The Introduction

Cape Town introduced itself with the grandest of gestures. When the captain (blessedly) interrupted my half-hearted attempt at watching the recent Three Musketeers with the announcement that we would be landing in around 30 minutes, I gingerly pushed up the plane's window a couple of inches. Bright light instantly streamed through, temporarily sending my bleary, sleep-deprived eyes into a few seconds of blindness. I squinted and rubbed my eyes. The French guy next to me took the opportunity to open the window more, glance outside, and then turned to me with a grin. "Magnifique!"

I turned back to the window, and then I saw what all the fuss was about. As if out of nowhere, the city's iconic Table Mountain seemed to rush toward us against a backdrop of luminous, robin's-egg-blue sky. The only clouds were a blanket of those rapidly running off the mountain's flat top. I had learned that this cloud cover was referred to affectionately as the "tablecloth" by locals, and now I could see why. Beaches were covered with sand so white it looked like the snow that I had left back in Chicago 36 hours earlier. This was all complemented by the sprawling assortment of white colonial-style buildings that comprised the city's center, interspersed with the lush green of vast tropical forests and grassy hills. To the south the cobalt blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean intermingled with the teal waves of the Indian.

Jake, the curly-haired kid on my program seated in front of me, stuck his head between the seats. He smiled like a little kid. "That's...amazing."

I laughed. "Haha, yep," I replied.

Magnifique, indeed.