Cape Town: The Castle of Good Hope

Exactly one week from today, we will leave Cape Town.  We're going to Mossel Bay for 6 weeks for Aaron to finish up his analysis ... and then home!

I'm gonna wax poetic about Cape Town next week.  But first, I wanted to share one of our favorite places here in the Mother City:  The Castle of Good Hope 

 

I don't even wanna tell you how long I've been sitting on these pictures.  It's embarrassing.  What can I say?  Aaron and I went one weekend, I snapped some pictures with my little camera ... and then I just kinda forgot about them.  Which is crazy!  Because some of these are among my favorite pictures I've taken here in SA!

Ah well, better late than never, right?  This first pic is seriously one of my favorites of the past 15 months; it is a laughing lion at the front of the Castle:

Here's the Castle itself, the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, built between 1666 and 1679 by the Dutch East India Company:

The inner courtyard is really gorgeous.  You see Table Mountain in the background and it houses several museums, a cafe, etc.  We went into 2 of the museums, one of antiques and fine art and one a military museum.  No pictures inside -- sorry -- but they were quite interesting.

It also plays host to historic reenactments.  The day we went there was a guy shooting authentic cannons:

POOF.  BANG.  WOW.

We then took a tour of the premises.  There was a beautiful pool that had at one point been built over ... what a shame, it's really beautiful:

But my absolute favorite aspect of the whole Castle experience was the graffiti carved into the doors of the old prison:

Eerie, but captured in the wood and the golden light of the afternoon, beautiful.  And an intimate, tactile reminder of this beautiful city's dark past.