“Let’s meet in Cape Town!”, we promised, with a wink, when we saw Andy and Tammy before this cruise began. We live in the same hometown, and met when they were the Cruise Director and Assistant Cruise Director on our long Insignia voyage. While we’ve been on Marina, they were back on Insignia, and our ships were scheduled to overlap in Cape Town for just one night so that we could, from two different cruise ships, coming from opposite directions, possibly meet simultaneously at the same place. Kind of a perfect storm. We were intrigued by that coincidence, and thought how chic it would be to meet up half way around the world.
And we did! Some of our new friends and fellow passengers from Marina, and some passengers from Insignia, including Andy and Tammy, met for our last dinner in Cape Town, at a fun, funky, colorful Ethiopian restaurant called “Addis in Cape” in the heart of the city. The restaurant is a favorite of Don and Suzy, the husband and wife staff lecturers who were shifting from Marina to Insignia, and the key organizers behind this serendipitous gathering of eighteen friends and travelers.
I read a novel called “Cutting for Stone”, that had many interesting layers, including descriptions of the protagonist’s upbringing in Ethiopia and Eritrea, in the horn of Africa, with great emphasis on the indigenous food. Ethiopians do not use utensils from which to eat, rather, they scoop their food with a pancake type of “bread” called injera, which is their national dish, and greatly endeared to its native people as the ultimate comfort food that reminds them of their homeland. Injera is actually a sourdough-risen flatbread, with a slightly spongy texture, made from a gluten-free flour called teff.
So, after a bit of a learning curve, we all got the hang of it, scooping up the variety of tasty, traditional meat and vegetable stew-like dishes with our injera. Delicious and SO much fun! And here we all were…together in Cape Town, once again proving that the more I see of the world, the smaller it seems to become.
