The Bookmarks 2012

Yawn. At least I am writing this from my gorgeous hotel room :)

Last night was The Bookmark Awards, the reason I got to enjoy this whirlwind trip to Cape Town. The event started for me by checking into my hotel room at New Kings Hotel. Wow. The rooms here are absolutely massive. Seriously, I'm sitting in my study as I type this! It is an absolutely gorgeous, still day in Cape Town today. Wish I was staying :)

This hotel is pretty stunning, room- and view-wise. Pity the hot water takes about 10minutes to arrive ... even after waiting that long and deciding to just shower with the tepid water, I did eventually see some steam as I was rinsing my hair before getting out ... Also, they are seriously lacking in floor length mirrors. Which would've been helpful for dressing up last night ;)

I got to wear another of my Vietnam dresses :) I think it looked pretty awesome. It is a bit loose now tho ... sadly (but also happily :D haha).

We headed to The Artscape Theatre at about 7pm for the actual awards ceremony. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting. For some reason (until I received my ticket on Wednesday) I had this idea we'd be seated at company tables ... I guess sort of like something from a cliche movie event. It wasn't like that at all. The first clue was the venue. It was like going to watch a show. Our company had a few different groups of seats, and everyone sat in a row. Which made it a bit weird. I'll be honest and say a bunch of us ended up in the empty back rows because it was easier to get to the loo, the bar and actually get some of the little snacks they put out. By 20h30 I hadn't eaten a thing (we'd skipped dinner to be there by 7) and was starving.

The awards were pretty boring honestly. I hadn't seen many of the sites that were winning. It was all very exciting tho when our company was short-listed and we cheered wildly for our awards. I think we did quite nicely :) The first grouping took ages, but after that it went quite fast. We saw a performance by Gazelle who I think used the stage space amazingly well :)

At around 23h30 it finished up and we headed to Trinity for the After Party. Which fell a little flat, I guess because I'm not a big schmoozer and I didn't know anyone except the other people from my company who hadn't gone back to the hotel. We didn't stay very late, got home just after 1am. It was a beautiful night tho, warm and calm.

All in all a good experience and I'm glad I got to come and cheer and see what all the fuss was about :) Mostly I'm glad I got a quick visit down in Cape Town :)