The Winter Sculpture Fair

The Winter Sculpture Fair in the Cradle of Humankind ... yes, winter! Will never quite get used to it. The leaves were turning and falling just like they would be in September if we were back in the ol' US of A. But it was May. Mother's Day to be exact. Oh well, if you can't beat 'em ... grab a wine glass.

Back in the USA I always brought my mother to visit a garden on Mother's Day. The New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and the Chinese Scholar's Garden at Snug Harbor in Staten Island were favorites. One year I even took her for a long Mother's Day weekend to the Brandywine Valley to visit the gardens of Winterthur and Longwood. Gardens are the perfect place for a Mother's Day picnic!





At the Winter Sculpture Fair, there were tents set up with lots of wine from Franschhoek.

... and delicious food from the Cape Valley too.

... including a bacon of the month club stall. Pretty sure that wasn't for me.

Whiskey from the Cape too.














And art. Lots and lots of art.

Amongst bucolic gardens. Like I said, the perfect place for a picnic on Mother's Day.

Beautiful day too.

There were even sculptures incorporated into the water features.

And at the end of the day ... Mother's Day calls, flowers and treats from my boys back home in California. And the best gift of all, their letting me live half way around the world and enjoy this fabulous adventure. Guilt-free! Love you and thank you, Alex and Nick!!!! XOXO

Jozi Craft Beer Fest. Take 2.

enjoying a world famous Balkan Burger

Vince went to the Jozi Craft Beer Fest last year without me. This year I tagged along. He pretty much covered it with his last year's guest blog except he didn't mention that ...

beer pong

... 1. There was "beer pong." No "quarters" though.

Brewhogs made in nearby Kyalami

And 2. there was Brewhogs, the first brewery in South Africa to employ a female Brewmeister, ... er, Brew Frau? Her name is Apiwe Nxusani.

We are going to have to make a house call to her brew haus in Kyalami.

Apiwe Nxusani

Apiwe Nxusani

May Fest

Family sailing in San Diego in 2013 ... last time we were all together

May was always very festive around our house back in the old US of A.

Not only are Vince's and my birthdays in May, we had so many friends and family whose birthdays were also in May that it had become a nonstop month of festive celebrations.

Plus May Day. Cinco de Mayo. The Derby. Garden shows. Designer Showhouses.

May Babies

Then there was Mother's Day. And finally the month was finished off with Memorial Day weekend at the shore - the unofficial start of summer in the US - with more festivities and season openings.

This year we do not have our family here at Valley Lodge for Mother's Day nor for our birthdays. None of our "May baby" friends and family are here with us either to share their month-long celebrations. Memorial Day this year will instead be heralding in the unofficial start of winter in South Africa. But this May marks the first anniversary of my first full year living abroad in South Africa and that is something to celebrate.

At least it still looks and feels like May in Johannesburg. Warm during the day with a slight chill in the air at night. Flowers are blooming everywhere. Not the May flowers I am used to and adore - like lilies of the valley, peonies, wisteria and lilacs - but flowers nonetheless. We decided to celebrate the month of May by taking in a couple of festivals over the weekend. Johannesburg - and South Africa in general - loves its festivals. Wine festivals. Food festivals. Music festivals. Art festivals and air shows. We chose the Jozi Craft Beer Fest and the Nirox Winter Sculpture Fair for our weekend May Fest.






Yesterday ... Saturday ... beer. It was Vince's second Jozi Craft Beer Fest but my first.

And today on Sunday, the Nirox Winter Sculpture Fair in the Cradle of Humankind. What's not to love? Art in a garden featuring a food and wine fair showcasing the finest chefs and winemakers from Franschhoek.

Happy May, Jozi!

Remember Desert Boots?

Sure you do. Actually they have never really gone out of style for the die hard fan but I probably stopped wearing them myself sometime in the 80's. 

how to wear desert boots

The original desert boot that I knew and loved was designed in 1949 by Nathan Clark of C & J Clark, the shoe-making family based in the UK. Its inspiration was a crepe-soled boot made from rough suede in Cairo's fabled Old Bazaar for off-duty Eighth Army officers based in North Africa during the Second World War. But it seems that this version was based on the shoes worn by South African soldiers which were themselves based on Dutch voortrekkers' veldtshoen shoes. Schier Shoes is a Namibian brand that has been making veldtshoens (affectionately called vellies) since, believe it or not, 1935.

But wait ... the provenance goes back even further. Veldtshoens forefathers are thought to have been made in southern Africa by the Khoe people (know pejoratively as the Hottentots) before the arrival of the Europeans.

After Clarks debuted their design at the Chicago World's Fair in 1950, these comfortable shoes were quickly adopted for the preppy look in the US and later immortalized by that great style icon of cool, Steve McQueen. They have been an essential element of many style movements, worn equally enthusiastically by groups as diverse as mods and British Army officers. 

Brother Vellies

I became re-acquainted with the desert boot and newly acquainted with its history when I was searching for appropriate footwear to buy for our upcoming trips to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and the Kalahari Desert. I found a distributor in NYC called Brother Vellies who makes an updated and very stylish version of my old desert boot featuring tribal patterns, springbok suede and neon colors. The shoes are made in South Africa, Kenya and Namibia by a handful of skilled artisans and assembled at the workshop in South Africa by a small group of men and women who assemble a few dozen pairs of shoes a day by hand, using techniques refined over multiple generations. (Brother Vellies bought the fore-mentioned Schier Shoes.)

 

Lemmi & Sipho

They seemed perfect for my needs except for the fact they they are distributed from the US. Since it made no sense to me whatsoever to order shoes from the US that were originally made in SA just to ship them back across the ocean from whence they came, I instead searched for a local alternative. I found it at Lemmi and Sipho in Cape Town. A mother and daughter design team, they took my bespoke order online and my vellies were ready to be picked up in two weeks. Reunion time.

Election Day

Today is Election Day in South Africa. It is also quite a historic one as it concludes the first 20 years of the post-apartheid democratic government. And it is the first general election for the "born free" generation, the name given South Africans born after 1994, the year apartheid was abolished.

The number 20 practically begs for pause and some reflection. Newspaper headlines and magazine covers, campaign speeches and Freedom Day addresses have all obliged by putting forth evaluations of the last 20 years and posing their own questions for this fifth election.

Is South Africa a better place to live than it was 20 years ago? Has the ANC and it's four elected presidents so far lived up to its initial promise? Is the current government on the right path? Does Zuma deserve another go at the presidency? Is it time to change party partners? Should it be the DA? The EFF? I do not think anyone has any doubt how the election will go but from what I am reading in the independent press, the other parties are gaining momentum and eventually it may actually become a real race.

Vince and I are of course just passively watching what happens. We cannot vote so we will keep our opinions to ourselves as well. (But we do have an opinion.) All I will say is that the first 20 years of this new democracy has had some incredible highs and some glaring short-falls. South Africa has come very far since 1994 but it still has a long way to go. Don't forget to vote today, South Africa!

Treasure Trove

We finally made it to the Collectors Treasury. I say "finally" because it has literally been on my list of places to go since I first read about it even before we moved to Johannesburg. But as I have said before, there is so much to do here and we keep adding things to our list. It has been difficult to get there.

Founded in 1974, and housed in an eight story building in the diamond and jewellery district in the Joburg CBD, Collectors Treasury is the largest used and rare book shop in Africa, and in the Southern Hemisphere, having 1,000,000 plus items on hand. In addition to books, there are substantial offerings of maps, old engravings and prints, printed ephemera, periodicals, newspapers and photographica. Collectors Treasury also deals extensively in records, with a stock of over 300,000 vinyl and 78rpm discs.



But that is not all. As I found out, they also have an extensive range of small antiques and collectibles, with strong emphasis on the decorative arts 1870-1970.

The mosaics in the sidewalk in front of the store should have been my first clue. It certainly was an omen of good things to come.

Piles and aisles of first editions ...

... and rare books ...

... it certainly is a literary treasury.

And somewhere behind the stacks of books and display cases was buried treasure of another kind  ... Linnware. Dozens and dozens of pieces.

Along with an out-of-print book on South African art ceramics, The Woman of Olifantsfontein – South African Studio Ceramics, we purchased some more practical examples to add to our collection.

A cream jug, a couple of tea mugs, two beer tankards and a gorgeous teapot to go along with the coffee mugs we already have at home.

I kept it on my list because we will be going back often to Collectors Treasury.

Black Sam's smokin'

I am really not equipped to judge good smokehouse barbeque. So when I saw on Facebook that the new Joburg pop-up phenom, Black Sam Smoque, would be parking its food truck / mobile smokehouse in the middle of Parktown North, I recruited my resident expert to accompany me for a taste.







My husband Vince is a bona fide expert on barbeque, especially smokehouse barbeque. Weaned on it in Kansas City, he has made a mission of eating barbeque in all its forms across the United States of America and the world. Since his job has had him traveling a couple of million miles over the past 20 years, that's been a LOT of barbecue.









He also has cooked a lot of barbecue, at home and in the rag-tag grills that are available in self-catering places that we've stayed at over the years. Both of our boys can create a credible rub and turn out more than credible barbecue themselves.

Vince even built his own quad-purpose grill / smoker / cold smoker / wood-fired oven at home, as a project with our younger son. It's a re-purposed Weber kettle barbeque that was otherwise headed for the trash heap. Dubbed the FrankenWeber, it has turned out smoked turkeys, briskets, chicken, pork shoulder, and pork belly, cold-smoked bacon and salmon (aka lox, see to the right), and made some pretty decent "brick oven" pizza!

Armed with a couple of USA-made and imported smokers and inspired by all the major styles (Carolinas, Texas, Memphis and Kansas City) of barbeque, Sam has added a South African twist to Black Sam Smoque by using local Kameeldoring and Mopani wood for his smoking.

His pop-up menu yesterday was pretty simple - brisket and pork belly SAMwiches and ribs. We had to get a sample of all three.

The brisket SAMwich was topped with a homemade barbeque and / or chili sauces - we got half and half - and the pork belly was served with an herbal salsa verde. Both were topped with a generous scoop of some yummy apple and cabbage coleslaw and served on a Portuguese roll.

Although not as smoky-flavored as we're used to (the local wood is milder than the hickory, cherry, and pecan that is typical in the US), Vince says that it is far and away the best barbecue that we've had outside the States - and that includes places like Australia, which has as strong a braai tradition as South Africa, and the Caribbean which is where it all started as barbacoa.

Everything was really well executed. The ribs were actually perfect. The pork belly and brisket were more lightly done than a US BBQ place would do it, but with great smoke rings and really tender and juicy. Kudos to Sam for the brisket, which is a) hard to do well in the first place, and b) is a difficult cut of meat to find in the right style for proper BBQ. We asked him about that specifically, and he said he has his local butcher (a closely held secret it appears) do a special cut for him, then trims it to spec himself. Nice!

Bottom line - Black Sam Smoque might not be ready to go head to head with institutions like Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City, or County Line BBQ in Austin, but it's a heckuva BBQ place, and a welcome find. Follow Black Sam Smoque for his next pop-up.