my "birthday weekend." I have not put that much focus on my birthday since I was a kid, and it was a lot of fun. In fact, it's probably the first time a long time I haven't been in the hospital on my birthday. Anyways, we got word of this place called Butterfly World and we figured that it would either be awesome, or kind of a joke. Well, it was awesome. There were hundreds of butterflies all over the place and all different colors. There were a couple with bright blue wings, but they were quite elusive and we couldn't catch a photo of them. My favorite part was the wall of cocoons. They had a wall with about 500 cocoons on it and they were all in different stages. Some of them were totally closed, but wiggling and wiggling and wiggling like something was just getting ready to pop out. And some of them had butterflies that had just emerged and were drying there wings. One of the photos is of a red and black butterfly that has just emerged. It was really amazing. My favorite butterfly was the one with the clear wings. The second picture. When they flew, they looked like dragonflies.

After lunch and the epic bike ride, we stopped by for a bit of work, errr fishing. Megan hooked into some real monsters and at one point I had 2 of these beasts on at once. No troots, but Megan shouldn't have to wait long for her first African trout, we are fishing a stream on tuesday.

We came across this fella this morning. there is something wrong with his head, maybe he got attacked and dropped or something. but he seems mostly fine now, just a bit ugly, but he was in the open near some crows so i brought him home to the orchard here to have some recuperation time. hes pretty.

Its a chameleon.

The end

I got my surfboard...

I also now have a wetsuit so i can ride in cold water and a car to get me and the board to the water.

Speaking of cars... check out the awesome car we were given as a courtesy car for a couple days. And if Megan didn't get super pissed, we wouldn't have even had that. This is a funny place.

This is now Megan's Birthday weekend bash and we are pulling out all the stops. We had a picnic in the forest at one of the vineyards called Vergelegen. It was awesome, all tucked back in the woods with gourmet foods. The bike ride there was down and enormous hill, which of course meant the bike ride home was really fun.

We also stopped at the farmers market and got some butter, a free range chicken, some amazing cheese, a mix of wild mushrooms, eggs, and awesome loaf of bread and some chocolate. it was a fun market and we hardly scratched the surface.

Caterpillar Wonderland

Spring is in full swing. Had a little trip to the Gardens again over the past weekend. It was wonderful, strange weather too. There were less flowers in bloom this time, but other signs of life and spring time. There were these crazy caterpillars around the gardens, one in particular caught our attention for quite a long while. this guy was fantastic, and about the size of your index finger give or take a couple centimeters. The little black guy with yellow dots was also very cute. check out the mohawk...

thats about it for now. We get our car back in exactly one week and could not be more excited about an automobile. i think we are both tiring of the city a bit and long to get out into rural Africa. We have a fishing trip to do, a Knysna trip to do, and so many other places to visit. Also, my surfboard is now finished and i pick it up on Sunday and take it for a surf.

Go Penguins!

We got a braai!

(I am having trouble uploading pictures, so the pictures with this post will be up in the next couple of days.

So our biggest new development is that we bought a small grill. And I mean small, but its big enough for us. They call barbecuing "braai'ing" here and they are serious about it...even more than us. They do meat well...they have all of the regular stuff, but then they have ostrich, springbok, kudu, and their sausages come in these huge sausage spirals and are awesome. Then they have biltong which is similar to jerky, but way way better. What they don't do though, is hamburgers on the grill. They look at us like we are crazy when we suggest it. So we are teaching the country about hamburgers on the grill. Oh and they have awesome ketchup, but they don't put it on hamburgers. They obviously don't really understand the true beauty of a grilled hamburger with lots of ketchup. Then I have really been missing an oven. There is something in me, given to me by my mom, that makes me neeeeeeed to bake. And also neeeed to eat sweets. They really go hand in hand, but I can't here without an oven. Then I read about baking brownies on a grill. I thought, you can't really screw up brownies unless you just completely burn them. So using chocolate chips my mom sent me (one of the few things you can't find here even though nestle seems to own the place), I mixed up some brownie mix and we put it on the grill. Well, apparently you can screw up brownies. I have included a picture. The bottom half was charred and I thought we could just eat the top half, but unfortunately, instead of a sweet chocolatey taste, it tasted like sour smoke. That was a huge disappointment.
This weekend Matt has been score keeping for the South African National Flyfishing Championships. I asked him how you keep score and he said he didn't really know. So I hope they taught him. He has been out fishing a few times with some of the team members from around here and he has been fishing really well and they are all impressed with him. As soon as we get our car back, I will be able to go and I am guessing there probably won't be a weekend that we aren't out fishing. I told Matt he better watch out because I'm pretty sure that I'll be better than him soon.
I went to this big expo this weekend downtown called From the Earth. It was really cool. I included a picture that is art made from sprouted seedlings of different vegetables and such. It is the silouhette of Table Mountain. It was beautiful. Anyways, it was an agricultural expo and I went to talks on cooking and growing mushrooms, making cheese, worm farming (had to meet our fellow vermiculturalists), and organic growing. And I bought a lot of nice food--cheese, honey, reduced balsamic....and I found brownies---they don't do baked goods here as well as we do, but the brownies were better than my grill brownies. The other picture is an orchid at the expo. They had a whole beautiful collection of orchids that I had never seen before.
The other picture in the set is of a puzzle we just finished. It was an awesome puzzle, but we got it used and cheap, which explains the piece that was missing.

We are Vermiculturalists!

Good news in the car saga---we should, theoretically have our car back in about a month. As many of you know, Matt was in a car accident. He is fine, but the car sadly is not. You can see that I posted a picture of the car looking into the rear wheel well. You should see a wheel there, but instead, it is broken at a 90 degree angle and hanging down. And that's not the side that the lady hit! We have been without a car for a month now, but we are getting along nicely on our bikes. We need our car to travel throughout the country though. So hopefully by November we will have our classy set of wheels back.

We are working on finding friends. We met a few cool people last week and one of them took us on a hike up Lions Head, which is a smaller hill off of Table Mountain. It sits in the city and you hike up it in a spiral so you get great views of the city and the ocean. It is tradition here to hike up it sometime around the full moon. You hike in the evening and catch a sunset, and then hike down by the light of the full moon.

Since we don't have enough room to compost, and since we have a lot of compost material (produce is really cheap here), we have become vermiculturalists, or wormers. We bought some worms from this really interesting 80 year old lady who's business is breeding worms and selling them from her retirement village. Matt built a worm bin and off we go. My job is to name all of the worms, but there are about 300 of them and the little hussies get pregnant quick, so it will keep me busy. Then we started a little patio garden with some herbs, lettuce, and tomatoes. We stole some nastirtium off the roadside and planted it too. It grows like crazy here.

Summer is coming. This past weekend we got to don shorts and tanktops and break a sweat. It feels strange that it is October. My mind thinks that it is May. In a couple of weeks we are taking a trip along the east coast garden route to a town called Knysna. It is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the country. So that will be fun. I think that's it for now.

Spring is here and the flowers are in full bloom everywhere. We haven't been doing much exciting since we don't have a car right now, but we go to the gardens a lot, so you get to see all the flowers come out with us. There is also a meadow right before we get to the gardens where there are a lot of wildflowers so some of these pictures are from the meadow. Matt has been learning the streams and the lakes here and has been out fishing a few times. I just sit around and read a lot. Hopefully we will have our car back soon and start touring the country. Until then, you are forced to look at crazy beautiful flowers.

Protea City