South Africa: Happy birthday toooo meeeee

I was woken up on the morning of my 27th birthday by the disgusting sound of a hacking cough coming from the strange German girl in the bunk above mine. There were 6 other unknown strangers snoozing in the room.

Shanaaz said she'd be here by 10am so naturally I expected her to arrive around midday, so after a quick breakfast in the shady courtyard of the hostel I set off for a wander. Walking down Long Street on a Sunday morning really epotomises the 'morning after the night before' feeling, with the smell of alcohol and urine everywhere and people doing walks of shame round every corner, lovely! We drove down to Boulders beach down towards Cape Point where you get African penguins on the beach, I just had to see that. It's so strange to see these creatures on a beach when I've always imagined them knee deep in snow and ice. Actually do penguins have knees? Anyway.

Then we went to Shanaaz's parents house for Sunday lunch, and not only was the food awesome and her mum a legend for singing two versus of Happy Birthday (original and monkey) but it was really nice to be surrounded by the noise and chaos of family life, even if it wasn't my own. We had to leave shortly after dinner as we had planned to go up Table Mountain for sunset. I really wanted to hike but there just wasn't enough time so we got the cable car. I feel I should pause here and have a mini rant about the sheer number of annoying Americans in the world - how can they be so universally irritating? And HOW do they always manage to find me?! We were in the queue just ahead of a group of American sorority type girls in big jewelery and long gowns - yeah, to go up a mountain... And all we could here was the nasal, whiney, 'like, oh my god you guys, thats like, totally awesome, really cool, oh my gawwwwd', it felt like the longest queue in the world. It was about 10 minutes.

Anyway rant over, so we got to the top and found ourselves a good spot to watch the sunset, and boy was it worth it - beautiful.

Quality birthday, fact.