So proud

G and I went to one of The City Beneath the Mountain’s big tourist spots last night. It’s a shopping mall, but redeems itself by being strategically placed in the harbour, with wheeling sea gulls above, our beautiful sea beside, and our ever-present mountain, over there.

It’s a place I go to relatively often, mainly to do some shopping (of the boring shampoo and calcium pills variety) and to have a little dinner in a pretty spot by the sea. This time I was there to upgrade my phone, a task that, while I realise some people get all excited about, I don’t. A pimply youth getting excitable about the wonders of Phone A (“It can take pictures from two kilometres away!”) versus Phone B (“With a press of a button you can send your whereabouts to your three hundred closest friends!”) holds no attraction to me whatsoever. That’s another post though.

I expected it to be a bit fuller, what with us playing host to a couple thousands of foreign visitors for the World Cup. I misjudged the size of this thing. It was crammed full of tourists. Fabulously so. All dressed up in country colours, swarthed (is that the right word?) in their flags, vuvuzelas parping left, right, and centre. We chose to have dinner at one of my favourite spots – an ‘English-type’ pub, where we sat outside, next to a table of Poms. Note, this was post the England/Slovenia match.

They were all dressed in English soccer kits, faces painted, flags aflutter (one woman even had one of those alice bands with two tiny flags flapping about above her head.) They kept bursting into song and hugging. Then two Americans ambled in, one in a fabulous HUGE American-Indian headdress. They were met with cries of joy, and more hugging. It was great.

Then there was the large Argentinian man, with a group of lovely other Argentinian people. He was dressed in a (large) green and yellow top with “Boks” written across the front. Bless.

But my best? In the parking garage, I saw three good-looking Portoguese boys, with their Portugal tops on, ambling into the entrance, past one of the cleaning staff men who was wheeling a bin somewhere. He looked at them, smiled hugely, and said enthusiastically: “Obrigado!”, in his beautiful Xhosa accent.

The world is not wrong if they think us South Africans are hospitable, are they?