Rosendale Road

Cape Town's homeless have turf, and this man's is the highly coveted Rosendale/Main Road intersection. The light at this intersection is slow, leaving traffic backed up for 3-5 minutes at a time - time enough to ask for small change at every window before the light turns green. The traffic is particularly good because Rosendale is a short road that dead-ends into the parking garage that serves a highly-trafficked strip mall including Checkers Shoprite and the Rondebosch Post Office. There used to be a tiny woman here, but I haven't seen her for a few weeks; she's been replaced by this man for now. He seems less eager to solicit and prefers often to just sit in the intersection. He always has a 2-liter bottle of milk at his side, in spite of the heat. In contrast, the tiny lady he replaced was always moving - she never missed a car and when there were no cars, she'd salvage cigarette stubs, consolidate the tobacco, re-roll it in discarded newspaper, and take slow, deep drags. She wore a Santa hat during the holidays.