Another terrific adventure

It’s Monday, so it must be Birds of Eden. But first, the news: yesterday, Laird read a headline in the paper that said “Make homemade condensed milk in shell jewelry”. We were quite confused all day long. First off, why would someone want to make any kind of anything in shell jewelry???? Anyway, it wasn’t until I was looking at the paper last night that I saw that Laird had mistaken “and” for “in”. How, I don’t know, but it cleared up a lot for me. I don’t think we saw anything in the paper today, but if so, I’ll report tomorrow.
Before the adventuring, let me tell you about the beautiful BLACK, very black bunnies all over the resort — they are quite cheerful making.
Breakfast at Mugg and Bean, which isn’t my first choice of place to go but at least they have good coffee and a terrific breakfast bowl (that isn’t served in a bowl) that is quinoa, spinach, tomatoes and poached eggs. It’s served with a terrible hollandaise sauce so after the first time I learned to order it without. Then on the road to Birds of Eden. Kind of ugly day, overcast, sometimes chilly, sometimes not, like it wants to rain — which would be fantastic, of course, but it hasn’t so far. At Birds we saw my favorite bird, a Knyesna lourie (pronounced NICE-nah instead of what I want to say, which is Ness-nah). It starts out at the top sort of a grass green then moving down gets darker and darker green until it becomes a deep navy blue. When it flies, it flashes the most startling scarlet red on its underwings. See if you can google it to see what it looks like. Oh, they also have “eye make-up, white around the red circle around their eyes. We saw lots of them, but at one point there was one right in front of us and as we stayed still and I had my hand on the post, he walked up to me, then up my arm and onto my shoulder so he could peck so gently on my ear! Reminded me of the lorikets at the casino near Joburg that swarm you and want to eat the earwax out of your ears (a very weird feeling, let me tell you!). He hopped down, hung around some more and then hopped up on my shoulder again. I was thrilled, of course! Speaking of scarlet, Birds of Eden also have lots and lots of scarlet ibis, also quite beautiful. But a pinker scarlet than the lourie underwing. We also saw blue dikker, a very, very small buck. I can’t remember what is bigger, a dikker or a dikdik, also a small buck. I’ll get back to you on that. I got my first order of boboutie at the restaurant there — one of my favorite South African dishes.
Noekie, please tell Loret I wore a pair of my WONDERFUL pants she made for me and I felt SO TERRIFIC. I wore the circle ones. I’m going to try to figure out how to spell the African fabric that they are made of: phonetically it’s something like schway-schway. It might be spelled something like Tswai-tswai, but so far I haven’t asked anyone who knows how it is spelled. It’s a waxed cotton that loses its wax in the first washing unfortunately, though it does make it a far more flexible fabric than when you buy. But, oh, those amazing African patterns in shiny wax — so fantastic! First wash must be in cold salt water to set the color. Why they don’t do that when they make the fabric and before they wax it is beyond me, but there you are: they don’t. Daniel and Sandy, you would go nuts at the colors and the patterns! The store Loret took us to has shelves and shelves of the stuff, sorted by color: reds, oranges, blues, turquoises, greens, yellows, purples, pinks, browns, on and on, in regular patterns like polka dots and then the craziest patterns you can imagine. Some of them are like being on an acid trip in the ’60s! I wanted to buy out the store, of course. Loret and Helmien made me TWO pairs of bell bottom pants — I can’t wait to wear them to the capitol! Thank you, thank you, thank you to both of them.
So I guess that’s all the news I have. Hippiely yours, jm