Commitment

I've been thinking about you often but haven't had the ability to sit still long enough, nor a consistently reliable internet connection, to get a post up. Now that it's 2010 things will change for the positive.  I'm committing to at least one post a week and may even be able to cajole my fellow blogger to contribute a few items that may be of interest to all.  We'll see... until then to catch you up:

Christmas in Cape Town

We spent the day on the beach at Camps Bay.


It was fun and quite relaxing.  We found the lead up to the Christmas holiday to be pretty low key even though all the stores were decked out with decorations to lure shoppers.  We never felt the frenzy that can hit in the U.S. on those last few days leading up to Christmas and we even spent part of Christmas Eve at the Waterfront which includes a large mall.  There were plenty of people out and about but it wasn't hectic and we bounced from pub to ice cream to pub without tripping over anyone or getting trampled. We came home to find Christmas gifts from our neighbors on the doorstep and learned that quite a bit of visiting and gift-exchanging goes on, at least on-site, on Christmas Eve. Ooops...still learning the ropes, but definitely appreciating our thoughtful neighbors.

On Christmas day itself, several grocery stores were open until 2pm and at Camps Bay about half the restaurants were open and serving customers.  The only glitch in our day was that we didn't anticipate that we wouldn't be able to buy wine at Woolworth's (a more expensive Trader Joe's) on Christmas.  Our wine stash at home had been depleted by various parties we had attended and we were hoping to celebrate the day on the beach with a little clandestine vino drinking (technically no alcohol allowed on the beach...but...)  Here in Cape Town, no wine is sold in grocery stores on Sunday and this seems to extend to certain holidays too.  If we had thought about this we probably could have guessed that we should have stocked up on Christmas Eve, but we weren't planning too hard.  So we were on the beach sans wine...and we had a great time anyways!  We learned our lesson and now keep a regular stash of wine in the house so we don't get caught out in the future ;)  All part of our cross-cultural adaptation (and on the way home from the beach we found an open liquor store, so this no-wine-sales-on-Christmas does not appear to apply to all types of stores).


We came home from the beach and were invited to a potluck dinner and Christmas celebration at the home of our awesome Finnish neighbors.  Most of the families who lived on site were there and there was a hilarious gift exchange (all gifts had to be under R20, approx $2.75).  It's quite fun to see a Russian PhD in Astrophysics wrestle with a 9-year old boy for possession of the hot gift item - a laser keychain.  Little did we know that the competitive gift exchange was just a buildup to musical-chairs-as-contact-sport on New Years Eve...but that's another story for another blog post.

Until then we leave you with a shot of the Boo, rocking out to the musical Christmas card his Nana sent him.  He's singing something to do with a "Hippopotamus Christmas" and wearing Tim's new glasses:



Hope your Christmas was full of good cheer and Happy 2010!