I’ve been in Cape Town on holiday for almost a week now. It’s nice, being back home and seeing the family, taking a break from university work and the daily worries that come with it. However, outside of the “vegetarian – default” meal system at Rhodes, trying to get by outside of the great RU walls has been nutritionally challenging. Now, Cape Town has a certain image. I’m not one to judge a book by its cover (or a city by its hipsters) but I must admit that I’ve been quite… well, disappointed.
My family have been awesome in meeting this whole vegetarian lifestyle that I’ve got going on. Family meals have taken on a more vege-centred, meatless form, even though they still have yet to give up the red and white entirely. Apparently sushi is just too awesome to never eat again.
However, the first few problems arise as soon as I step foot out my door (which is a new door: we’ve moved house, and when I say “moved” I mean something more like “took our stuff about a hundred metres down the road to a new complex”). I went to Long street with my family to eat out. We sat down in a nice little café, and everything was just perfect. Perfect, that is, until I opened the menu.
No vegetarian option in sight. Well, there was salad (a range of salads), but salad is nowhere near a main course. Hell, salad is a side-option to a main course. So we decided to get up and try another place.
And another.
And another.
And another.
I found it hard to believe that so many places in Long street had nothing to offer green-crunchers other than salad; these placed offered about as much choice as a Zimbabwean presidential election. I eventually had to ask the chef of one establishment to make me a cheeseburger, minus burger, plus fried onion and egg. Now, I’m not saying that Cape Town doesn’t cater for vegetarians: there are lots of places that do do it, and well (Kauai comes to mind), but they are just too few and far in between. Even the high-end places like Harbour House, Sevruga’s and Willoughby’s have nothing really aside from a soya dish and vegetarian maki. It’s almost insulting. I’ve almost, almost, rescinded on my ideals and partaken of chicken just so that I don’t have to eat another salad or choke down another vegetarian pasta. I mean, there are literally thousands of different vegetarian meals that can be made. The other night I made a vegetarian ratatouille with pasta; is it too much to ask a master chef to make something similar, if not better? I cannot imagine what it would be like being a vegan: cutting egg, milk and other animal products entirely from my diet would in effect guarantee my starvation.
However, investigating what I could eat without betraying my new ideals has been interesting. A few pertinent questions have arisen: if I eat eggs, doesn’t that mean eating caviar is okay? (some sushi is quasi-vegetarian, but topped with caviar and mayo); and what about prawns? I mean, I gave up fish, but prawns aren’t exactly fish, are they? Sigh, categories and labels are such confusing things (does eating one prawn mean that I failed to stay the course? Oh well: that tempura was well worth it, if it does).
Anyway, I’m back in Rhodes as I add to this post, which has been sitting around partially edited for the last few days. It’s gonna be interesting to see what this next term brings. My first guess? Work: it isn’t even the first day of term yet and already I have several Word documents sitting on my desktop waiting to be finished by Friday… C’est la vie d’un étudiant, non?
My other guesses? Well, for the most part, two: firstly, I got a Kindle, so I'm probably gonna read a lot more than I used to; and secondly, I've been practising guitar a lot (played two gigs - open mic nights, really - in Cape Town) and so I think that George and I (George is another great guitarist at Rhodes, and he plays a style that really gels with mine) will make some serious music this term and in the others to follow. Working name? El Toro. The Bull.
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