You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, designed underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterward a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swearword.
Zadie Smith, “White Teeth”
Twenty eight degrees in New York City. Body-temperature breezes here in Cape Town. It’s 7:00 p.m. as I type this and golden sunshine covers the city.
Earlier my partner and I visited the beach at Camps Bay. “Grenadilla lollies,” called out vendors hawking frozen treats and cold drinks in the 90-degree heat. We played beach tennis, which we punctuated by dashing into the waves to cool off.
Our weekend started in the city’s Sea Point section, where we attended Shabbat services at Chabad of Cape Town. We arrived at 6:30 p.m., about a half hour early. While we waited we met one man, a local who looked to be in his early 30s. “I’m here because my friend in Joburg tells me that Chabad is the place to meet women,” he said. “There are only seven Jewish women my age in Cape Town, and I’ve dated four-and-a-half of them.”
The half remains a mystery. Upon hearing that the service didn’t start until 7:00 p.m. the man announced plans to scope out another shul, started his silver hatchback and drove off into the evening.
Some other images from the weekend…
At 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.
20 milliliters espresso. Iced tonic water. Natural sweetener. Espressolab Microroasters. Cape Town.