Eating abroad

On our recent journey through Spain and Paris, it was almost impossible to find the kind of food I normally eat at home. What is it about the nations of the world, that their food and eating habits are so different? Do we follow the food developed by our inherited cultures? As a believer in 'you are what you eat' and having experienced a remarkable improvement in my health and wellbeing by following a diet with minimal sugar, wheat and dairy, the alternative available consists of a limited range of fruit, nuts, seeds, vegetables and proteins.

Take breakfast: tomato and two eggs does it for me. In Spain, a substantial feast of cereal, fruit, sweetened yoghurt, breads, jams, cheese, salami, a slice of plain cake, orange juice and coffee. None of which form part of my chosen diet. As a tourist, you are pretty much confined to eating at local bars and restaurants, unless you have found a market and stocked up on what you do eat.

Mid-morning: handful of almonds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. Couldn't find that anywhere. Coffee shops served exquisite pastries and cakes. Still not on the menu.

Lunch: a varied salad with chicken. Hmm. 'Salad' was a torn-up iceberg lettuce (lots) with a few slices of tomato - no dressing. Where were the radishes, celery, seeds, onion, avocado and herbs, liberally sprinkled with olive oil? Fair enough, we were stopping at the frequent roadside eateries which ensure that no-one goes hungry when travelling through Spain, and the fare was probably more suited to burly truckers with hearty appetites, but somehow the piles of greasy chips and paper-thin slices of pale pork did nothing for the digestion. Surely someone in Spain wants to eat a real, multi-ingredient salad?

Dinner was another story! Chicken and vegetables are my absolute favourite. The only vegetable which accompanied anything you could order was potato (also off my menu) and the descriptions seldom resembled what appeared on the plate.

By the time we eventually reached Granada, I was suffering from vegetable withdrawal symptoms. We were booked into our first large 'commercial' hotel, with a huge dining room and vast buffet for dinner and breakfast, where I fell on the vegetables like there was no tomorrow!

I'm sure there must be better food in Europe, but it is probably served in private homes and only the most expensive restaurants. Or perhaps we are just too used to our own way of eating and find it hard to adapt to a different culture. But I still have a sneaky feeling that back home we are more used to a very varied and healthy diet.

I must mention that my mother and father had absolutely no problem with the food they were presented with, especially the confectionery! Perhaps I'm just too fussy...

Life's little pleasures

While I generally am able to maintain an eating regimen that excludes sugar, wheat and dairy and most forms of carbohydrate, there are two things that I cannot resist: Eggs Benedict and cappuccino. Not any old Eggs Benedict. It must be on an English muffin, topped with the best smoked ham and, vitally important, poached eggs that have not been cooked in vinegar. The yolks must be soft, but the white firm, and the hollandaise sauce should cover the whole egg. A taste and texture sensation!

What would life be without coffee? Never settle for a mediocre cappuccino - the cup should be large, the coffee full-bodied but not bitter and the froth thick and substantial, not deconstituting itself as you watch.

I can recommend the source of these delights without hesitation, for those of you lucky enough to live in the South Peninsula - Mugg & Bean, Longbeach Mall. The service is always with a smile and a chat, although this may be because they see me so often they crack the eggs into the pan when they see me approach. I'll catch them out one day and have a salad. Any query is attended to with alacrity and to the customer's satisfaction and the quality is consistent.

You may eat there with impunity - give yourself a treat!

Taxi rant

Is it any wonder that South Africa's infamous minibus taxi drivers rank among the most annoying people in the world? Their blatant disregard for other road users and particularly their passengers has to be seen to be believed. The majority apparently have no genuine licences, as they seem to be oblivious to the rules of the road which are based on consideration for fellow road-users.

An orange traffic light is simply a signal to accelerate and they still have to discover the meaning of the red one. It is safest to wait until all taxis have gone before venturing to take your turn through a green light. If there is a traffic jam, they will simply drive past on the left and push into the queue at the front, leaving the rest of us sitting like monkeys waiting for our turn.

They drop their passengers in the most inappropriate places, usually pulling across a Stop sign and blocking the traffic, in a gesture of FU, knowing that no-one will challenge them. If you dare to indicate your displeasure at their lack of manners, they will threaten you verbally or physically, and have been known to shoot indiscriminately in busy main roads.

But we must try to see things from their point of view:
1. You don't actually need a licence to drive a car. You just turn the key and steer as best you can. It helps to know where the brakes are, but the accelerator is the only thing that really counts.
2. It doesn't matter if you bump into someone. They will be insured and you don't care about another dent. The minibus still goes.
3. It doesn't matter if you overload. You are just getting as many people to work as possible, and if the minibus rolls as you go round a corner, they probably won't be hurt as they are well packed in.
4. If your passenger works 50m from a bus stop, aren't you giving them good service by dropping them at the door rather than letting them walk?
5. If you know that no-one will go when the traffic light turns green because they can see you coming at high speed and won't be able to stop, why disappoint them?

It would be wonderful to see them in action going round the Arc de Triomphe - what a hoot!

Pet dynamics

   Since the passing on of our two oldest cats, the animal dynamic has changed in our house. The male dog, Monty, no longer feels his position as alpha male is threatened by the alpha cat and doesn't mark his territory in the house any more - if only we had known the cause! The spayed female dog, Susie, hasn't noticed their absence and continues to sleep all day on the couch or a sunny corner of the garden, with the occasional mock charge at the remaining indoor cat, Felix, to keep the blood circulating. Felix thinks she is an orphan now and rushes wildly about the house, jumping over furniture and rolling herself up in the rugs to provide variety in her routine. She runs up the support pole and onto the bamboo canopy over the deck (despite a fair-sized overhang) to make sure that no birds are nesting under the eaves - very handy, we don't have to get up there to remove nests any more. And at night she is all peaceful, snuggled on my bed.
  The beautiful pale orange chinchilla cat, Tigger, which lives outside even in the wildest winter weather has moved closer to comfort, sleeping on the top step leading up to the front door. Unfortunately she has further to fall than when she slept on the fence and we regularly hear a thud-thud-thud as she bounces down 12 or so stairs, Sometimes she takes the quick route and falls straight through the treads onto the bricks below. But she seems happy. The other day she came inside and lay in the sun along the back of a chair, so she must be feeling less threatened now.
  We are now settling down into some kind of pet normalcy, rather than maintaining a hospice for frail and incontinent cats. I hope it's going to last. My daughter is threatening to bring home a stray that has turned up where she works. She's a compulsive cat rescuer and is not in the least intimidated by my insistence that I want no more cats. She never listened before and there's not much hope that she's going to start now.
 

Cellphone tracking blues

Is it just me or are there millions out there who long for the days when we were uncontactable? While I agree that cellphones serve a vital purpose in situations where you have become separated from your husband while shopping and need to trace him before he gets lost in the hardware department, or you have left your shopping list at home and need to phone for a quick recap, the worst aspect is that everyone expects you to carry it with you at all times. Try going to the bathroom without it. You will hear it ringing incessantly and find 4 missed calls before you are finished. Even going outside to do a bit of gardening can create havoc - I once planted a new tree and the phone must have slipped out of my pocket into the hole. When I couldn't find it, I got my son to call my phone and lo and behold!, it was underground and I had to dig it up again. Fortunately I hadn't yet watered the plant!

A large part of the problem is that women's clothing doesn't have pockets for cellphones, unlike men who are always or mostly wearing pants. And we don't always take a bag with us, especially if it's a quick walk down to the rocks to look at the waves. The major part of the problem is the reaction from my family if I don't answer my phone; They suffer from momisntansweringhercellphonephobia. It's an all-persons alert and the phone lines buzz as the 3 of them phone each other to find out where I am - my husband I suspect just wants to make sure I'm at home and not out having coffee with friends or maybe something a little more exciting, my son usually just wants to know what's for dinner, but my daughter always suspects that I've slipped and broken my hip! The last time she couldn't reach me, she was on the point of sending out the police to look for an old woman who had had a heart attack walking near the lighthouse! I ask you! How incompetent do they think I am?

So I long for the days when nobody ever knew where I was and didn't have to worry about it.

Having a hairy time!

If you have ever had any doubts about the dangers of excessive alcohol intake, watching the TV show The Smoking Gun - Dumbest Partiers, will dispel those doubts forever. Partying is supposed to be fun, but I doubt whether the idiot who trashed his entire apartment with a baseball bat remembers the fun part. The dumbest of all was the guy who let his friend put duct tape on his head (had a No. 1) and tear it off to give him a bald look. The ripping sound as each hair was torn from its follicle by the root travelled through every nerve in my body as I remembered similar torture at the hands of a beautician. The partygoer's scream intensified when he realised that part of his scalp had also been removed, and I felt a sense of satisfaction that at least one male had experienced the routine pain that women endure to look attractive for them.

I was reminded of the infamous Epilady, a tool of torture which had obviously never been tested by its apparently male inventor. For those of you lucky enough not to have ever used one, it was a tightly coiled spring thing that vibrated as you gently stroked it over your hirsute limbs, on the premise that the individual hairs would be caught in the coils and plucked from you in a ladylike fashion. I can only say that the sensation was that of being repeatedly stabbed with multiple blunt needles and the result completely ineffectual. The Epilady was consigned straight into the bin and history.

I hope evolution has been told that women need to be less hairy to ensure the survival of the species and that something will be sorted out over the next hundred thousand or so years.

Snail trail

My garden is suffering from an excess of large brown snails at the moment. If there are any chefs out there who want to add them to the menu, I will deliver! Not that I enjoy killing snails. I normally throw them over the fence into the neighbour's garden (it's an empty plot, so that's not quite as mean as it sounds), but I recently heard that a study was done to determine whether snails came back home like pigeons do. The researcher painted the snail shells with nail varnish and took them away to be released in a field a few blocks from home and, lo and behold! a good number returned. So that appears to be a pointless exercise. I throw them onto the lawn and hope that nature will take its course and bring in the snail-eating birds, but I've never seen that happen yet. Perhaps they are too big?

I wouldn't mind them eating a few leaves, but they are decimating my clivia buds and they are the most stunning flowers, providing big splashes of colour ranging from orange to peach at this time of year. It looks rather pathetic when only 3 buds open on the whole head of about 10! They have also eaten the petals off many of the daisies and vygies which are now blooming, which rather defeats the purpose of nurturing them through winter. There is nothing quite so disappointing as a daisy with petals only 1mm long!

I'm considering picking the snails and putting them in green bags to take far away to the compost dump, but then I picture them going through the 'bossieslaner' (shredder) and that is not a pretty picture. I think I'll stick to my original plan and keep throwing them over the fence. Maybe they'll get tired of the return trip and stay there.

Scents of Spring

Today it truly felt like Spring. The light has a warmer quality and the south east breeze which heralds Cape Town's summer carries the smell of the fynbos across the Peninsula. Here in Kommetjie, there are no industries to pollute it as it journeys from Cape Point up the coastline, and it even carries a hint of the sea from the furthest reaches of the South Atlantic Ocean.  The sun is going down later and is moving noticeably towards the south. Clivias, daisies, vygies and the heady-scented buddleia are blooming in my garden and the birds are starting to squabble in the undergrowth as they prepare for the nesting season. There is even the familiar smell of a distant bush fire from beyond the Cape Flats, causing a distinct haze across the horizon.

As I drove over Ou Kaapse Weg this morning, I was once more treated to a display by our spectacular floral kingdom of mountain dahlias, proteas, leucadendrons, ericas and podalyrias. Even the wild grass at the side of the road glowed pink in the sunshine. The daily drive over this floral paradise is the only thing I miss about working from home!