St Patrick's Day at Cafe Blanca

So, as I approach the end of my three-week sojourn in Grahamstown (yeah, it was only ever meant to be three weeks. I'm eyeing you, Mr Danny “When-are-you-going-to-stop-being-such-a-hippie-at-Cow-Moon?” Day) I look back and realise that perhaps I've been a little too engrossed in work and similar comfort zone activites. I decided to take the opportunity on good old St. Paddy's Day to get out, have some fun and admire all the green booze that was suddenly emerging from nowhere.

My highlight of the evening was spending some time at a cocktail garden known as Cafe Blanca, a place on Grahamstown's High Street where my brother works as a bartender. It's a pretty nice place – the vibe is pretty chilled when compared with other establishments, and the patrons generally aren't all that raucous. Heck, even the bartenders are great: there's a lot of interaction with customers and they bring loads of personality to the place.

Some of the Cafe Blanca bartenders. Now with an extra ninja nosepick.

Overall, Blanca is a great establishment for when you want to sit down with a cocktail, talk to your friends and meet new people. And even if you're not into drinking all that much, they have a pretty respectable food menu – if you ever stop by town, ask for the R25 Gatsby sub. It's awesome.

Anyway. St Paddy's. On this particularly special night, the students came out with the full fury of green behind them. I'm not sure how many of them actually know about the main idea behind St Patrick's Day, but it's well-understood that it's a good excuse to get drunk and dress up in interesting ways.

Aftermath of the food colouring accident.

Aside from impersonating orcs and spinach vat victims, most of Blanca's patrons availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge in some St Paddy's specials: for example, a green “depth charge” that I've been duly informed has the punch of a shot with the liquid volume of a draught. Or something like that.

A depth charge. Also known as doom in a tumbler.

I didn't actually buy one of these. At least, not for myself. I wussed out with a hot chocolate and gave my drink to someone else after I'd snapped the photo.

Mmm, chocolate.

The Rhodes University rowing club

Since my first year at Rhodes University, I've been friends with a member of the rowing squad. He doesn't look as badass as one would suspect (he's actually less than seven feet tall), but by golly does he do some crazy stuff. Like all rowers, he had some sort of hectic diet and exercise regime, and there were times when he would get up before sunrise every day for a few weeks to train.

He even gave up drinking during the sport season. Amongst students, this sort of thing is rather unheard of.

Recently, another of my friends decided to take up rowing as well. And willingly, to boot. We're still trying to get him to check in with a psychologist, but in the meantime I've accompanied him on one or two rowing-related expeditions onto campus.

Yesterday evening, we went for some sort of ergo test thingie at the Rhodes University Rowing Club, a small hovel near the swimming pool and squash courts which served as a home to all sorts of burly, hairy-chested, beer-swilling rowing men and women.

WATCH YOUR BACK.

Well, okay, I've met some truly charming rowing ladies out there, but I still think that it made a wonderful picture. And besides, rowers are about the most macho objects in existence, second only to a distilled mixture of pure chest hair and man-sweat. Seriously, I could feel my beard growing the moment I stepped into the clubhouse – I was also overcome with an overpowering urge to constantly high-five people.

This is the chill zone, where you can pose and flex between exercises.

The Rhodes rowing club wasn't always this way. It apparently owes its success – and the dedication of its members – to one gentleman who single-handedly turned the rowing club from its old B-league ways into the pumped-up festival of madness and testosterone that one sees today. Whoever this guy was, he must have been some sort of demi-god: I've never seen any sportsmen exert themselves so hard or commit themselves so fully to a cause in the way that the Rhodes rowers do. I'm not quite sure whether to regard them with awe or concern.

Occasionally they have silly ideas. Like making rowboats out of concrete. Silly silly.

After about twenty minutes at the club, I decided to duck out and head to the local library to get some work done. The rowers are an interesting bunch, but there's only so much uber-manliness that a hardcore geek can take in one sitting.

Chinese drink things are weird-awesome

So, being entrenched as I am within the alternate crowd, I tend to stumble across some interesting things. For example, huge shipments of Eastern beverages. Eastern beverages which you can eat. Seriously, a bunch of cryptically-labelled cans consisting of part liquid and part glop arrived at the doors of Cow Moon Theory yesterday. I lent a hand in unloading some of the contents, and was introduced to the concept of making drinks that people could pretty much eat.

Trial by suspicious-looking psuedo-liquids.

Cow Moon's owner came across these concoctions while travelling about in Johannesburg's Chinatown and subsequently decided that it would be great to inflict them upon the humble residents of Grahamstown. We sat down with a few of these things after unpacking them and indulged in some experimental refreshment (a damn fine idea too, considering how hot it was).

It's actually amazing how incredibly different these drinks taste to our regular old Western stuff. I mean, it's not as if they took standard Squeez-O-Juice and threw in some generic chunks. They have a rather different flavour which I'm not used to with liquids in general, and the chunks are – for lack of a better word – meaningful. Even pretty, if you decide to opt for the awesome fruit juices.

This is either litchi or fish eggs. We're still trying to decide.

Suffice it to say, these drinks are really cool. You can get yourself some grass jelly or white pearl tea for R8 (made by a company called Chin Chin, which has rather blatantly stolen Coca Cola's text style). The fruit juice is a bit expensive (15 bucks a pop) but considering the brand-new taste experience, the ability to eat while you drink AND the fact that you can walk away with an awesome glass bottle, I think it's worth it. Also, it's fantastic to drink while watching anime.

I feel totally asian right now.

As a random little tidbit to end off this blog, I've recently been looking into travel options for a trip along the Garden Route to Cape Town. Stumbled across a service known as Baz Bus and I must admit that I'm rather intrigued. More on my plans a little later – I plan on sorting out the next leg of my trip within the week.

My culinary wizardry

I don't cook. It's just not something that I've ever really been into. I can make myself a toasted sandwich, a heat-up microwave meal or a boiled egg, but that's just about the extent of it.

Recently, I have become exposed to the art of making Real Food™, an endeavour which I was first introduced to when I sort-of-successfully helped some buddies make a killer lasagne. This trend continued while I was in Cape Town – I stayed with a couple of student friends who unbelievably managed to cook meals for themselves every single night. I've encountered some crazy things over the course of my blogging career, but this little factoid has probably astounded me the most.

Since arriving in Grahamstown, I've felt inspired to try this “cooking” thing for myself. The results have been ugly, but edible.

My first dish.

I've benefitted greatly from being able to use the fully-equipped kitchen at Cow Moon Theory to craft my crimes against nature. It wasn't too difficult to get permission to use it outside business hours – offering to cook food for people kinda falls into the same category as famous commentary like “Hey, can you look after my Xbox for a few days?” and “My wallet is way too heavy, would you like some of this money?”

In general, I'm striving to tear apart the good name that pasta meals have acquired over the ages – after all, they're cheap and easy to make. I do intend to diversify, however, and have already attempted bolder ventures such as chicken a la king.

The meal ended up turning into its less glorious cousin: chicken, rice and glop. Half eaten, of course.

What I've found is that cooking isn't as hard as the Internet makes it out to be. Seriously, shame on you Internet. You provide me with a lasagne recipe with about five billion ingredients when all it really takes is a wad of mince, a wad of pasta sheets and a packet of just-add-some-damn-water cheese sauce. I added a can of tomato onion mix and that was JUST BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE FANCY.

My tuna macaroni dish. Ingredient count: 4. Splurt of tomato sauce was number 4.

Cooking an adequate meal is surprisingly easy, even if the results aren't exactly pretty, and I think that simpler recipes need to be more broadly advertised so that neophytes like me can see that making food isn't so hard. Yes, my lasagne isn't nearly as good as the stuff that top chefs make, but it's a springboard into the Real Food™ world and hey, it's still pretty edible.

It's great to know that I can start with a bare bones pasta dish like this, for example, and then elaborate in the future with more interesting stuff like garlic, chicken livers and crystal meth. If only more Doritos-eating basement dwellers like me realised that this truly was the case.

OutRhodes party – rock around the clock!

I had a rather crazy night on Saturday – I was determined to live it up and actually go past midnight without spontaneously flopping onto a couch somewhere in narcoleptic fury. By the power of Facebook and my continued attachment to the student newswire, I was alerted to the existence of gay-bashing at Rhodes. And by “gay-bash” I do, of course, mean a huge party hosted by OutRhodes, a local LGBT support/activism/rights/party-throwing group. Oh, how witty and misleading I can be, dear reader!

I've always considered Grahamstown to be rather intent on their crusade to support all sexual paradigms when compared to other locations in South Africa – the community has a broad and rather passionate group of supporters, and although I consider some of their actions to be rather heavy-handed at times, I can't help but admire their ability to tirelessly crusade for a cause and still throw awesome parties at the same time. Especially when they feature free drinks and pizza.

Oh, and an awesome dress theme.

Yes, that's a Guitar Hero controller. You trying to say something?

The “Rock around the clock” theme of the party allowed me to dress up as pretty much anything, so basically getting some rags of clothing together and giving peace symbols once in a while allowed me to pass as some hipster rip-off. I was originally going for David Bowie as he appears in Labyrinth, but I couldn't quite fit into my pair of Goblin King tights.

Also: hair.

Unfortunately, I feel that the venue didn't quite do justice to the size of the party, and I didn't stay for terribly long. I'd also decided not to bring my camera along (shallow pockets and a raucous dancefloor were asking for trouble in my opinion), and am still trying in vain to source some pictures of the event for your viewing pleasure. I'll try update later when I have something.

After OutRhodes, I spent the evening bouncing around Slipstream Sports Bar, a friend's digs and Cow Moon Theory. Long story short, I got to sleep at about 8am. Funnily enough, my last three hours were thrown into an intense bout of game development. I guess that's what happens when geeks party too hard.

Speaking of which, I have Xbox Live for another month. Yay me!

Well, sorta yay. If I drop off this blog for a few weeks, you'll at least have an explanation for my absence.