Tuesday(Sams Cultural Tour)

My body felt knackered in the morning, from the cycle ride the day before, and so seriously chilled in the morning.
In the afternoon went on Sam’s township tour, going to the district 6 museum, and getting a flavour of the history-seeing old apartheid signs, ID cards and learning of SA’s apartheid government’s definition of races. Also how they decided someone was black vs. coloured, such as the pencil test- putting a pencil through the hair and then telling them to shake it out, and if they had curly black hair it wouldn’t fall out and thus they were black. After the museum we went to the first township of the day, Langa and saw a variety of building and how the government was starting to update them, one we saw showed how overcrowded the rooms were with 3 families in a very small room, the overcrowding began after apartheid with women were allowed to move freely and then join there men, there was a room that was locked and did have quite nice blankets (so was curious to know if 3 families still slept in the room). The house had quite a stale smell and concrete benches and table.

We went afterwards to a sheebeen, a local drinking establishment, which had huge gallon drums full of beer, which the women who had brewed the beer ladled out into a beaker, which must have contained at least 5 pints worth of beer, with a price tag of 10R, it had quite a stilted environment as the regulars seemed to be waiting for us to leave before really drinking what we had left, and to be honest we hadn’t drunk that much of the stuff as it had bits of yeast still floating in it, the taste was somewhere between a larger and a cider, I got slightly concerned after leaving as I had a slightly tickly throat, and was a little concerned that I might have caught something. Afterwards we went to a witch doctors place; it was full of random substances, mostly dried plants and animal bones, plus a huge snake skin. Lastly on the tour went to Khayelitsha- which started as an unofficial township with mostly tin hut houses, and apparently despite outward appearances many have tvs/dvds inside, due to lots of people not necessarily wanting to leave friend and family and so upgrade their properties rather than move elsewhere. Saw some friendly kids playing with photos somewhere on http://endlesssummer2005.over-blog.com/
I had a nice quiet evening, but sillyly(sp?) walked from Long St. to the waterfront, silly because it was very quiet on the way, and read later in the guide book it wasn’t recommended. On the way found a pub for 9R a beer and bitter on tap, also planned to go out for a drinks with the Brazilian.