Aside from paying a visit to me, Kate was in town for the wedding of her friends from London, Will and Liz. The wedding was in the tiny town of Stellenbosch, about an hour outside of Cape Town.
Stellenbosch is notorious wine country and as we discovered upon our arrival, also notorious for holding on dearly to its rich Afrikaaner heritage. Afrikaaners are the group of white people in South Africa that derive from the Dutch settlers in the region during the 1600's. I don't want to get into too much trouble on allisonswank.blogspot.com, but it is my blog, so I'll go ahead and say it: sometimes, Afrikaaners can have unfortunate racist tendencies.
This is us waiting for the charter bus in our southern-plantation-style B&B
The rehearsal dinner was held at the Spier Winery. Aside from producing wine, Spier also hosts a really expensive dinner buffet complete with ambiguous "cultural" entertainment (below) and outdoor festivals.
This is Kate's friend Angela. They went to college together at Texas Tech. Angela has since married a british man and is Kate's link to the wedding couple, Will and Liz. Make sense?
This woman came around to all of the guests and applied paint to their faces. I won't state my exact reasons for declining the "indigenous" face paint, but I do want to say that it just didn't seem right to accept the face painting without the contextualization of the practice (if it does in fact have a history).
The social constructs of Stellenbosch and more specifically, Spier, are complex, but it can be said that the economic disparity is drawn along the color line. This isn't unlike the rest of South Africa, but it is concentrated very deeply in this town.
Talk about the elections!!! I want to know your thought, very curious what it was like among the youth in ZA. What what the media frenzy like in Stellenbosch?
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