Howdy my fellow humans,

I woke up this morning thinking, "Oh no! I will miss this room and comfy hotel bed." Nothing can beat sneaking in hotel's warm and thick covers, agreed? It was our last day in Cape Town before we were bound to depart for Johannesburg. Good thing I have packed almost everything last night, expect for few toiletries stuff which I easily stuffed into the top of my backpack. I did a quick room sweep to ensure I did not forgot anything. My day pack was heavy and crammed with gifts I bought from the Greenmarket plus my backpack was heavy too, so I barely carried them to the hotel lobby and put the bags in bags storage room provided by hotel. As for the breakfast, I savored every flavor of their delicious omelet for one final time. Our agenda for the day was very light and simple, visit several POIs (point of interest) around the Cape Town.

Our first stop was the colorful and radiant Bo Kaap. Bo Kaap is well known for vibrant colors houses, each one with different color. When you look at the houses stack together, it is unbelievably gorgeous, especially with each color standing out on its own. The words I used trying to explain doesn't do it justice. You have to see for yourself to be in awe like we were the whole time we were there. Of course, we had to take some pictures and each one of us chose a different color and posed front of the house. The interesting history behind colorful houses is the area were used to be occupied by Muslims only after the government order in 1950. After the apartheid ended in 1994, the people were free to live there and residents decided to paint up the houses to express the feeling of freedom.

After Bo Kaap, we drove to the beach and visited Green Point lighthouse. This particular lighthouse is the OLDEST operational lighthouse in South Africa since 1824. Lighthouse originally used whale oil to operate the light. We saw the lighthouse up close and it is surprisingly small compared to typical 150 feet tall lighthouses. For next good 30 minutes, we watched the wild waves continually crash the boardwalk. It was so fascinating to watch waves always keep moving, never stopping. We walked for an around half mile to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. The Noble Square is right there in the waterfront, and we had opportunity to see statues of 4 South African Nobel Peace winners. The 4 are Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli, F. W. de Klerk, and Desmond Tutu. They all won for fighting against apartheid, or discrimination. The bronze statues were slightly bigger than life size, hovering around 6 inches over me. We ate at a restaurant on the waterfront and enjoyed our late lunch meal. Good thing there were many cool stores around the waterfront, we looked around for a while before going back to hotel.

We entered the hotel and grabbed our bags from storage room, all ready to leave for airport. Oh no! Once we arrived at the airport, we counted only 9 baggage and realized Jakiya's was missing. So, we had to wait for her to return with bag this time. When she arrived, we checked in but ended up having to put our bags into oversized luggage section. Apparently, we packed too much gifts! That's a good thing anyways, right?? We had around 2 hours to kill, so naturally we went to get drinks/snacks. I got Wimpy's, South Africa's equivalent to McDonald's in America, delicious milkshake. At the gate, we played competitive games of UNO, and some got their fair share of victories. I won a whopping total of zero game, cool right!? The flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg took around 2 hours, then we returned to same hostel we stayed during our previous brief stay in Johannesburg, Brown Sugar hostel. Off to dream world!

- Nevan

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Comments:

Crystal Schwartz: Must be nice returning to a familiar place during your stay, the Brown Sugar Hostel. Glad you all took the time to take a picture with the vibrant colors and nobel peace winners, especially after visiting Nelson Mandela's cell. Also glad it worked out re: Jakiya's luggage! Stay safe, everyone.