5. Tasting Wine

Russell and I arrived in Cape Town this afternoon, and it is more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined. The city is situated in between the mountains and the ocean, which I've never seen anywhere else before. The views are spectacular here, and I can't wait to show you guys pictures of it.

Unfortunately, the pictures will all be taken on Russell's camera, because as I was getting out of our rental car, my camera fell out of my lap, and now the backlight doesn't work and I can't tell what I'm taking pictures of anymore. Ah well, perhaps this will be a good excuse for me to buy a digital SLR to use for the rest of the trip... hooray for loan money (or, as I like to look at it, Monopoly money)!

The first thing we did when we got here was to go wine tasting. Cape Town is the heart of the South African wine industry, and all of the vineyards are in the same part of the city, so we literally drove down one road and hopped from one vineyard to the next. We finished off by going to a distillery, where they gave us a brandy-chocolate-coffee tasting, which is by far the hoity-toitiest thing I've ever done in my life. When we left, they encouraged us to come back again tomorrow, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty tempted.

As you can imagine, after a few wine tastings and a brandy tasting, I was pretty well on my way to drunktown. We stopped for dinner on the waterfront, where I think I did a pretty good job of not embarassing myself, and then checked into the hostel that we're staying at. This is by far the nicest hostel I have ever been to: private two-bed bedrooms, a kitchen, free internet, and everything else you would ever need.

Well, everything except for a new camera. Sigh.