Beach Days

Hello all! Are you all enjoying the feeling of relief and excitement (false or realistic) that Friday brings? (note this is assuming I manage to get this blog out today). Personally it’s been a long week so I am very happy the weekend has arrived.

I experienced quite a lot during the first couple of weeks of Cape Town which I neglected to blog about so today I am going to tell you about one of the places that I have spent some quality time – the beach. It is to be expected that I would enter the sandy/windy world of beach land considering I am living in a coastal city now and there is a beautiful stretch of coast around Muizenberg where the water is a few mild degrees warmer than the arctic temperatures that make up the majority of Cape Town water which I have landed up at a few times.

Now let me get something straight: I am not a beach person. Cape Town beaches are better than any others because they are cold and windy so people don’t judge you for you negative beach attitude. The thing is though, the Muizenberg beach is beautiful: pretty pale sand, an amazing mountain, blue sea with crashing waves and of course an adorable row of colourful houses which kind of make the beach slightly unreal. This would not be that bad. I think that, even in my ‘beach hater’ existence, I might be able to enjoy these beaches…

But I need to reflect on the situations which I was thrown on these beaches. Firstly it was a UCT orientation event where hundreds of over-excited / hungover students crowded the beach and for about 600 students they supplied 10 umbrellas, maybe 11. I am very pale which means the sun and I are not good friends and this particular day was a very hot day and so in a desperate bid to not end up red for my first week of university I spent the day in the only shady place available… Under the coloured houses (I know I think this may even be the appropriate time to use the word ‘ratchet’ here). Then while my friends were running around doing the physical activities they had available I sat lying under a house looking and feeling like the beach bags that I had been instructed to watch. The view was still beautiful but I cant say I enjoyed it profusely because I felt like an abandoned towel to be honest.

The next time I stumbled onto that beach was for our bonding experience with the Civil Engineering department. We took the train which made me feel like a proper hipster and it also felt less typical tourist like most of the other things I’ve done here. The beach day was completely different. We were put into groups and forced to partake in the physical activities they had planned… How did I feel about this? Well I didn’t enjoy it. I liked meeting the people in my department but I also felt humiliated as I was expected to play numerous ball sports. In a predominantly male course (and it seems that even nerdy boys can catch a ball) sport cannot be played in the noncompetitive, and rather useless manner that the bookworm of a girl I am plays it. I do not understand why whenever bonding is involved the tasks are always physical activities. This is insanely biased and it annoys me because it means that throughout high school and now university I am always disadvantaged when portraying myself to new people. Surely it would be more logical to make us bond over an intellectual activity rather than a physical one after all we all had to be academic to a degree to get into engineering. But NO I played rugby, volleyball, soccer, tug of war and dodge ball (I think I had bruises on my legs for a week after one of my class mates chose me as his victim) and I burnt my nose in the sun! Then I missed a university event that I had been excited to go to so I was not happy.

Looking back on this post I do realise this has been a bit of a rant which was not my initial intention but I do want to give an honest reflection of my view of places. I did think the beach was beautiful and it is one of the nicest beaches I’ve been to in Cape Town and there are a few nice shops to go explore (not as many as Kalk Bay though which will have to be a future blog post in itself) but I didn’t have the best experience there so I am biased slightly against it but if you are in Cape Town and want to relax at the beach and have a nice view that should definitely be on your list of places to go… Just make sure it doesn’t coincide with a UCT event.

Enjoy your weekend

x J