Quiz Night in Cape Town

After a failed attempt a few months ago to attend a real South African Quiz Nite, we finally scored! We went back to the Fireman's Arms on a Thursday night and participated in their world famous Quiz Nite. Unfortunately for us and our visitors, we were a group of all Americans. Last time we had a few South African ringers on our team but unfortunately no quiz on Quiz Nite thanks to the World Cup. Oh well, we represented for the good ol' US of A and had a great time to boot.

First order of business, each team pays a small entry fee and gets a booklet. In it are the categories of questions and spaces for our answers. Each team picks a team name and you write it on every page because you are going to be tearing the pages out and handing them in to a scorer after each round of questions.

There are five questions per category with each correct answer worth a point. Science & Nature, Sports, Film, Music, etc. You get to pick one category where you can double your points on correct answers. With a team filled with engineers and computer scientists, we chose Science & Nature. It was a good choice because we doubled all five of our correct answers in that category and scored a maximum of 10 points.

We didn't do quite as well on some of the other categories that were very South African-centric in nature. We choked on sports (maybe 2 points), cratered on politics (no Mandela questions) but we got at least half of most of the others. There was also a random spot question and "an incredibly impossible question to answer" for some possible bonus points. Not for us however.

The questions are called out by the game hostess and projected on a couple of large screens. After you finish a page with two categories, you tear it out and hand it to the central scorer who tallies the correct answers and reads the standings out loud after every scoring session. Some of the names were hysterical. "The team with the most points" never had the most points. In fact they were often at the rock bottom of the standings. We chose "Anita Beer" as our team name.

For many of the players, this was a regular Thursday night ritual and just like the New York Times crossword puzzle, you get better with experience. After all was said and done, we came in around about the middle of the pack. Twelfth out of 26 teams. Not bad for a bunch of strangers in a strange land. Hmmm. Maybe that should have been our name.