A little challenge for you When was the last time you looked at your national flag? Have you ever tried to draw it? From memory? And without looking it up on Google? Go on, give it a try. Grab some colourful crayons or pencils, a piece of paper, and draw what you can remember. The…
Paul, the Octopus Oracle (otherwise fondly referred to as the Okrakel) got his latest prediction correct. The semi-final last night between Germany and Spain (match report in the Guardian), played at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, got off to a slow start, with a disappointingly lacklustre performance by Germany. For the entire first half,…
When I arrived at the magnificent and historic Castle of Good Hope in central Cape Town early on Friday evening there was a serious party happening at the FIFA Fan Fest on the Grand Parade, in front of our beautiful City Hall. The music was thumping, the bands were whipping the crowds into a frenzy,…
Oh my, what a whirlwind weekend this has been! It passed in a blur of World Cup football with all four quarter-finals jam-packed into two days, a social function at the Castle of Good Hope to meet some of the people involved behind the scenes of the Cape Military Tattoo, a quest for the perfect…
Shortly after lunchtime on Saturday, we picked up our friends from their guesthouse in Milnerton, and raced into town. Our plan was to join our visitors on the Fan Walk, taking in the sights and sounds of the pre-match excitement, before returning to our car and haring it up to Mom’s to watch the actual…
Quarter-final 1: Brazil / The Netherlands Soccer fever started on Friday afternoon at 16h00, with a fast-paced match between Brazil and the Netherlands at the Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in Port Elizabeth. It had us on the edge of our seats (see Match Report in the Guardian). After the Brazilians scored a goal in the…
Yesterday’s match between Bafana Bafana and France, held at the Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein was the most nailbiting of the entire World Cup so far – for me, anyway, but I think also for the entire nation. During the course of Monday and Tuesday, I became aware of a buzz in the air, a…
I am reeling from shock. What an awful ending to a match that started with such anticipation and patriotic fervour. With mounting excitement, we had been looking forward to tonight’s [last night’s] 20h30 match between Bafana Bafana and Uruguay at the Loftus Versfeld Stadium all day. When we witnessed Switzerland’s surprise 1-0 defeat of Spain,…
In the run-up to the start of the 2010 Soccer World Cup last week, a great deal of attention has been focused on a colourful plastic trumpet that emits a B-flat drone, which resembles, variously, the sound of a furiously trumpeting herd of elephants, the buzzing of thousands of angry bees, or the approach of…
What do “IWorld Cup ifikile” and “Ndithanda isoka” have in common? They are both Xhosa phrases, and they are both particularly useful for the Soccer World Cup taking place in South Africa at the moment! (Their meanings are revealed below… so read on…) A couple of years ago, we attended an introductory Xhosa language course…
This is a recipe for a really simple, straightforward, no-muss no-fuss, chocolate cake with some chunks of dark chocolate tossed into the mix. The amounts used aren’t prescriptive, as I used Granny’s old method of “Backen nach Schnauze”. This basically means that you adjust the ingredients as you go, depending on the water content or…
Finally, after waiting in the Visitor Centre for a while, 12h00 came around. Clutching our little ticket stubs (they had run out of the wristbands they’d been using so far – Darn! I wanted one of those!), we joined the large and excited crowd that pushed and shoved its way through the narrow gate. We…
Last Saturday morning (15 May) dawned bright and beautiful. I had heard somewhere that the Visitor Centre at the Green Point Stadium – sorry, that should be the Cape Town Stadium, which is its official name – was running its last series of tours, at 10h00, 12h00 and 14h00 that day. The next week, the…
This is a pretty awesome aerial photo of Cape Town and the new stadium for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, currently still under construction at Green Point. The Visitors Centre at the stadium (with a capacity of 70,000 people) has been offering various guided tours of the stadium. The main one is the Soccer Magic…
Grains of Sand 
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