Cape Town

I am in Cape Town at the moment with little time to write but lots to say. The city is beautiful and Gill, my host, has been great.
I arrived from Mauritius a few days ago. Before I go on about South Africa and my limited impressions, I wanted to make a few comments on Mauritius. Let's see if I remember them.
I had dinner with Chrystel and a couple of others on my last night there. I had a little trouble with the Mauritius accent: if I didn't try to listen, I couldn't get half of what they said. This is a country that hasn't been part of France for almost two hundred years, but still decided to hold on to their French. Even though England owned the island before independence, most people speak French before English. And yet the laws are written in English. All but the Napoleonic Code.
Chrystel's mother, affectionately called Pitchounette, told me they call the island the rainbow island, because of all the races. The French Mauritians, the Indians, the Creoles, the Muslims and the other whites, which include the English and the tourists, are the colours of the rainbow, and as Pitchounette put it, they don't mix. An Indian will not marry a French Mauritian. Now apparently, on nearby Reunion, which remained under French control and enjoyed all the aid this entails, the races have mixed.
I went to a village not far from my hotel, and it reminded me a lot of India. Yes, there were Indians, and many of them, but the Indians there aren't typically Indian: they wear shorts, skirts, t-shirts, etc. No, that's not what reminded me of India. Instead it was the architecture, or the lack of. Houses are made of concrete. Concrete decays badly, paint doesn't seem to stick, the slabs stoop, the windows aren't straight, and the buildings feel cheap.
We use concrete everywhere, but not as in these houses: there, concrete makes up the whole house, and it's not poured well.
I said people speak French in Mauritius. It's not the only language they speak. Add Hindi, English and Creole and you get a better idea of the cocktails of cultures there. Creole seems like a simpler version of French with a few English words. Here's an example:
Nou Pays, Nou Labiere
That's the slogan of the national beer. In French, it would be: "Notre Pays, Notre Biere." In English the slogan translates to: "Us Country, Us A-beer" to mean "Our Country, Our Beer."
Creole doesn't seem to have articles. No "the", "a", etc.