Morning Cityscape

by Mandy Schreiber

What a great way to start the day! A group of us went to the Park Inn Greenmarket Square Hotel for breakfast and a look around this morning. It’s a comfortable and friendly hotel right at the heart of Cape Town’s CBD and boasts awesome views of the cityscape. Cape Town really is a unique and unusual city. The colonial (Dutch and British) hangover which is most apparent in Cape Town and surrounding towns and villages really gives our African city a European flavour. I was saying to my colleagues this morning, as we admired the view from the seventh floor, that Cape Town really doesn’t take advantage of the “top storey views”! Besides a few years in London, I have lived in Cape Town all my life and panoramic views such as this one are really hard to come by. It is a shame because our birds eye observation of Greenmarket Square waking up, the clouds spilling over Table Mountain, the bright colours of the Bo-Kaap houses contrasting with the intricate details of the colonial buildings was brilliant.

I suppose we also get so tied up in our daily routines and city life gets so busy that we forget to explore the urban beauty that surrounds us on a daily basis. Perhaps the lesson is to simply endeavour to seek a different view as often as possible. A new perspective on something familiar can never be a bad thing!

So while the Park Inn Greenmarket is not quite the Table Bay hotel, it certainly gives the Cape Town visitor the opportunity to be right in the throng of things and is built on one of the cities most renowned sites. There are great places to have coffee while buskers from all over Africa appear around every corner and the cobbled streets are lined with the culturally diverse people of Cape Town.

This is a picture of Greenmarket Square by Johannes Rach in 1764 (borrowed from the iZiko Museum Website). The building was then the "New" Town House and was the first double stroey building in Cape Town. You can see this picture and other historical pictures at the iZiko Town House Museum (just opposite Park Inn) , now ironically called the “Old Town House”.

2007/05/30 | permalink |

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Morning Cityscape

by Mandy Schreiber

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