South Africa’s National Women’s Day

Yesterday, August 9th, was South Africa’s National Women’s Day. National Women's Day is an annual holiday that commemorates the national march of women on this day in 1956 to petition against legislation that required African persons to carry the "pass”, special identification documents which limited an African's freedom of movement during the apartheid era. So in order to join in the celebration, my roommate Gabi and I went out for a full day to explore the downtown area of Cape Town.

Our day started at 6am as we had to be at a downtown theatre by 8am, in line to get tickets for a play entitled Waiting for Godot. The play starred Ian McKellan who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since both us are big fans of his, this play was certainly high on our priority list. We arrived at the theatre 10 minutes early, but the taxi driver obviously had other things to do and let us out in the rain to wait. To pass the time before the theatre opened, we decided to find a place for coffee. Obviously we passed a little too much time because when we got back to the theatre it was 9am, but luckily we got the last two tickets (by a matter of 2 seconds). We found out that the play started at 7:30pm which of course meant we had the whole day downtown.

Gabi and I walked to the Alfred and Victoria waterfront area which is located in a very tourist friendly area of Cape Town. Some of the local attractions included: a Ferris wheel (titled “The Wheel of Excellence”), lots of shopping (the mall was comparable to, if not better than, South Park Mall in Charlotte, NC), movie cinema, live entertainment, restaurants, breweries, World Cup stadium, and much more. We ended up spending the day here—eating, shopping, drinking coffee, watching men parade around in dresses (in honor of Women’s Day), seeing Shrek 4 in 3-D, enjoying the many rainbows in the Cape Town sky (weather changes rapidly and there were many short rainstorms—thus lots of rainbows), and listening to live entertainment.
We made it back to the Fugard Theatre by 6:30pm where we thoroughly enjoyed the play Waiting for Godot. During the play I got a thought in my head that I couldn’t shake out—I had to meet Ian McKellan, somehow, someway. During intermission I told Gabi that we HAVE to meet him no matter what after the play. After seeing how determined I was, Gabi agreed and we waited 45 minutes after the play in the lobby. I had to see “Gandalf” and indeed I did (see picture). After the show we returned home at 11:30pm. Gabi and I had the best Women’s Day ever!