SERVICES, SERVICE and SOME FOOD

(If you are here only for the food bits, skip to the end for a good tip.)

Cape Tonians are much like Londoners, in the sense that they love complaining about services. Have you heard Londoners go off when the Tube is three minutes away? As tourists, especially from South Africa, the London Underground never fails to amaze us – it runs, it is pretty much always on time and it is clean and mostly graffiti free.

Now listen to Cape Tonians discuss municipal services – they would have you believe that nothing works, ever!

As a recent immigrant (from Gauteng), I have to disagree. For example, we have a bin cleaning service at home – they come around every Friday between 10 and 11 AM, wash and disinfect the refuse bin. The only reason that this is possible is because the municipality comes round every Friday morning between 7 and 7:30 AM to empty the bins.

This service would not work in Pretoria, there you don’t know for sure which day your bin will be emptied, never mind what time! The norm there is also to mix up the bins as much as possible, probably in an effort to give homeowners some exercise walking the streets searching for their bin.

Don’t get me started on traffic lights, just listen to the Gauteng traffic reports in the morning and note how many traffic lights are still not working, often days on end. My experience in Cape Town has been different – I have never seen a traffic light out two days in a row, mostly on my outward journey, the one light (at most) that is not working is fixed by the time I return. This has happened within an hour, more than once.

We, I include myself here, complain about service in restaurants, we even warn out of town guests not to expect good service. Yes, sometimes it is slow and not up to the standard we’d like to expect, but is it any worse than anywhere else in the country? I think not, if we are led to have certain expectations, they will often be met – expect slow service, and it will seem slow. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Go with a positive attitude, order with a smile, relax, you are in Cape Town after all, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

To end on a foody note, we recently discovered Blue Wave Fisheries, Main Road, Wynberg. Absolutely the best take-away fish and chips we have ever tasted! Fresh Hake or Yellow Tail, battered and fried when you order (not pre-fried and sitting around waiting) with the best chips this side of England. I am not going to give away the prices as this may mean they run out and we can’t get any (self preservation).

Trust me, it is cheap and the portions are huge! (We normally share one portion between the two of us…)