Food & people in Cape Town

---

okay, about the food. when I embarked on this journey around the world, I decided that I will try local foods as much as possible including meat dishes (except in India where I can be vegetarian & still taste everything). the food in SA is as fascinating as its history. Because of the kind of vegetation that exists here, game is the main staple, hence the popularity of the braai (BBQ). I wasn't interested in beef but I had to try ostrich meat and kudu biltong which are very common foods here. (kudu is a kind of antelope and biltong is dried meat) Mind you, I tried these just once and don't intend to keep eating them unless social circumstances call for it. Other common dishes include all kinds of flavours that come from the mix of people here: there are rotis with East Indian spices, malay spices and corn-related foods (mealie and mealie meal), especially in the Cape. this is because Cape Town was the main stop for ships going from Europe to India and South East Asia & vise versa. For example, Islam was introduced to SA through Dutch traders bringing people from Malaysia and Indonesia. (Muslim traders from Persia & Gujarat brought Islam to these parts long before Dutch colonial times.) There's this Malay curry here that I'm dying to try out. I guess this also explains why there are so many Indians in Malaysia and Singapore. (But culture from India has always been an influence in Southeast Asia but that's another story.) There was an older woman and her granddaughter travelling with me in the train (from Joburg to Cape Town) and I swear they looked Filipino. when I asked her what her background is, she said she doesn't know but she's 6th generation South African. They spoke English but I couldn't understand them because of their accent which is not like the English accent white South Africans have. I can see that some "coloured" people (as they call them here) are a real mix of black, white, Indians and Southeast Asians. However, there is also the Khoisan people who are native to the area (south western Africa, the Kalahari Desert "Gods Must Be Crazy" people). I find their faces very Asian--they have flat noses and small eyes. If you make them lighter skinned & straight haired, they'd look totally East Asian--so god knows!
In any case, there's a whole mix of people in Cape Town just like the different foods found here which I find really interesting and tasty too!
For geographical reasons, the Cape is very windy. it is full of high mountains surrounded by the ocean. it's always blowing hard whether I'm downtown or in the suburbs, night or day. Wind is a permanent background noise.

---