Back home. Things feel different here. All those people that say Cape Town doesn't really feel like its in Africa? They were right. Its windier, for one thing.
I don't know how I feel about Cape Town. While I was in Malawi, I found supermarkets a fairly manageable experience. They were a little dirty, the shelves were badly stacked, the fluorescent lighting might flicker a bit, and the butcheries were often straight-up disgusting. But they were more like large shops, with lots of stuff in them, than the supermarkets we know so well. This keeps running around in my head-and when I go into the (ludicrously) well stocked, cavernous, brightly lit, air conditioned and totally disorienting supermarkets of white suburbia it feels even more pertinent. The range of products here seems ridiculous, compared to the choice I had only a little while ago, in a poorer country. (Maybe the strange thing here is that I feel so distant from these things after only two months away. )
Who needs seventeen different types of baked beans? Who needs a variety of fucking shampoos? I'm not saying a bit of choice isn't good. I like my coffee dark, roasty and wholesome, and maybe you don't. But the sheer scale of choices seems absurd. There are enough fucking things I have to decide every day, without having to choose between three or four types of salt!
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