The Friendly City – wine, women and calm

I can’t get over seeing amaXhosa do manual labour; I just cannot get over it. To the Sumo, a boitjie born and bred in the lush bosom of the KwaZulu-Natal’s North Coast and exposure to amaXhosa strictly limited to what I saw on TV (Government officials and celebrity personalities) and heard (through the folklore which makes villains of all Xhosa people with woman being branded man-stealers and the men as aloof know-it-alls) to see umXhosa with a pick, banging away on the tarred road seemed a bit ludicrous to me, but that’s just a function of my being the anti-traveller coupled with ignorance, that’s all.

It’s not like they would ship in truck loads of Zulu’s every time a ditch needed digging, now would they? That would be insane.

Plus I had just never seen such a high volume of amaXhosa in one place. I mean, maybe I could’ve attended boxing matches at the men’s hostels in Durban. Maybe there I would have run into a collective of maybe five or six of these fascinating people enjoying what was their favourite sport for a while, but I just could never reconcile “a good time out” and watching someone use his face as the last line of defense against a barrage of blows brutally, though sportingly launched their way in front of a crowd that actually won’t intervene to stop the madness and the impending brain damage, but will rather cheer this madness on and even bet on it.

Let us just put it out there that a fight in some Town Hall eGcuwa is just that – a fight – whether there is a paying crowd in attendance makes no difference. Mayweather versus De La Hoya in Las Vegas, on the other hand, is a boxing match. It’s poetry and, that my friend, I shall awake at 3am for on any day.

But that’s just me. Maybe I’m just soft; not acquainted with the humble brutality of man against man in mortal combat – in some remote and sad cases. And don’t get me wrong, this is not a tirade against amaXhosa or Xhosadom. I love amaXhosa people. In fact, when I was a lightie my best friend was umXhosa. His name was Zolani and I even spoke that deep farm isiXhosa that he taught me. And I especially love their woman and I can see why all the other clan groups’ women would jealously accuse these obliging, robust creatures of being cunning man-thieves.

Yesterday, I had the sexiest check-in experience I have ever had. This event took place at the Summerstrand City Lodge. Actually, I doubt any other woman, besides a umXhosa woman, could give me such a completely euphoric check-in short of them stripping the Sumo naked right there and doing her dirty business with me after having body-slammed me on top of the check-in counter and straddling me, grinding away screaming “giddy-‘up!”

The woman who provided this steamy sequence of events was actually not even trying. I doubt that she even had the vaguest realization of the effect she was having on the otherwise always collected and always focused Sumo. Maybe the drooping of my eyes, the drool from lips and the disturbing, though subtle rhythmic thumping of the counter front that was coming from my side would have alerted her to my disposition and I swear, if she had asked me to hand over my personal credit card for her exclusive use at that moment, I would have handed it over willingly in my Zombie state and probably all my cash and even the loose change in my pocket. Heck, I would have signed over my left kidney for her to harvest from me at her discretion.

And I would imagine that involuntary gyrations of my lower body should have alerted her to the facts, which I guess she chose to ignore or maybe, in her professionalism, she processed me quickly and let me get on my sordid way, to sort out my internal issues in the privacy of my suite if that is what it would have to come down to.

The thing is she is not even my type, but she oozed intense sexual energy — at least I thought. She was a healthily proportioned lady with a pretty face, but what got me was a combination of her soothing, melodic, silky voice and the language she was speaking in which is the native isiXhosa. She spoke it to me throughout our interaction and the collective was the catch. She had me at “Molo, Bhut’ wam” (an endearing greeting if delivered just right) and I was like “… eish …’ and I swear, if our interaction had gone on for a couple more minutes, I would have wrapped it up right there at the front desk in front of the customers who would have become shocked onlookers and maybe even innocent casualties.

But, enough of the sordidness. My point here is that I love this city, Port Elizabeth, and I had plenty of reservations before setting foot here. I was worried about what I would find and how people would react to me. I must say that I have been very pleasantly surprised. This truly is The Friendly City and I shall tell you why.

I’m an explorer of sorts, in my own special, do-as-little-as-possible way. I like to experience new things and ways of life, courtship rituals of the different cities being right up there in the things I like to experience. Therefore I experiment and see what is possible and how difficult it is for one to get “theirs” so to speak, but of course, all of this is for purely for research and scientific purposes, therefore I never follow through right to the … hmm … culmination of matters.

I will spare you the sordid details, but I have concluded, from my research, that there are many ways to describe the mating rituals in Port Elizabeth in general. This is a generalisation based on the sample I experimented on, which involved some young professionals, but mostly was made up of University students. What I found is that “difficult” is not one of the infinite descriptors one would employ to explain the process of getting one’s leg over in this city and lets just leave it at that.

I love beer — the golden nectar of the gods, the liquid gold, the way the amber fluid that spews forth magically from mystery taps at pubs the world over. My love for this stuff is very well documented, but “love for” is not a manner to describe how people in this place consume alcohol and no one can justify the individual volumes I observed being consumed. The more fitting descriptor is “live for” as opposed to the Sumo’s “love for”.

You wonder how I have come to this conclusion. Well, I have been here four days, asked questions and experienced it for myself, and people “live” to drink here … most of the people I met anyway, which may say more about the company I have chosen to keep as maybe opposed to the reality, I guess.

Maybe it is just me, but ordering a beer and a double whiskey every round is not normal. It is unacceptable and it is offensive to your liver, both the institutions of the golden nectar, and also the painstakingly slowly matured whiskey. In my humble opinion, there is no way to justify why you need to get that drunk that quickly, men and woman alike.

Exactly what is it that is so wrong with this place that you need to get so far away from and at a pace only matched by Cheetahs and maybe the rampaging David “Mvula” Radebe as he destroys his former employers, the once mighty Chiefs?! This is a beautiful place, man, and David has beautiful pace, as the glamour girls came to find out last Sunday!

But I don’t blame the locals and partisans of this party scene. When one club has a special each week on Wednesday of a cover charge of R20 and then all beers and ciders are R8 for the rest of the night, it would be difficult not to go on a weekly, midweek binge of scary proportions, one which results in a two-day long hangover which chills with you as you slowly go about your day, never hurried, in the true spirit of PE.

I guess this also links back to the accommodating nature of the fairer sex in this town. You do not have to say or do much, I heard, except for purchasing a few dozen beer and whiskey combos and offering gripping conversation with frequent compliments on the general aesthetic pleasantness of the female in question.

I must say though that the dancing was particularly bad, I have never seen such a large collection of left-footed people in mine life. The deejay was equally atrocious, though I was the only person who seemed to think this way. The selector played tracks that are at least like seven seasons old and the moves on the dance floor by the patrons are at least three years behind Durban, the capital of dance in South Africa and the most progressive party scene.

Let me just put this out there – ballroom dancing at the club is just wrong, do not cha-cha at the club, and where do you learn to do those moves at twenty years old? Were you born cha-charing?

Apart from that, there are other things that make this place an absolute dream though. The roads are always open — except for a ten minute peak hour spike in traffic, which means that you are still moving at a pace above 90km/h on the freeway. When compared to Jo’burg’s 10km/h on similar roads, you learn to appreciate this place even more.

The surf is excellent too, the water is clean and the beaches are well kept and look safe from the short distance away out of my window at the lodge. I never ventured down to the beach. Unfortunately didn’t have the time or the inclination. There were much more interesting sites to see inside the eateries and drinking holes which mushroom around the beach front.

I love PE. I wish I could stay the weekend and the friends that I have made in my short stay here wish that I could stay the weekend too. But unfortunately I have to return home. Yes, home, my new home, in one of Johannesburg’s more opulent though rather scantily leafy suburbs.

I am going back to a place where traffic is horrendous, the beer expensive and the woman — driving very fast imported motor vehicles and clad in the latest in Prada, Gucci and on heels with names that are as expensive to announce as to purchase. This is a generally unwelcoming backdrop, with very high property prices.

This is the place I now call home; a yet to be furnished place with no curtains or chairs; a lonely place which I shall tell you all about in my next piece as David Attenborough observes the lesser spotted Sumo go about a transition from coast to mining dump.

I love PE. I will be coming back before December and I love amaXhosa.

I rest,

The Sumo