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.