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At Christmas, dreaming of fake Chinese food…

xmas_dayOn Christmas Eve in 1908, New York City Mayor George McClellan shuttered the city’s 550 movie houses, saying they had inadequate fire exits, the Times reminded readers recently. The theaters reopened a few days later.

I’m glad Mayor McClellan relented because seeing a movie on Christmas Day is one of my favorite traditions. As many of my tribesmen can tell you, the routine involves a late-afternoon movie – a 5:00 p.m. showtime feels ideal – followed by going out for Chinese food.

In Manhattan, Christmas morning may be the quietest day of the year. The hum that seems to run through the city the rest of the time ceases. It can be a great day to read, to volunteer or to walk.

In the afternoon, I would head to a theater filled with moviegoers who by then are dreaming of the wonton soup and hoisin sauce they will savor later at a restaurant packed with those of us for whom December 25 offers all the fun of a holiday without actually having to observe anything.

Hunan Park, a restaurant that used to be on Columbus Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets but closed a few years ago, topped my list. I still can taste the restaurant’s jade chicken, which featured white meat flanked by green beans in a spicy sauce.

I can’t vouch for the food’s tie to Chinese cuisine, but my girlfriend, who’s half-Chinese, seems pretty sure the link was tenuous. I asked her how she knows Hunan Park wasn’t typical of regional Hunan cooking. “Because if you ate there, it wasn’t,” she replied.

Still, the food was terrific. So was the scene. On Christmas the place filled with Upper West Siders fresh from the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13. The dining room’s decor looked to be from the 1980s. Signed headshots of Dan Rather and other celebrities adorned the walls near the register, which was bookended by bags of takeout. On cold days, the floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted Columbus Avenue fogged with steam from all the soup and dumplings.

I’m feeling nostalgic for Hunan Park here in South Africa, where a woman corrected me recently after I wished her happy holidays. “It’s ‘Happy Christmas’ here,” she said. “In America you soften it because you don’t want to offend anyone but here even the Muslims say ‘Happy Christmas’ and it’s fine.”

At first, I attributed her response to her being South African, until I read that two-thirds of Americans prefer to say “Merry Christmas” while 18 percent prefer “Happy Holidays,” according to a poll released Monday by Farleigh Dickenson University. Fifteen percent say they’re indifferent or would rather people not say anything. The greeting also varies by political party. Eighty-two percent of GOP’ers prefer saying “Merry Christmas” compared with 55 percent of Democrats, the survey found.

No war on Christmas here. In my reverie, I’m back at Hunan Park. If I were there I would hang my jacket on the back of my chair in the overcrowded room and look forward to being passed a pot of tea while I practically drool in anticipation of the fake Chinese food to come.

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Favorite Places

Born to Run

cedaraI played Bruce Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on my iPod randomly one day while walking with our dogs, Tala and Juma, at a farm here in South Africa that we like to visit.

The song, which appears on the album “Born to Run” and tells the story of Springsteen’s E Street Band, resonated with me in a way it hadn’t previously. Maybe it’s the lyric about being all alone and on own’s own, which feels like an anthem to this stranger in a strange land, even if I’m hardly alone.

Or perhaps it’s the connection between this place and home. The green hills that roll to the Drakensberg here in Kwa-Zulu Natal and New York City, which I left, each have a scenic grandeur. As it happens, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are slated to play their first shows in South Africa this January.

Or maybe it’s that listening to “Born to Run” makes sense at a farm where the dogs and I go to run. If anyone were born to run, it’s Tala and Juma.

The Zulu guys with whom we share the road and I exchange a thumbs-up when we pass one another. Everyone’s smiling.

Here’s the song:

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Favorite Places

Clifton Beach No. 4

beachsceneAt Clifton Beach in Cape Town on Wednesday I watched as the last of about a dozen swimmers emerged from the blue-green water on a 78-degree afternoon. The group had been swimming freestyle, about 25 yards from shore, traversing the four beaches that link to one another in this strand that sits just north of Camps Bay. “Maybe only 10 or 12 days a year when the water’s this warm,” one of the swimmers told me as he shook water off him. “It’s like the south of France.”

By then it was early evening and the beach was dotted with clumps of teenagers and families on blankets. A circle of boys passed a rugby ball to one another. Parents held babies. An old man wearing a pea green polo shirt and yellow headphones used a detector to scavenge for whatever metal might be buried. Three Indian guys played beach cricket.

Behind the beach and across a strand of road loomed Lion’s Head, a mountain that rises nearly 2,200 feet with ribbons of houses chiseled across its lowest section. The mountain provided a background to the action on the beach, where Odo, a 20-something Zimbabwean who came to Cape Town at the age of eight, sold hats from a selection he carried under his arm.

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Travel

Black Tonic

blacktonic20 milliliters espresso. Iced tonic water. Natural sweetener. Espressolab Microroasters. Cape Town.

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People

Remembering Nelson Mandela…

IMG_0370As I type this I’m listening to the BBC’s coverage of the memorial service for Nelson Mandela that is being held at FNB Stadium in Johannesburg. Leaders from the U.S., China, Brazil, the U.K., India, Afghanistan, Liberia, France, Cuba and scores of other countries are arriving to join more than 90,000 mourners who are gathering to show their respects to Mandela.

While awaiting the start of the proceedings, I’ve been listening to the sounds of the stadium and leafing through “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela’s autobiography. I’ve been re-reading Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia trial, at which Mandela and fellow members of the African National Congress were convicted of conspiring to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid government.

The trial took place over roughly 20 months beginning in October 1962. As Mandela describes, the defense case began in April 1964 with a statement from the dock by Mandela. In his address, Mandela detailed the disparities between the lives of blacks and whites in South Africa and described the aims and objects of the ANC, which included the following:

Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society. Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. This then is what the ANC is fighting for.  Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.

After reading for four hours, Mandela turned to face the judge and delivered from memory the final words:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

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People

From prisoner to president…

taxi_rankOn Saturday I spent the afternoon in the rondaval of a South African traditional healer.

My girlfriend and I had come to see the healer and his wife to ask them their feelings on the passing of Nelson Mandela and to visit a nearby taxi rank together. Each day residents of the Zulu tribal area that adjoins the mostly white enclave where we live gather at the rank to hail taxis to town and elsewhere here in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

“Mandela was a hero,” Makhosi Zuma, our host, told us. “In Zulu, we say ‘iqhawe.’ He survived from being a prisoner to become a president.”

Mandela is a hero. Born, educated, tried for treason, imprisoned for 27 years and elected president in his country’s first democratic elections, he changed the lives of all South Africans. He may be the greatest man to have been born within these borders, but he became a hero to the world.

Buried in the roadway near the taxi rank lies a steel grate that is said to have marked a barrier in the days of apartheid. Blacks who sought to enter the whites-only area on the other side of the grate had to present their so-called passbook in order to cross.

To this American, the grate embodies both South Africa’s progress and the challenges that remain. Stand at the grate and you’ll see cars and trucks carrying white South Africans bump past the tribal area’s mostly black residents, who gather at the rank to hail rides in taxis known as kombis.

Commuting via kombi can mean packing into a van with 10 others and enduring ear-splitting music. It also can mean exposing oneself to tuberculosis, especially when the windows remain rolled up, which is often the case on rainy days that mark the springtime.

A commute suggests the commuter has a job, something that too few people here possess. South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 24.7%, among the highest in the world, according to Africa Check. The country also has the world’s fourth-highest murder rate and the highest incidence per capita of people living with HIV. For millions of its citizens, South Africa remains, to borrow a label coined by the novelist Zadie Smith, a death-dealing place.

That’s not to say South Africa has a monopoly on death. America’s transition from apartheid took about 100 years and was marked by violence, poverty and other ills that have spanned generations. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the hero of America’s anti-apartheid movement, was murdered at age 39. Mandela lived to be 95.

Mandela himself knew the challenges his country faced would not end with majority rule. As he wrote in his autobiography:

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Iqawhe.

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People

One measure of Mandela

“Nelson Mandela embodied the 20th century in South Africa and in the world in many more ways than people think,” recalls Zackie Achmat, who co-founded the organization that forced the government to provide antiretroviral drugs to South Africans living with HIV.

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People

Never Again

purple mandelaTerrific tribute to Madiba, by Prophets of da city

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Travel

Some sounds of South Africa…

I rode along this spring with traditional health practitioners from iTEACH, en route to an event to promote medical male circumcision here in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Their songs made the trip something special.

Categories
Life Travel

Thanksgiving in South Africa

tableThere’s a crack my tribesmen tell. It goes like this: two Jews, three opinions. That’s how Thanksgiving had started to feel by the time Saturday arrived.

That’s right: Saturday. Three of us had decided to host the holiday for a group of Americans and our South African guests, and for days we planned…and wrangled. I proposed we serve both turkey and lamb but my co-hosts vetoed the idea. One guest emailed that he planned to bring a Peking duck. “No,” we said. To brine or not to brine: that was another question. Thursday or Saturday? I’m still unclear why we waited. By the weekend the back-and-forth produced 59 email messages and left me wondering whether we could pull off the holiday.

Whatever doubts I had dissolved by Saturday. The day began sunny but by nightfall the rain arrived. No worries, we had pitched two tents, one to serve as an auxiliary kitchen and the other for the bar, which we adorned with strings of Christmas lights.

Krista grilled a turkey on the braai, the South African term for barbecue, one of two birds we prepared. Rachel prepared scalloped potatoes that were sliced razor thin and piled layers deep. Jordan made potato latkes – our dinner conincided with the fourth night of Hanukkah – fried in duck fat that we ate with a dollop of sour cream. Thobe baked jeque, Zulu steamed bread. We also had mashed potatoes, two types of stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, Waldorf salad, sourdough bread, cheese, wine, coffee, and, thanks to Kate and Amber, three pies: pumpkin, apple and pecan.

I served as greeter and bartender. The specialty cocktail of the night was Jack Daniels – in tribute to America – with dry lemon, in honor of our host country. The combo seemed to be a hit, judging by reactions.

Before dinner we went around the table and everyone said what they were thankful for. For our South African guests, the dinner was both their first Thanksgiving and their first Hanukkah. After dessert we lit the menorah. Everyone took a turn.