13.08.2010
So I know my goal was every two weeks for a blog post, but this is a little late. Life here is starting to feel a bit more normal. We just finished our third week of school so I think that means I have already been here for almost 5 weeks. Time is seriously flying. I am officially taking Race, Class and Gender instead of Social Justice and Inequality. It’s really interesting because all of my classes except African Dance are linked to each other and even our readings reference readings for the other classes. And it is a lot of learning about South African History and how it is affecting living in South Africa now, which I really enjoy. But at times I wish I had taken the Art History Class instead just so I would be learning something different, it was very difficult to choose which class, they were all so interesting. One thing I don’t like about my classes is that it always seems like the Americans are the ones who decide to talk in class. I came to South Africa to learn about South Africa, not to learn about America, I would much rather hear what the South Africans have to say. So I don’t like that so much. African Dance is another story. That class is all exchange students, so it helps with meeting more Americans. But the teacher is INTENSE. For a long time he yelled at us for smiling and told us we needed to be serious, and would yell at us because no one could do or remember the moves. But this last week was good, he smiled and actually told us we were scaring him because we were too serious. And apparently we are learning things because he is happy with us. We have officially learned all of our warm up dance thing. We have barely even touched any kind of actual dance. It is really cool though because for every class we have live drummers to play the music for us. Taking Belly Dancing at home has definitely helped me learn some of the moves! For classes here, there is A LOT of reading that is expected of us. We don’t really have busy work to turn in (and if we do it won’t be graded), which kind of sucks because that means most of my grade is going to come from my final test. Pretty much everyone I know is behind on their readings though so that isn’t good. But I have also had South Africans tell me that it is a lot of work and they can’t do it all either. I had 5 1-2 page papers due in the first week of school, so I didn’t start off easy. There are two really strange things about school here is that they have a period of the day called the Meridian, which is a lunch period where there is more or less no classes for anyone, and everyone eats lunch together. I don’t think I really like it because it basically just elongates my day at school. The other thing is that each class has 2-3 different teachers who will teach for a certain number of weeks and then they switch. It is very strange. Plus, it is really weird just being in school so early in the year.
The weekend after I blogged last I went on a cycle the Stellenbosch winelands tour. It was really cool thing to do. We started really early in the morning. We had to wake up at 6am to go drinking! We got our bikes and went to the first winery and had our first sip of wine at 9:34am. This stop had the best wine of all of our stops, including the best wine I have ever had, a sweet red wine that cost a whole $3 to buy a bottle of, and a strictly South African wine called Pinotage, which is a hybrid grape between Pinot noir and Cinsaut which is known as Hermitage here. After sampling 5 glasses of wine here, we made our way to the next winery and had 5 more glasses. Right next to this winery is a Cheetah sanctuary. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to actually go into the sanctuary and play with the cheetahs, but we got to see one named phoenix (I think). I definitely plan to go back there (and to the first winery). Then we headed to a Brandy distillery. This place was super fancy and brandy is gross. We had one mixed drink which was really good and then we got to try the 10 year and the 12 year brandies. They were both not to my liking but the 2 years definitely made a difference for the better. At this point in time, most of us were super tired and our butts hurt a lot from the bike seats and we had the hardest part of the biking to go, pretty much all up hill. We ended up walking most of the way, it was horrible. But once we got to the last winery, we had lunch, which is the best burger I have had here (burgers are a little weird here…..) but this one was super super good, it had two patties and an egg on it and thick bacon. Ironically, all 5 of the wines we tasted here all tasted the same and wasn’t very good. Then the trip back was straight downhill through the winelands on dirt. Me and two other girls got really far behind taking pictures and just being plain tired, and we had 20 mins to catch the last train of the day back to Cape Town. One of the tour guides came back to find us and then we had to take the “express short cut” down the hill. The other groups were complaining how steep their path was, they should have seen ours. I should have wiped out more than once speeding down that hill, even the tour guide told me he thought I was a goner with my back tire whipping back and forth but I’m cool. However, I did manage to get tangled in a really big curly wire thing that was on the ground and needed the guy to untangle me. We made it down that hill in record time, got our free bottle of wine that came with the tour and made it to the train stop with time to spare. When we got back I went straight to bed for a long nap.
The next day I went with a small group of people to a braai (barbeque) in a township, which turned out to be an all day party. We felt a little awkward when we pulled up because we saw no one white there and here we were a big group of white Americans stepping out of a van. It turned out absolutely fine though there were people of all ethnicities around the corner. Trying to find a table was near impossible. We had to ask several people and we finally got a really small one and were told it was the last table. Turns out that several tables came out later for other people. But we did get the last chairs. And the chairs we got were not the best quality and we had to sit on two at the same time so they didn’t collapse. But they were two chairs short, so me and someone else ended up sitting on one and hoping for the best (no one collapsed so that’s good). But so many people came up to us and asked if they could take one our chairs thinking we were just being greedy Americans. We felt so bad. And then some guy at the table behind us decided to steal one of our chairs, so that was nice and another person had to sit on only one chair. It was really cool though we all just hung out outside and waited for our meat to cook, drinking cider and listening to the DJ.
Then another week of school. Not very exciting, just more readings for me to get behind in.
But Friday, we went on an African road trip! We went on the garden route, which is a pretty famous area to travel around along the southern coast. It was a lot of driving but super fun. Although, it wasn’t all that pretty to look at, not really anything garden-y about it, but then again it is winter here, so maybe it will be prettier when I do it with my parents in November. There were 15 of us in total split into 3 cars. In my car were Lill, Chelsea, Ben and Andrew. The first day we drove for over 5 hours to Mossel Bay, where we ate dinner at the worst place ever. The service was horrible, and even though the food was pretty good tasting it was nowhere near worth it, especially since the portions were so small. I really cannot even express how horrible the service was there, the best way to give a glimpse is the fact that the starter came out as a dessert. After dinner it took us about an hour to find our hostel that was about 5 mins away from the restaurant. We let Lill drive so she could say she had driven on the wrong side of the road. First we went to the wrong hostel and got really confused. While Ben was out of the car trying to figure out how to get into our wrong hostel, Lill decided to try to park the car and instead just crashed into the sidewalk, slightly bending and scratching the hub cap which was really funny. And then a black cat sat and stared at her for a min and then ran in front of our car, which also led to more jokes for Lill. Once we figured out that we were at the wrong hostel, we drove past cops checking for drunk drivers who just pick random cars and pull them over for routine checks (this was the third time we had driven by), and of course we got pulled over both the second and third time we drove past, before we finally made it to the hostel. My car didn’t really see anything of Mossel Bay because we pretty much went straight to bed once we got to the hostel and slept in the next morning (aka, 9am). This was my first time staying in hostels so that was exciting, but they were really called Backpacker’s, which isn’t technically a hostel, it’s nicer.
Saturday we went Bungee Jumping of the World’s highest bridge!!!! It is called Bloukrans Bridge and is 216 meters high (about 709 feet). It was so crazy, we were just driving over this bridge and remarking at how beautiful the view was and then we realized it was the bridge we were jumping off of. Our group ended up being too big because we accidentally only reserved spots for 10 and we had 11 people, but one car was late so it ended up working out and we split into a group of 7 and a group of 4. I went in the group of 7 with Natalie, Lill, Chelsea, Ben, Taylor, and Devin. They played music on the bridge for us to all get pumped up. All of us were so excited and were dancing around the whole time; we all just wanted to go already! Unfortunately, I was the last to go of all of my friends (it was done by weight bracket, and then within that bracket who had paid first and got the lowest numbers went first) and I was third to last of the entire group. This was only a problem because everyone else was so excited about how amazing it was and the hype to go had worn off for all of them and that brought my excitedness down, and let the fear start to creep back in. Your legs are bound together so there are people are there to help you hop to the end of the bridge and they also kind of push you off, while you jump out as far as you can. I screamed at first because I was jumping off a bridge and couldn’t believe it. It was scary but amazing at the same time and is so hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it. I came back up and they asked me how it was and I was seriously speechless. When the bouncing started to calm I had time to look at the mountains and the river and ocean around me. All I could hear was the brook below me and my breathing. It was crazy, and actually super relaxing. I feel so accomplished with myself having done this. I would do it again, but I would still be scared to do it.
That night we stayed in Jeffery’s Bay and went to a really good restaurant which made up for the night before. Again, I didn’t see a whole lot of the town, but from what I did see, it was really pretty. This night me and Lill and Ben stayed in a room with random people because none of us had stayed in a hostel before and wanted to have the closest experience to a real hostel as possible (even though this was also a Backpackers). The next morning we went to a Lion Sanctuary, which really ended up being like a zoo filled with a lot of lions. But there were really beautiful white lions there. They also had garaffes and zebras and a Timon and Pumba, and buffalo and Springbok. And the best part is that I got to pet and play with 4 baby lions. They were so adorable and cute and playful. Even though when we got in to see them, they were pretty much all asleep. But they were so cute. One scratched my hand and made it bleed so I have a battle wound from a lion ;) haha.
This night we stayed at a backpackers literally called Tube N’ Axe, in Storms River. This was a really small town kind of in the jungle. We went to dinner at pretty much the only restaurant in the town that was the host of the biggest Elvis festival outside of the US. Unfortunately other than the menu, there was not really any Elvis paraphernalia. They weren’t even playing Elvis music, so that was a little disappointing. We stayed up and taught the bartender at Tube N’ Axe drinking games which was fun, he really enjoyed them.
The next day was the public holiday Women’s Day (which is why we didn’t have school and why we went on this road trip). We were all pretty much exhausted and we decided just to drive straight home. This was about a 7 hour drive. We stopped at a small town and went to eat lunch at Resturant. Which was next to a giant amount of Baboons. Random. And we tried to get gas and asked some guy on the street where the gas station was and he told us it was closed for the holiday. Luckily it actually wasn’t closed so that was good. Once back on the road, we hit traffic that literally was stop and go for about an hour and a half. It was ridiculous. The best part of being in that car was the fact that we only had one CD to listen and we listened to the same songs over and over. The theme song of the trip ended up being “I can see you, stalking like a predator” there is really no way to describe this. And this soundtrack still played in my head for the following week. Although technically we had two CDs, but the CD I made got pretty much fully vetoed right away after the first time we listened to it on the car ride leaving the city, and then only got played once on the way back to break up the other CD for a little bit. Once we got back we were all happy to get out of that car.
Then back to school on Tuesday. Luckily this week of school went really fast because of no Monday, but it also made me feel like I was even more behind in my readings. Thursday night (last night) we went out to a bar called the purple turtle with some other Americans in a different program (and a lot of them in my dance class). At this bar we sang karaoke!!! I have never done it before and technically I don’t know if you can say I really have now either. The only song I sang was Spice Girls –Wannabe with a very large group of (mostly) girls. I didn’t have enough courage to sing by myself or do a duet, but it was still super fun. We definitely plan to go back there! After the karaoke pretty much ended, we went to another bar called the Dubliner where we caught the end of some live music which was also fun. Actually a pretty relaxed night.
Today a little less than half of our Interstudy group went on an excursion with our program, which I, and the rest who didn’t go this week, will go on next weekend. Lill went with them, so I am all alone in the flat this weekend. But I am glad I didn’t go this weekend because hopefully I will be able to catch up on some of my readings!
