#Culture

1. Potchefstroom is a very old town by South African standards, founded in 1838 by Voortrekker Andries Potgieter.
2. Potchefstroom is a university town. The Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education – now the North-West University Potchefstroom Campus – was founded here in 1869.
3. Potchefstroom has the longest avenue of oak trees in South Africa – possibly in the entire Southern Hemisphere.
4. Potchefstroom is a long and difficult (at least for me) word to say. Thank goodness most people call it Potch. (Read more about the origin of the name Potchefstroom.)

I lived 90 minutes from Potch for nearly nine years before going there. I didn’t expect to particularly like it. With the exception of the oak tree story I’d never heard much about Potch, and it isn’t a town that one unexpectedly stumbles upon. It’s not really on the way to anywhere.

I visited the Swartland – a wine region about an hour northwest of Cape Town – almost two months ago. My visit was mostly about wine, which I wrote about already, but I have all these other cool pictures and memories from the trip that I wasn’t able to share in that post.

This post, featuring Ophelia Café, is the ninth in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg.

Making a great coffee shop is about more than just serving great coffee. In the global indie coffee culture of 2019, coffee shops must also have style. They must be bright and Instagrammable, in a cool but unlikely location, with pretty tableware and light fixtures. The food must be good. The servers must be attentive and friendly, preferably with tattoos and cool but effortless-looking hairstyles. The furniture must be attractive and comfortable but not too comfortable, as customers need to stay awake as they type away at their MacBooks.