The SAMA Awards

Our latest adventure was a short trip up to Sun City, a huge and elaborate casino and vacation club, two hours north of Johannesburg. Terry and I drove up to lend our support to Ange and Eleni at the South African Music Awards. Ange is in the music business here and his artist, Etienne Steyn (a very good Afrikaans musician, go buy his CD) had been nominated for the best pop artist of the year. Despite some really crossed fingers on our part Etienne, unfortunately, did not win the award this year but we are all pretty sure that next year will be his!

We all stayed at a sweet little guest house owned by a lovely French couple and we can highly recommend their lodge, the Authentique French Guest House for the cute rooms, friendly owners, and lovely breakfasts.

After our arrival we had a few free hours to explore the area before we had to get ready and it was recommended that we make a visit to the Lion Park nearby. I can definitely say that we all really enjoyed our visit there and were spoiled by getting to play with two 3 month old male lion cubs! Its hard to imagine that the little babies that were attacking our fingers and camera bags will be such imposing and deadly animals in a year or two. So even though we weren't able to get pics of the wild cubs on our last trip to the bush we got you a few of babies that in another two years will be released into one of the national parks here in South Africa.

After a bit of prepping and posing for pictures we headed off to Sun City to see the awards show which turned out to be a fantastic and very cultural experience for all of us. The fashion, music, and vibe were a unique blend of western and traditional African sights and sounds. It was an amazing thing for us to be able to see the changing tides of South African culture from our seats in the theatre. Here are more pictures from our weekend (SAMA Photo Album).