At Home In Cape Town

After 20 hours in the air and nearly two days of total travel time, we’re finally in Cape Town.

It was a disorienting trip – a dazed trudge through lines, through tiny spaces, through clouds of food smells and foreign languages, through nearly an entire pack of cold medicine. From JFK to AMS, from AMS to JNB, and from JNB to CPT, I dutifully ate whatever was put in front of me, played passive-aggressive games of knee-jabbing with the seat-recliners in front of me, and stared impassively at the pile of old New Yorkers I’d brought along as plane reading.

Along the way, we slept for a few hours at a YotelAir at the Amsterdam airport, where our high-tech, purple-hued, rent-by-the-hour room bore more resemblance to a space shuttle than to a hotel. Then in Johannesburg, we crashed overnight in a generically pleasant airport hotel before returning to the terminal for 10am strawberry milkshakes and a cross-country flight to Cape Town.

Now we’re here, bedding down for the week at this AirBnB in Woodstock. It's my dream New York loft located halfway around the world – a land of white painted brick, dozens of houseplants, and natural light pouring through wide-open windows. I chose Woodstock because I wanted to stay in a neighborhood with local flavor (read: no chain hotels, no tourist traps), and this one seemed like my kind of place. It has a little bit of grit, a lot of street art, two bookstores, and one of the world’s 50 best restaurants. It’s also historically significant – a neighborhood that managed to avoid forced removal under apartheid, remaining a racially integrated “grey area” that was safe for people of all colors and creeds.

Today, we nest. Tomorrow, we explore.