SHOPPING IS QUITE AH ADVENTURE IN SUNNY CAPETOWN

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVI, Issue 14618, 11 March 1948, Page 4

SHOPPING IS QUITE AH ADVENTURE IN SUNNY CAPETOWN

City’s Fascination For

The Newcomer

Comfortable Clothes To

Suit Season „

“Fashions are not considered very much here —all the women seem to wear the most comfortable clothes to suit each season,” writes Miss Irene Spidy (a former Wellington girl) from Cape Town. “Coming from New Zealand I felt conspicuous with my off-the-face hat and high heeled shoes. Very few hats are ever worn even at the popular sundowner parties. Balls and dances are where the South African girls shine—their gowns are beautiful, of¥-the-shoulder, white, full-skirted dance frocks, looking so lovely against the girls’ sunburned golden skin.” Miss Spidy and her mother, Mrs E. T. Spidy, left last year to make their home in South Africa, and though they have been there but a short time they find many things that fascinate and interest them. Jotting down a few impressions, Miss Spidy writes: — “When shopping, travelling on buses, trams, or by train one is treated with the greatest courtesy and generally made to feel at home. Shopping is quite an adventure, the stores are full of the most wonderful goods and the summer sales are now on. They are sales in the real sense of the word, with frocks reduced from £6 and £7 to 39s 6d and 455. Commercial Life Slow

“But there are many obsolete methods employed still and from observation I would say there has been very little progress in the commercial life of the city for some years. When buying meat, for instance, you first select the roast and collect a ticket from the butcher (Slagters as they are called), then take the ticket to the cash counter and pay for the purchase, go back again to the butcher, hand him the ticket, and wait while he wraps the meat in a parcel. It is a slow process and applies to quite a number of the stores—irritating at first, but, like so many other things, one gets used to it.

“Newspaper advertisements are always intriguing to the newcomer. Quite a business is done with the natives with ‘anti-curl’ hair advertisements —it is the ambition of their lives to get the tight woolly curls smooth and slick. And it is one of my ambitions to find a good hairdresser. Salons are few and far between and very expensive. The hair styles are not at all as modern as I expected, most girls wearing the hair* fairly short or Edwardian for coolness’s sake.

“The South African speaks English with a rather curious, singsong lilt, ending every sentence with an upward inflection. It is very musical to listen to and it is difficult not to mimic them. Afrikaans is spoken more in the Cape than in any other. part of South Africa. Positions are advertised for, say, shorthand-typists to be .bi-lingual, hut there is plenty of employment offered whore this is net needed. Afrikaans is hardly a language on its own, as it is a combination of German and Dutch.

Notices Printed in Afrik^a^s

Public notice: arc printed in Afrikaans and sometimes in English but they are usually quite understandable to the stranger. For example, two telephone booths side by side in the railway station are printed thus ‘Public Telephone’ and ‘Publik Telephoon,’ ‘No Smoking’ is ‘Nie Rook Nie.’ ‘No Parking’ is ‘Geen Staanplek,’ and so on. Seats in the gardens and railway stations are printed ‘Eurpens only’ on one end and ‘Slegs vir Blankes’ on the other. Words like Pnskantoor (Post Office), Stasie, Straat, and Weg, station and streets are easy,'too, but I was really fooled when I read ‘Kamer vir Dames’ (Indies’ Rest Room)! “This is truly a wonderful city, spread out at the foot of Table Mountain which towers over and seems to shelter the city. The mnutain often has a ‘tablecloth’ of rolling white clouds cascading like a waterfull and forecasting the windy sou’-easter. known as the ‘Cape Drctor,’ which blows and blows and keens the streets free from disease. It is so strong a gale at times that notices are put on shop doors reading, ‘Owing to wind this door is closed. Please go round to the other side.’ Fortunately these 'winds only last frr three days and then it turns very hot and temperatures ranging from 80-degrees to 98 degrees follow, and you long for the wind again.”