the adlards

The Maj, that bastion of underage drinking back in the days when bars were bars and women weren’t allowed in, is now the Majestic Boutique Hotel. Until yesterday I’d not come across a boutique hotel that had the foresight to use the word in naming their establishment. It would probably help their Google ranking were they not situated 9,000 miles from the east London in which people might search for boutique hotels.

We loaded up clothes, kids and Christmas last Monday night and drove the twelve and a half hours to East London by way of a bouncy castle in Mossel Bay and the inevitable string of roadside facilities. When you pass the big sign saying “Welcome to Buffalo City” you can be in no doubt that you’ve reached the frontier lands of the Wild East. It’s a very different head space.

Since then we’ve been enjoying days starting at 5.20 as for some thus-far-unfathomable reason that’s when the girls wake up in East London and – as ever – if the girls are up then so am I. Well no, not really, but it was a good line.

We visited a new antique shop today and spent a couple of hours sifting through their stuff. As we turned to go Michelle saw a 6’x4′ enamel sign that had hung outside her grandfather’s trading station in the old Transkei. We knew because it had his name on it. Small (part of the) world.

We might just be passing through this place that seems so completely foreign, but we have history here. Well, unless the Maj really is a boutique hotel; then I got nuffink.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 9:11 pm by james and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.