Day Two in South Africa

So, you’re asking, what did we eat at Market on Main?  Well, I learned two lessons.  First: take pictures of your food.  Second: write down what you took a picture of.  Good lesson to learn early in the trip.  I did neither; the fact that we were pretty jet-lagged by this time is my excuse.   I remember that even though we got to the event shortly before closing time, there was still many booths open with a wide variety of foods on offer.  We split up and each bought what looked interesting to us, planning to share. This was our first experience using the rand, the South African currency we’d gotten in stacks at the ATM at the airport, and we really didn’t have a clue as to its value, so we just dove in. 

We’re used to many ethnic options in a big city like Philadelphia, and the offerings at Market on Main were just as varied, but still different to us:  Malaysian, Spanish, Thai, Indian, Sudanese, Portuguese, Ethiopian, Argentinean, and of course Chinese, Italian, and Mexican.  (What, Mexican?  We though our hemisphere had a lock on Mexican.  Learned something new today about myself and my preconceptions!)  There were also bagels and smoked salmon, cupcakes, and of course coffees, teas (lots of rooibos) and even smoothies.  

Anyhow, I remember I got a cocktail of some sort, though I can’t remember what.  (Pictures tell me it was a rum and Coke, an odd drink for me to choose, in retrospect.  Can I blame it on jet lag, again?) A new interest of mine is trying local or national cocktails.  I’ve learned to love pisco sours from Chile (though Chile and Peru both claim the drink as “theirs”).  I adore caipirinhas after having tried them while overlooking the falls at Iguaçu (admittedly from the Argentine side, though the caipirinha is the Brazilian national cocktail; I was looking at Brazil when I sipped my first one—does that count?)   

Ted and Dianne tried a couple of South African red wines and of course Dane had to find a South African beer.  It turned out there aren’t many brewpubs or micro beers yet in South Africa; his go-to beer became Windhoek, originally from neighboring Namibia!  Ted & Dianne discovered the couple selling paella so had to order some, thinking of Dianne's son Brian and his wife Juliana from Columbia, who make a fabulous paella.  We also tried some Malaysian curry.  We realized we needed to learn a new vocabulary:  what were braii, snoek and biltong?   

We ate around a rustic table made of an old cable spool, sitting on pillows on smaller stools.  We were sorry we arrived so late, as I think it would have been fun to talk with some of the young people there; we definitely brought the average of the crowd up a decade.  The flea market shops which sold vintage clothing, eyeglasses, books and crafts were closed by the time we finished eating, but we wandered around the old warehouse and adjoining patio, where there was a hip-looking cafe called Canteen and an interesting bookstore/art gallery.