Zimbabwe & Botswana

    **This is a short blog, with an even shorter video**

    

     Our trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana. I tried to write all about it, but I couldn't seem to put it into words. Literally I sat here for an hour writing and deleting, writing and deleting. I didn't take as many physical photos as I should of, I mostly captured it in my memory. However, thankfully, Bobby managed to take a few videos. I decided to compile a small video to help you guys get a better picture of our trip. 

     

            

   As you can see, we have been very fortunate to have spent time here on the African continent. Not only traveling around in South Africa, but now making it to a few other countries as well. Hope you enjoyed the video, only a few more blogs to write before we are stateside. =) Kruger park is our next big adventure in the first week of June. We'll be sure to document the last few weeks of Cape Town the best we can. Looking forward as always to seeing everyone when we get back.

XOXO from South Africa

Stargazing and Wine

     April. April. April. I feel like I say this every time, but dang time is going fast this year! We have moved back into our apartment for the remainder of our stay in Cape Town! (48 days and counting....but who's counting...) I would like to say it's easier to be here in the apartment with all the noise, knowing that we are going home soon, but it actually makes me more homesick. I lay in bed at night and dream of In-N-Out or a MOM-cooked meal. We are such nerds that basically every day we have a conversation about what we want to do first when we get home. As many of you can probably guess, it includes food. I would also like to give out a few good and long hugs. Soon enough. First we have to get all the best we can out of Africa with the time left.

     Now that our adventure is coming to an end, we have been trying to squeeze things in for the last two months. We still have quite a list of things to get done before we go, but this month we have accomplished two. =) Our first check box was a trip to Sutherland. The second check box which also happens to be an ongoing check box...hehe...was a winery trip to Paarl. Luckily you can never taste test too much wine! 

• Sutherland is located in the Northern Cape province. Home of the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. So being married to an astronomer, warrants a 4 hour drive to see it. Hehe. We drove out to tour the telescope facilities and to also do a little stargazing. 

Bobby standing in front of SALT

I have never seen such an amazing view of the stars

    The stargazing part of the trip was by a local man in the town who sets up private group viewings of the stars. We had dinner at his house, then he takes you out to his 11 inch telescopes and tours the evening sky with you. Absolutely breathtaking. Being out in the middle of nowhere really gets an amazing view of the sky. WOW. I really cant even begin to explain the awesome views we had. Only down side of the STARs to Midnight---hehe---Sutherland is the coldest place in South Africa. Boy was it cold!

 Huguenot Tunnel. 
2.5 miles through the mountain! YIKES

• Wine  =) All along the way to Sutherland and back to Cape Town we probably passed 50 wineries. We stopped at two on the way back in Paarl. Fairview and Spice Route. Spice Route was giant facility that not only had wine but also a brewery and 4 restaurants. Fairview had the traditional wine tasting, but they are also well known for their cheese. Very yummy! 

One of the many wineries on the drive.

MMMmmm Amber Weiss local brew @ Spice Route.

Fairview wine tasting.

Driving home....greeted by the fabulous FOG!!! NOOOOOO

Winter is coming! ;)

     The weekends are quickly filling up. We are very excited about our next trip. VICTORIA FALLS! In the first week of May we are flying to Zimbabwe to visit the falls. My next blog will have lots of beautiful photos to share. That is all for now. As always, much love to everyone. See you all very soon!

 XOXO from Africa

3 Events in March

     March. Wow! Heck March is nearly over, it's practically April. I can't believe we are almost 4 months into 2015. Why does time go so fast when you get older? I remember being 8 for like 10 years! Why don't we listen to our parents when they tell us to just be a kid because we will be adults forever? Do you think I'm getting wiser with age? Haha. Yeah probably not. ^Leave it to me to take this off on a tangent. Speaking of tangents, man I hated geometry in school. Okay, so back to March. We spent the month away from our "South African Home" in the guesthouse in Rondebosch. Never thought I say this, but I missed the seagull noises. This side of the mountain is like a different world. The sun sets nearly two hours before it does on the ocean side. Alright I have three events to share with you from the month.

• Our trip to Robben Island. For those of you who are not familiar, Robben Island is the prison where Nelson Mandela (18 years), and many others spent time behind bars as political prisoners. It is hard to fathom that South Africa recently (1994) ended their apartheid. It was a very eye opening trip into the not so distant past. 

View from Robben Island looking towards Cape Town. You can barely see Table Mountain.

Mandela's Cell

View from the ferry on way back to Cape Town

• Bobby got a job and we are moving out of Africa! Do you ever feel like you don't know how to set something up, so instead you just blurt it out? ^ That just happened. =) Hurray!!! Bobby accepted a post-doctoral position at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Champaign is a small college town about 2 hours south of Chicago. Lots of corn, lots of snow and lots of flatlands. I can say that we are looking forward to living in a town with seasons. I think the average high in the summer is around 85. Definitely going to be an experience, and again, it is nothing permanent. The life of a scholar seems similar to a traveling nomad. In a way we are happy to do it, eventually we will tie down and put some roots in the ground. But until then we are going to continue to journey around. 

• We celebrated our 2nd Wedding Anniversary tasting wine in Constantia and dining at Myoga. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing my day was. First we went to the winery. Had a tour of the wine making process and facility. Then we tasted 5 wines. We even got to taste the #1 Chardonnay in the WORLD. (<---as of three days ago)

My favorite was the last one on the right side. It was called the
governours wine. It was a red blend, mostly merlot and cab.

Wine aging =)

Gosh I love him! 

        Next stop was dinner. Oh man! I'm getting excited just writing about this.  Myoga is a fusion restaurant that tries (and succeeds) to incorporate flavors from all over the world. We ordered the 7 course tasting menu. I took a picture of each course I selected. I am going to try and list all that I had to the best of my ability.

Course #1. Tickler. The starter before the starter.
- Tomato puree thing...lol
-Squid ink fried ball
-Chicken and pistachio
-Aged chedder cigar (egg roll looking thing)

Bread platter

Course #2. All white scallop

Course #3. Veal Schnitzel
*I think this was my favorite. Hard to pick just one.

Course #4. Herb Frittata with wild mushrooms

Course #5. Lime Lemongrass sorbet
Back one is Bobby's Kalamansi 

Course #6. Beef Shin with beets
(I can honestly say I am not a fan of beets, but damn
I scraped the plate clean. To be fair I scraped every plate clean.)

Course #7. Alota Chocolate
Just as it sounds. A LOT of chocolate.
Even that ice cream was chocolate flavored.

Surprise course #8. Dessert version of the tickler.
-Dark Chocolate ball
-White chocolate and pistachio
-White chocolate with mint sauce (egg roll)
-Strawberry cream shooter

     The idea was to have symmetry in the meal. We started and ending with seemingly the same thing. Wow! I can't even tell you how good this was. Poor Bobby had to hear me rave about it after each bite. He considered at one point video taping me eat, but we decided against that...lol. Lisa I eat like you, with every bite, it's..."Mmmmmm!" I forgot to mention that I went with the courses that also paired with wine. I didn't take a picture of the wines, but man, again sooooooo good! This restaurant was so good that I have already talked Bobby into taking me back before we leave! 

That is all for now. XOXOXO....See ya soon! 

Cheers from South Africa

Oops I missed January...

     HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! In the first week of January, I read an article about when to stop saying Happy New Year. It said usually in the first week... but since we haven't spoken yet, I assumed I'm safe.

The New Year fireworks seen from our living room.

The beach on New Years.

     Apparently January 1st everyone in Cape Town goes to the beach. I have never seen so many people on our "crappy" beach. I say crappy because you can clearly see that it isn't exactly a lounge around beach, but never-the-less people lined up. This picture hardly does it justice. Lets see what else has this new year brought us....Oh how could I forget. With the new year we got more load shedding. What is load shedding you ask? Basically, it is South Africa's way of saying they can't support enough energy for the people living here. So the people of the country are forced to be without power for a random "scheduled" 2 hours a day. Scheduled is in parenthesis because however it is scheduled on the website, they don't always follow it. Sometimes you will plan for the outage, then they wont turn if off....or you will be sitting doing something on the computer and suddenly poof no power.
     Okay, so what have we been up to? Well, not a whole lot. In fact, I have only a few pictures to show from the month hiatus from blogging. I have been doing A LOT of cooking, but i'm saving all the pictures to show as one huge slideshow for the end. #SpoilerNotReallyASpoiler. I kid you not folks, I take a picture of almost every single meal I eat. Sometimes at restaurants I forget, but all my home cooking is documented. I have taken 2,015 photos since we got here. I'd say a good portion of those are food pictures.
     January is a fun month because it means one thing. Football playoffs! We have spent many late evenings watching every single playoff game. With that comes seeing the sunrise...haha. In February our football team won the Superbowl!! That was a nice treat. It felt like a South African gift. Something finally went our way. We stayed up all night, woke the entire Atlantic seaboard when we won the game in the last 20 seconds!  =)

This is the sun coming up on the night of the SUPER BOWL! 

 
   Recently we went to a Kite Surfing Competition in Big Bay. We had never seen kite surfing before, so we thought it would be neat to check it out. Too windy. haha. Unfortunately for the competition, they need lots of wind...but to be a bi-stander its way too windy and cold. Let me remind you that it's summer and we were still chilly. (Clearly from the desert.)

Surfers warming up.

I'm the worst selfie taker ever!

This was during the competition

     That is really all I have to share right now. We are moving out of our flat for the month of March. So we are planning to do some fun stuff while we are at a guesthouse in Rondebosch. Promise to document and have a new post in March. As always...XOXO from Africa.

More than halfway....?

     Another month has come and gone. =) Pretty soon that should say another YEAR has come and gone. Wow I can hardly believe we have been here almost 1 year. Alright, that's a lie. I can believe it, because honestly it felt like 10 years. I think that's due to the fact that this place lives in the past. From the cars on the road, to the speed of their Internet...ha-ha. That last one isn't funny...I need good reliable Internet to watch my Pats win the Superbowl this year. =P
     Living abroad has been both challenging and rewarding. The biggest challenges for myself are that I have not been able to work and just trying to keep busy. People always say "Oh I can't wait to retire to do nothing!" --- take it from me, it's not all that fun. Heck I used to always say that. I guess it comes down to liking what you are doing for a job. I remember all those long nights working front desk thinking I would rather watch paint dry than stand there another moment. I guess that's another thing I figured out while living here away from it all. When I get back to the States, I am getting a career that will make me happy. Not some job to fill the time.
     One of the most rewarding things about being here is that it has allowed me a lot of time for "reflection". I think a lot about the people that have come in and out of my life. Some that aren't in my life anymore that I wish still were, and others that I say good riddance. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that by being away from relationships, you learn the true value of them. So to all those people who haven't lost contact with me, who even just send a friendly hello through text/facebook/email, or to my mother that calls me everyday, I would like to say Thank You. Being away is hard and it can make you feel lonely and secluded. Messages from friends and loved ones make every day here a little bit easier.

      I guess if I want anyone to read this I need to stop being so sentimental and just tell you the facts. Lets be honest, no one really wants to know how I feel, they just want to see sharks and lions and bears? Well we haven't seen and sharks recently (plans to go again in the winter), we won't go see the lions until June, and I'm pretty certain that we won't be seeing any bears period. BUT we have been spending a lot of time at an eagle sanctuary about 45 minutes from our house. This place is for injured birds to either be rehabilitated and released back into the wild, or a "refugee camp" where they can safely live out the rest of their lives. Bobby (as I am sure you have noticed from all the bird pictures on FB) has become a bit obsessed with birds. I'm not a huge bird fan, but I do enjoy the birds of prey. I don't like the ones that just poop and eat bird seed. 
Below are some photos of the birds at the sanctuary.

Bobby attempting to feed the baby. Meanwhile the
larger owl swooped in and stole the food!

Owl on B's head

Yuck. Holding the snake.

Rock Kestrel landed on my head. Jasmina thought that was funny!

Cape Dwarf Chameleon. Pretty adorable little guy. 

They should call it an Owl Sanctuary...

They are so soft! 

    One last thing to report. Our beautiful Lion's Head (that's the mountain out our back window) caught on fire a few weeks back. It was absolutely awful, but pretty cool to watch. I was laying on the couch reading when it started to smell smoke. I thought for sure our building was on fire. (This is South Africa...not so sure you should trust a fire alarm.) I jumped up and thankfully saw that the smoke wasn't coming from our building but the mountain. It was a very very windy day and the mountain itself is very steep so it appeared that the "firefighters" were really doing much about it. We watched it just burn for at least an hour before they finally called the helicopter to start dump water on it. I would say it burned for a good 12 hours. No one was injured and no property was damaged. However the mountain did take a beating. 

This was particularly cool to see the helicopter right
out the window picking up water and racing back to dump it.

Burning into the night.

The next morning. Notice all the dark vs. the green on the left side.
Today those trees on the right side are all brown and dying.

   Okay. That is all for now. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone! See ya next year!(possibly literally??) Hope everyone has a fun and safe New Years. 

XOXO from Africa.