Saturday, April 08, 2006
Hints at the family vacation.
My parents had inadvertently booked into a quirky urban castle, newly built, loftily perched and committed to flaunting a great number of architectural conventions and norms of interior design (successfully, on the whole). It was nestled into an obviously upper class suburb called Melville where fluorescent vested black men loitered around providing security for the largely white perambulators interested in the antique stores, fine dining and fashion outlets. The obvious advantage was that my parents and I could walk around with relative security during the evenings, whereas (I'm told) we would have been constrained to taxi cabs in many of the city's less prosperous neighbourhoods.
Johannesburg is manifestly a world class city. There are other urban centres in Sub Saharan Africa that boast a cluster of sky scrapers, reliable infrastructure, crowds, neighbourhood diversity and the like; but none of the ones that I have seen are nearly so overwhelming as Joburg. It looked, from the airplane, from fifty kilometres away, from the central bus station, from the windows of my taxi cab and from the panoramic window of my B&B, exactly like the world class cities of the United States. Not as dense as Manhattan or the Chicago Loop and not as big as L.A; but heftier than Boston, Philadelphia or Atlanta. I haven't seen anything like it in years and I immediately regretted that I would be unable to spend a much longer time exploring what it has to offer. I did not expect to be jealous of Tuuli's opportunity to stay and work there and I would have expected that any jealousy would actually have been rooted in my growing desire to stay still and capitalize on meaningful friendships; but this is pure location envy.
Rather than linger, I boarded a budget airline with my parents and headed for the Cape Town Peninsula, where my family has spent the last week reuniting. We based our vacation in a retirement village called Fish Hoek, having learned that cities bring out our differences, while places of natural beauty connect us to the shared years of our nuclear development and remind us of our ability to be simultaneously entertained. Slightly more on Cape Town and clan Calhoun will be forthcoming.
I am now hovering in the confused ether of solitude that occupies the tiny space between ye olde family time and the tsunami of our doomed red car. I missed the car.
My parents had inadvertently booked into a quirky urban castle, newly built, loftily perched and committed to flaunting a great number of architectural conventions and norms of interior design (successfully, on the whole). It was nestled into an obviously upper class suburb called Melville where fluorescent vested black men loitered around providing security for the largely white perambulators interested in the antique stores, fine dining and fashion outlets. The obvious advantage was that my parents and I could walk around with relative security during the evenings, whereas (I'm told) we would have been constrained to taxi cabs in many of the city's less prosperous neighbourhoods.
Johannesburg is manifestly a world class city. There are other urban centres in Sub Saharan Africa that boast a cluster of sky scrapers, reliable infrastructure, crowds, neighbourhood diversity and the like; but none of the ones that I have seen are nearly so overwhelming as Joburg. It looked, from the airplane, from fifty kilometres away, from the central bus station, from the windows of my taxi cab and from the panoramic window of my B&B, exactly like the world class cities of the United States. Not as dense as Manhattan or the Chicago Loop and not as big as L.A; but heftier than Boston, Philadelphia or Atlanta. I haven't seen anything like it in years and I immediately regretted that I would be unable to spend a much longer time exploring what it has to offer. I did not expect to be jealous of Tuuli's opportunity to stay and work there and I would have expected that any jealousy would actually have been rooted in my growing desire to stay still and capitalize on meaningful friendships; but this is pure location envy.
Rather than linger, I boarded a budget airline with my parents and headed for the Cape Town Peninsula, where my family has spent the last week reuniting. We based our vacation in a retirement village called Fish Hoek, having learned that cities bring out our differences, while places of natural beauty connect us to the shared years of our nuclear development and remind us of our ability to be simultaneously entertained. Slightly more on Cape Town and clan Calhoun will be forthcoming.
I am now hovering in the confused ether of solitude that occupies the tiny space between ye olde family time and the tsunami of our doomed red car. I missed the car.
2 Comments:
Lucky you Nat - and I am completely understanding of mixed feelings between family and car family. Just be accepting of the emotional ups and downs, its all normal:)
aiti
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aiti
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