Parkwood

Last night was a quiet evening in so nothing exciting to report I'm afraid. I was able to take a couple of pictures at sunset of the view from our front balcony of the Parkwood estate:





How do I describe Parkwood?! It's one of a group of coloured towns in the Cape Flats to the south of the city. The area is obviously very poor, and as a result many of the houses are in a dilapidated state. At the front of the house is a green which is very dirty and often fires are started here to burn rubbish:



There is often music being heard and a general sense of a buzzing community, with the Bagleys knowing many people in the area.

One of the most noticeable things for me is the fact that people are always on the streets. It's very different to England. Children play, adults sit on the kerbs talking and youths gather in groups by buildings. At home, we associate a group hanging around on a street corner as indicating trouble, but here it is very normal and it takes some getting used to.

When we have evenings in, the house is filled with the music from the biggest TV soap here, 7 de Laan (7th Avenue as my South African friend Stefan tells me). It's on every day and it's quite infectious...I have now started to whistle the theme tune as I walk along the streets. To make matters worse, they have an omnibus on Sundays like we do with Eastenders. It's in Afrikaans so sounds quite Germanic, but it is subtitled in English so we can keep up.

I'm starting to sleep through the 5am call to pray at the mosque and rather quirkily a man trains and exercises a show horse on the green outside the house every evening:



How random! Here's the Bagley's two German shepherds:



I don't know their names yet and they look mean but they are really very soppy. They always make me giggle because they follow me every morning on my way across the yard to the front gate but don't start barking at me until I've left, shut the gate and started walking down the road!