We were up and out early to drive to the Old Biscuit Mill, with sunny clear skies but a cool wind. When the roads were endlessly lined with parked cars and opportunists beckoned and waved us up side streets to park we realised we were getting near . We slowly passed each of these until we spotted a street with a couple of spaces, quickly proceeded down and hurriedly parked outside a row of dodgy looking abodes. An elderly man sauntered up, speaking to us but we didn’t understand him so we just smiled back and then he stood next to us and watched us move everything from the back seat into the boot. At this point, we were hoping he was the neighbourhood watch here.
At the entrance to the Mill, we noticed this was a local community market and we could see the place was fairly busy even for a blustery winter morning. As we ambled through stalls of secondhand, ethnic and boho clothes, artisan crafts and ceramics and trendy art shops, Yvonne was joyous in the fact we were at a market which Gilles, whose travel blog she fanatically follows, hasn’t yet been to. The creativity was oozing all around us and we understood why Rachel and Brian, the couple we met yesterday, would have thoroughly enjoyed it here, just as we were too. There were wafting aromas which meant one thing, food, and we turned a corner to be corralled by the crowd into the food market. The atmosphere was buzzing and the sights, sounds and smells of food made it irresistible not to try some things. Beautiful handmade chocolates, cakes galore, layers of artisan breads, countless cheeses, varieties of biltong and a plethora of local and international dishes being prepared and cooked at stalls and consumed on long tables and benches in the middle of the market. We spotted a craft brewery and settled down to enjoy a controlled portion sized lunch and a small beer, only after purchasing a lump of Mature Cheddar which Yvonne has been craving since arriving in SA. Crumbly, zingy and full of flavour, h e a v e n.
We returned to the car finding it, naturally, all still in one piece. It seems we are getting paranoid about security here too. Getting ready to set off we noticed several people waving at us and then we realised all the cars were parked facing the other way. Ah, we hadn’t even noticed we had driven the wrong way down the one way street in our pursuit of a parking spot. On reflection, that’s probably what the old man was trying to tell us. We need to chill out a little more here.
Our next destination was an unfortunate but necessary one. A shopping mall named Century City and as we followed the road signs to the village sized car parks, we entered a world of consumerism on a grand scale. Indeed, this was a City within a city and on a Saturday. Both groaning at the masses of people and number of shops we just had to knuckle down and get on with the task at hand, to find and buy a) outdoor jackets to meet criteria of warm, packable and good price in readiness for hiking up Table Mountain and Cedarberg NP and the cold mornings and nights in Namibia and b) a thick fleecy blanket required for some of our upcoming and unusual Namibian accommodation, ie no electricity for 4 days/5 nights.
With a good selection of gear shops we successfully purchased not only the jackets and blanket but a few other must haves which will definitely be useful for either skiing, cycling, sailing, hiking etc which clearly justified the necessity to buy them.
As we drove back to the apartment we tried to recall the last time we had spent a day shopping and after much consideration, neither of us could. Arriving home at sundowner time, Glenn dashed down to the beach to test his new jacket and take photos of the sunset. A resounding hit on the former, a miss on the latter.
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| Our ground floor apartment. |
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| Fruit and Veg stall in the market |
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| Artisan (what does that mean?) bread |
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| The central eating area |
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| Ethnic everything |
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