Time is flying by down here in the southern hemisphere....

Date: 22/03/2011
Time: ooh…2am. Ouch…class is going to be rough tomorrow…
Days abroad: 57 (how is THAT possible?!)

I feel like it isn’t very conducive for me to start every post with “oh man, I am a terrible blogger and I’ve been neglecting you all…” so I am going to stop apologizing for it and everyone is just going to have to get used to the fact that I am verrrry bad at keeping up with the blogging…time just goes so fast sometimes...if it is any consolation at all, I haven’t written in my handwritten journal since…maybe the first week of February..? (sorry mom!). So, in comparison, I am doing very well blog-wise, right?

Okay, on to the good stuff….

So, last weekend (not the one that just happened…March 11^th- March 13^th) our program had arranged a homestay in a Coloured community for us. We all got host families in the town of Ocean View and we stayed with our family and, in most cases, one other American student all weekend. It was an incredibly educational weekend. Many of the families in Ocean View were forcibly removed from Simons Town during the Apartheid era…for those of you who don’t know…Apartheid had several classifications of “race” and Coloured was one of their classifications. From what I understand, Coloured is a mixture of the other races. They are not Black, not White, not Indian, not Malay…rather, they are a mixture of any and all of these things. There is a distinct Coloured culture as they were classified as ther own race and forced to live in the same townships during Apartheid.

My host family was a single mother, her mother, and her 16-year-old son. They were so great. They didn’t have a car so Friday, a family friend picked us up at the high school and took us to their house in this little neighborhood:

Saturday, we took the mini-bus taxi to their mall and went shopping. My host mom needed groceries (yes, the pick n pay was inside the mall) and the son wanted to look for a shirt. Then, we went back to the house and watched some cricket (it’s the world cup right now) with Grandma and ate a DELICIOUS sandwich called a Gatsby. It had steak and french fries INSIDE the sandwich..among other things, haha. After lunch, we took their 2-year-old nephew across the street to the “farm”. They had camels there! And a ton of delicious baked goods (I may or may not have purchased a few desserts…) and a petting zoo with a million rabbits. They also had a bunch of cute little souvenir shops with things mad by the local people in them. Saturday evening, my host-mom braiied South African sausage and chicken for us. We also had corn and potatoes and green beans and Coke. Then Megan (my American host-sister) and I went out in the street to play with some of the kids…as soon as you pull out a camera they lose all interest in soccer and only want to have you take a million pictures and look at them all:

Sunday, the Cape Argus cycle tour was taking place in Cape Town. It is one of the biggest bike races in the world and it goes right through Ocean View:

Apparently, it is a HUGE thing in Ocean View every year, people set up tents alongside the road to eat and drink and watch the cyclists go by from 6am until 4pm. I was astounded at the number of bikers, there was a steady stream from the time I went out there at about noon with my host brother and the time I left at about 3…the oldest cyclist in the race was a 92 year old man who hails from Ocean View…he was trying to beat his time from last year (somewhere around 6 hours)…

Sunday afternoon, my host mom and grandma prepared a HUGE meal for us (I guess Sunday lunch is a big deal in the community) and they sent me home with a Tupperware full of dessert (homemade lemon meringue pie and something called milk tart which I must google a recipe for). On the bus on the way home, every student was clutching a tupperware of food that their host family had sent with them…general consensus: it was a great weekend.

The week between Ocean View and this last weekend was somewhat uneventful I think…OH! Except Friday! Friday I started volunteering (FINALLY) with a group called Young in Prison. They took us out to a youth facility where boys go who have been in trouble with the law…I believe most of them are awaiting trial still but some have been sentenced to the facility…anyway, the boys are between 13 and 20 and they live at this youth facility all week and go home to their families on Saturday. Our main purpose while volunteering is just to distract them from their situation and give them some positive role models.

I had no idea what to expect but it turned out to be so much fun. There was a group of about 10 of us Americans on Friday and a lot of the boys at the facility were gone on a field trip for the day so there were only 10 or 12 of them but we played a whole bunch of get to know you games and amused each other for about 2 hours. We played 2 truths and a lie and scramble and something called rock paper scissors evolution and human knot. Oh, and an all-time classic, heads up 7up…hahaha…The boys were all a lot of fun, they were all super eager to participate, I had a blast with them. I think next time we go we are going to teach them the great American game of kick ball…some CIEE students introduced it to the kids at the LEAP school (where I go on Mondays) a couple of years ago and they LOVE it…that is all they want to play during sport anymore…the boys all asked if we could bring music next time as well, they want to have a dance off, Americans vs South Africans…I think we all know who will win that competition…especially if I am on the American’s side. Hahaha. They also want to play soccer, Americans vs South Africans…once again…I better pre-apologize to my team on the way over there….

Other than Friday…it was a fairly uneventful week…I went to LEAP on Monday (man, I am running through the week backwards here…woopsies) and I went to the grade 9 life orientation again…there weren’t very many kids there because there was a taxi strike in the city on Monday so a lot of them couldn’t get to school…we had a discussion about Americans…White Americans in particular…my friend Mercy went this week too and she was born and raised in America but her parents are from Ghana so we had a talk with the kids about whether they considered her American or West African…it was quite an interesting (but very intense) discussion about race…

This weekend (the 19^th and 20^th of March) was a long weekend because Monday (the 21^st) was a public holiday! Yay, no school! It was Human Rights Day here in South Africa…so everyone had a 3 day weekend.

We went to Robben Island as a house on Sunday (CIEE pays for trips that are educational and cultural…so our RAs ask and CIEE either grants our house the money or not...). Robben Island has an incredible history which I am not going to get into right now because it is 1:45 am and I have class very early tomorrow…so, here are some pictures…and I will blog more on that at a later time…or you can google it…haha

Basically, what you NEED to know about Robben Island is that it was used as a maximum security prison for political prisoners during the Apartheid regime. Many political prisoners were held there, Nelson Mandela included…we took a tour of the island that took about 3 hours and both of our tour guides had been prisoners on the island during the late 60s.

This picture is the stunning view of Cape Town and Table Mountain from Robben Island...
This is one of our tour guides with some pictures of some of the prisoners. The ones who were considered leaders were locked up in individual cells that were 2 meters by 2.5 meters. They had to sleep on the floor and the only feature of their cell was a bucket to relieve themselves into which they had to remove and clean themselves every morning. The “non-leaders” were locked in communal cells of about 30 prisoners. There were microphones placed in all the cells so guards could hear what was being said and prevent political news from spreading or plans from being created. Rules are made to be broken though…the prisoners were forced to perform hard labor digging limestone every day. They had a cave in the limestone quarry which is where their bucket was…under Apartheid law, no White man was allowed to enter a Black toilet so the prisoners could go into the cave a scheme away and there was nothing the guards could do about it…pretty ingenious if you ask me…

Anyways…

That was Nelson Mandela’s cell…

I really do need to be off to sleep now…I have a very busy week…

Thursday, I leave for my mid-semester break trip…another girl in the program and I are flying to Windhoek, Namibia where we will get on an overland truck and spend 10 days camping our way across Botswana (including the Okavango Delta and Chobe National park) and we will end at Victoria Falls in Livingston, Zambia…then fly back to Cape Town on April 2^nd. A once in a lifetime trip, I am sure…please pray that I don’t get eaten by a hippo.

I hope everyone is well, I miss you all terribly!

Love love

South Africa has the most delicious plums...very unexpected...

Date: 3/9/2011 well…I started the 9^th…now it is the 10^th…
Time: very late
Days abroad: 45

Ok, ok…I am the worst blogger ever…my last blog was Mzoli’s…and it was a week late…and that was two weeks ago. Shoot. Apologies. So much has happened since then. Let’s see here…

The weekend after Mzoli’s weekend, CIEE took us out to Stellenbosch to the same winery we ate dinner at our first week here, Spier. They were having their autumn wine/grape harvest festival so we all got 5 free wine tastes and there was music and tons of good food. They had grape stomping!

Which is awesome…I really wanted to do it but they were charging and I waited in line for about half an hour then I got to the barrel and they told me I had to pay inside and get a ticket and get back in the end of the line instead of just paying the man shoveling grapes into the barrel. And that was way too much of a process for me…so I used my wine-stomping money to buy a slice of black forest cake instead. And I watched a lot of other people stomp some grapes. THEN! I saw the biggest spider I have ever seen in MY WHOLE LIFE. HUGE HUGE HUGE. Exhibit A:

I was going to put my hand up next to it to give everyone some scale but I was scared he would eat my whole hand…so you’ll have to imagine. The umbrella he is on is one of those giant deck umbrellas…use your imagination. I’ll collect pictures from my housemates before I come home…maybe one of them got something next to it for scale. It was so gross. I didn’t fully comprehend African wildlife until that moment.

Oh! Which reminds me…earlier that week, I lost a bet to my RA, Buhle…a dumb bet about peanut butter…anyways, I walked down to Checkers (the grocery store) to buy his dumb Fanta and there were pigeons all over the sidewalk. Not a big deal, there are a LOT of pigeons here…like Oregon squirrels. Anyways, I was walking back home and I walked through the flock of pigeons and they all hopped and fluttered and did pigeon-like things and then I heard something running through the leaves on the ground…and I thought to myself hmm, pigeons do not run…so, I looked down. Big mistake. A GIGANTIC rat, cousin to the ones who live in the New York City sewer/subway system (yes, I’m referring to them as one big system) was scurrying down the sidewalk. I SCREAMED bloody murder and ran up the hill to my house. I’m quite sure the locals thought I was being mugged. Or raped. Which is just silly because it was the middle of the afternoon right next to Main Road.

That was a bit of a side-track story…anyways, we went wine tasting on Saturday and on Sunday of that same weekend (2/27), CIEE took us to an outdoor concert at this beautiful venue:

Kirstenbosch Gardens. It’s about 10 minutes from campus. A huge botanical garden with big lawns for picnicking and Frisbee and whatever your heart desires and a concert venue…kind of like the Cuthbert in Eugene but with beautiful Table Mountain as the backdrop. I don’t even remember the name of the bands that played…they were South African, but it was a lovely evening…we took picnic food and sat in the shade and listened to some music. Delightful.

Umm…the week after the wine and the concert…classes…and homework. Haha. Classes take up a surprisingly large part of my days during the week…because I start at 9 and don’t finish until 345 on tues, wed, thurs those days are pretty much all used up. I do have some breaks during the day but the climb from my house is too daunting to make me want to go all the way home and all the way back…though I have trimmed my hill time down to 12 minutes. 12 minutes is fast, I tell you. I took a picture of the big hill:

This is the 2^nd up-hill on my way to class. Remember the Jameson hall picture? Notice how there is not one stair in sight in this hill picture? Yes, that’s because I have to climb that ^ beast then there are 2 flights of stairs, a tunnel under the freeway and a path between the rugby fields before I can even start thinking about Jameson Hall and its 100 steps…I have never in my life had such burly calf muscles.

I also took a couple of pictures of the outside of my house for everyone…

This is what it looks like from the driveway…the pointy-roofed house on the right is “A” house, 12 people live in there…they have a separate gated entrance…the little hut in front of the pointy-roofed house is our security guards’ hut, we have 2, Allison and Stephen. They are both very nice guys…and they keep the burglars away, so I really like them…The flat-roofed house in the background on the left (with one small window visible) is both “B” and “C” houses. B is downstairs, 8 people live there and C is upstairs, 10 of us live in C (including me!).

This is our courtyard…right inside the gate…and a better view of B and C. Don’t mind the creepy mariachi man and the streamers, some of my house mates had a tequila party the week I took this picture…

The weekend after the wine and concert was last weekend…Friday I got out of class at 11 and, due to some administrative issues, my volunteering was pushed back another week so, my lovely friend Loren and I decided we wanted to go to the beach…it was a hot day. We caught the mini-bus taxis…which are 16 passenger vans that drive everywhere and have a man who whistles and yells where the van is going and bangs the side the whole time…most of the time they are a huge annoyance because they all want you to get in their taxi but they are quite convenient when you need to go somewhere. Anyways, we took one from Rondebosch into the city to a place called the taxi rank where hundreds of mini-bus taxis are going in every direction imaginable….we wandered around a bit confused for a couple of minutes but then found a taxi headed to Camps Bay which is a lovely beach town where lots of rich people (such as the Beckhams) have summer homes. We got off the mini-bus at Clifton beach number 4:

As you can see, beautiful. We wandered up and down the beach…I bought a DELICIOUS passion fruit sherbet bar from a nice man with a cooler…and we splashed in the water a bit. Though, we are on the Atlantic side so there is an arctic current which means the water is FRIGID. Think Oregon Ocean. It’s a quick dip in then lay on the beach for an hour to defrost kind of place…haha.

When we decided to go home we count not, for the life of us, catch a mini-bus. They were ALL full. It was crazy. I have never had such a problem. So we were walking and walking and walking…and we found a construction site and somebody had put a sticker that said “filth” on the sign…which we thought was oddly funny in our overheated, dehydrated, sun-soaked delirium:

This is the lovely Loren with our construction sign.

FINALLY we found a mini-bus that wasn’t full…until we got in. And we headed back for the city. Our driver stopped in a random farmers market place and said “last stop” so we got out and asked him how to get to the taxi rank and he pointed us down the street. So, we were walking through this seedy farmers market and people kept asking me for money…I assume because I look so obviously American…so I grabbed the first mini-bus that was shouting “Wyneberg” because they had to go through Rondebosch to get there….it was the most dilapidated taxi I have ever seen. Loren and I were on the bench seat in the back and it was not attached to the rest of the vehicle. Every time the driver slammed his brakes (which was a LOT) we would have to brace our feet to keep from sliding into the seats in front of us. It was hilarious. Anyways, this man gets in and he asked me to pay his fare…mini-bus fare is only 6 rand to pretty much anywhere, I think you could get in a mini-bus destined for Kenya and only have to pay 6 rand so, normally I wouldn’t have a problem helping someone out…6 rand is less than 1 us dollar. However, it really bothered me that this guy ONLY asked me. There were at least 12 other people in the taxi and I was the only one that he was trying to coerce into paying his fare…now, if he had asked everyone for 50 cents, I bet they would’ve paid, I sure would’ve…there is a lovely sense of community and helping people out here…but no, he wanted the white American to pay his fare, so I said no. He kept asking and I kept refusing and he was getting really agitated and he started yelling not very nice things at me. Then this old lady in the mini-bus started yelling at him in Xshosa so I had no idea what she was saying. By this point, we had gone like 8 blocks (half of them on the sidewalk…traffic rules are more like suggestions here) and the guy hadn’t paid fare so the money-collector yelling man kicked him out.

Overall, a very exciting day.

Saturday, CIEE took us to a rugby game at the stadium in Newlands, which is about a 10 minute walk from my house. It was fun but I do not understand rugby. Not one bit. Sometimes they throw it and sometimes they kick it and sometimes the ref blows the whistle. I had no idea what was going on. So I just cheered when everyone else cheered.

Sunday I caught up on a lot of homework…

Monday! Monday was the BEST day I have had since being here. By far. Monday morning I (finally) started my volunteering! I went out to a high school called the LEAP school where they admit kids from the township called Langa and try to get them educated and into University. The schooling system in this country has a huge disparity between township schools and suburb or city schools…LEAP is trying to fill in that gap and provide opportunities to kids who wouldn’t otherwise get them…so Monday, I went out at 9am to the school to participate in a “life orientation” class. I got put in the grade 9 class and at first I was worried…you know, freshmen can be a bit…bratty? But, oh my gosh, the kids were AMAZING. The class is designed as a safe place for kids to talk about experiences and their feelings and discuss them with their peers. It teaches them about open communication and respect. Well, Monday was about relationships. At first, the kids were scared to talk to me…Nigel, the teacher, asked how they felt about having a visitor and many of them said it made them a bit uncomfortable discussing things because they didn’t know me. Then Nigel started including me in the conversations, he grilled me about my past boyfriends and what-what and at first it was a bit embarrassing but once Nigel started talking to me, ALL of the kids wanted to talk to me. The girls were all very giggly and the boys were pretty fidgety and when Nigel asked what was up, one ADORABLE boy raised his hand and said “I think because we have a woman from the USA here and we all want to be her best friend so maybe we are showing off…” oh my gosh, I wanted to bring him home with me. He was so cute. After class, the kids had a 15 minute “yoghurt break” so I went downstairs with them to mingle…there were some grade 12 kids selling waffles with ice cream, naturally, I bought one and I was talking to them…they were doing an entrepreneurship project for one of their classes…so cute. I cant wait to go back next week. I wish I could go there instead of to my school every day.

I start volunteering with a group called young in prison on Friday…I guess we’re going to go out to a youth prison and play sport or do arts or something with kids age 16-22 who have been arrested and are awaiting trial. The idea is to distract them from their current situation and help provide a positive role model for them to start thinking about what they want to do when they get out…maybe it will prevent them from spending the rest of their lives in and out of jail…I’m a little more nervous about this group…I fear that I might be an easy target for some of these kids but I am going to do my very best…they all need some support too.

I joined the surgical society on campus last week and tomorrow I am going to hear a talk about neurosurgery at the medical school…I am really excited….

I also joined the Zimbabwe society because all of the Zims I have met in Cape Town are extraordinarily nice people…and very relaxed and laid back…I like that. They ordered me a shirt, which I am quite excited about…

Next weekend CIEE has a homestay arranged for us in a Coloured township called Ocean View…which does not have a view of the ocean. I am quite excited about it…we leave Friday and come back to town on Sunday. It should be a lot of fun.

Other than alllll of that…it’s mostly just been school and homework for me. I am learning so much about South Africa and South Africans in class discussions and lectures and from my RA at home…I cant even believe how much I have learned. They call a hot water heater a geyser…only they pronounce it geezer, like the old man. I told Buhle (my RA) that we call it a hot water heater and he thought it was hilarious because that is such an obvious name. hahaha. I’m telling you, it’s the little things I pick up in conversation that make my whole trip.

I hope everyone at home is doing well, I miss you all!

Love