The oddest restaurant I ever ate in was Lenin’s Mating Call in St Petersburg. The said mating call – an electronic screech delivered by a waist-high silver bust of Lenin by the door – erupted whenever anyone entered the restaurant. Stalin’s bust was there, too, tastefully enough, and the waitresses scurried around in sexed-up versions of old Soviet Youth uniforms. The walls were swagged with red curtains and communist memorabilia, and giant flatscreen TVs played footage of old Soviet rallies intercut with not-particularly-softcore porn. Don’t even ask me about the toilets. The borscht, on the other hand, was very good, if overpriced. It was, in short, the culture of Soviet Russia rendered in tat. I was reminded of Lenin’s Mating Call while wandering past all the tourist shops that line the Waterfront of Cape Town, where I am staying for a while. As the sound of ­ Ladysmith Black Mambazo hits drifted out across the water (“Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake . . .”), I found my eye drawn to all the tat for sale: wooden sculptures of shiny-cheeked black women with headscarves and figures like inflated loaves shared space with knock-kneed giraffes and majestic lions – fragments of South African culture reduced to tat, to adorn keyrings and bum bags. Among all this were guitars made out of old Castrol GTX oilcans. Don’t ask me why. I’m interested in tat – fond of it, even

Original Source How a Lion King bum bag can tell you all you need to know about South Africa