in order to escape a bit from weekends that seemingly become routine - just the guy in the middle changes - we planned to go to stellenbosch on saturday. for visiting our 'family', for a change of pace, and for, yes, the stellenbosch winefestival (talking about routine...).
since our lift canceled their attendance to this social event, we had to break one of the cardinal rules: do not take the train. according to our guidebook, do take the train if you're a crowd. experience: whatever they say, you can't figure out whether it's right or wrong but you can FIND out. so, enough of the words and speculations, we took the train and it was fine.
along with aire and me came martin, the well-educated german (category: mother-in-law's dream) and in order to not destroy this reputation we bought flowers for mina and practised some essential moves in the streets of stellenbosch before we headed for home and then for festival, which was conveniently located directly opposite of mina's house.
in germany, we call these things 'flatrate parties'. here, it's a winefestival. you pay 10 euro (that might be, with a bit of luck, the same as with the flatrate party), you get equipped with an empty glass and of you go fill and refill it. whereas on a proper flatrate party the content of your glass would be something like cheap vodka or pilsener from the tap with a name you've probably never heard of before, here it is quality wine, ranging from 20 rand to 400+ rand per bottle.
after some random browsing, we luckily met zoue, joe and charl who were luckily wearing their festival gear (hats to recognise each other) as opposed to the stellenbosch youth's catwalk at the winefestival performed by everybody else, and they were able to tell us the cellars that know their business (we would have been admitted to warwick estate's VIP-lounge, unfortunately their wine supplies for the day were finished) . AND i had my first biltong, no idea how it happened that i dropped all the fear i had of dried meat before, in any case i'm cured and happen to like that stuff now.
the next day was full of sunshine and a fellini-lunch. ah well, stellenbosch seems to become more and more a sanctuary - great people, great food, occasionally great weather...
back to 'real' life then. monday we went again for surveys, after all the backdoor-trick opened us the front doors of canal walk, yet another monopolist mall, but taken to another dimension: "if disneyland was ever to become a mall, it would look like canal walk". clearly such a place doesn't allow surveys, we had however the permission of one of the few supermarkets in there to conduct our survey on their terrain. which we did-with some exceptions. after a few hours however a fiercely-friendly security matron, uhm, lady, came up to us asking us, as usual, for our permission. the one we had from the supermarket apparently wasn't enough - she claimed the supermarket was a tenant of the mall which doesn't allow surveys and consequently we should quickly go to the management otherwise we'll be 'escorted out by security guards'. whoa! arianna and i were shortly phantasising about the hilarious scene that would have been and whether we should chain ourselves in good activist's fashion to one of the classicist pillars inside the mall. additionally it puts the notion of a 'criminal' in this country slightly into question - but enough, we went up to management. super-fake-friendly management lady told us our activities were fine as long as we don't step across the border supermarket-mall, "in order not to annoy our customers who want to do their shopping in peace here".
after all, we were already having enough data to make a point about fair trade aware- and willingness.
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