O-Week

Wow, it seems to have been an entire week! Time’s just flying by and everything gets better and better by the day.  This week I had so many adventures.

We went to the farmers market (Saturday) at the Old Bisket Mill in the Cape Town suburb, Observatory. It was great! I finally got my fix of fresh veggies and pretty much bought out an entire produce vendor for like R65 (which is around 12.5 $). It has lasted me the entire week (and more).  They also had amazing prepared foods, smoothies, cheeses and breads. We are planning on going again tomorrow and I am psyched. (p.s. we did go today [Saturday]and it was just as good. I got fro-yo, a bagel sandwich, a muffin and iced tea.)

This past week was SSA (Semester Study Abroad) Orientation, so we spent most of our time with about 500 other international students going through the exact same orientation stuff as we did with Interstudy the previous week. It was a bit frustrating but I guess the more you hear something the more likely you are to remember it.

As a part of the orientation (the best and only different part, well besides the drumming class, which I loved) we went on a peninsula tour. This consisted of hanging out in a tour bus all day driving along the coast and getting out at designated spots. We got to see S. African PENGUINS!! What little cuties they are. We also got to hike up to the lighthouse at Cape Point and than hike down to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope. That was a really fun day.  We stopped for lunch at this town called Oceanview and the locals provided us with entertainment. There were a bunch of kids that sung and danced for us. It was very impressive; I was definitely not expecting them to be as good as they were.

At the end (ish) of this tour we saw Ostriches in the wild!! It was brilliant! One thing on my bucket list while I am here is to ride these “majestic” birds.

I also got to see/hang out with two S. African friends of mine (Hari Bhajan and Atma) who I went to school with in India and who I haven’t seen in years. They were both in Cape Town visiting from Jo’burg. Bhaj’s parents own a farm outside of the city so he came down to see them and Atma’s grandfather (who lives in Cape Town) had a big birthday party. It was really quite nice. They crashed on the tiny couches in my flat (probably not that comfortable but oh well…) for two nights. We went to the beach twice. The first time we were climbing on the rocks by the coast. On this occasion I was walking with them, kind of behind and not paying the strictest of attention and… I got attacked by a shark! I sustained some serious leg injuries.

No, not really. I just scraped my self up thinking I could jump father than I actually could onto a very slippery, wet rock. Now I have some hardcore battle wounds. J

The second beach trip was a little less eventful and WAY colder. Cape Town is a peninsula so there are two different oceans on either side. One side is the Indian Ocean, which is lovely and a perfect temperature, the other is the Atlantic, which is ridiculously cold! I was really shocked at how cold the water actually was.

That night we had a nice Tapas dinner with a bunch of people from the Interstudy program at a place called Forks. It was extremely classy, and I was surprisingly full by the end.

Yesterday I had a free day since I preregistered for classes before we went to the beach and dinner. A girl named Ally and I decided we wanted to go to the beach. We went to one on the Indian Ocean side so we could actually go in the water. The thing about that side of the peninsula is it gets REALLY windy. Yesterday was a windy day by nature, so it was like a hurricane out there. This meant really nice waves and a completely deserted beach. It was great (minus the sand in my face from the wind).

We had taken the train there and chose not to pay the R8, since they don’t really check (or so we thought). Once we got the beach there was a guy there taking tickets. Thinking fast we chose to go the dumb, lost American route. It worked… ish. We told the guy we had bought tickets but we couldn’t find them anywhere! We asked if it would be all right to just buy the ticket right there. He said fine and we proceeded to buy only our return tickets… (hehe, definitely wasn’t my idea) ;) So this meant we were kind of obligated to take the train home. On our way back we accidentally missed our stop and wound up in a suburb about two away from Rosebank (which is where our apartments are). Lets just say this was a part of town they would NEVER take us on a tour. Ally and I were walking around looking a bit confused (because we were) and some guy came up to us and was all, “you girls look really lost” we replied, “that’s because we are.”  He than asked us where we wanted to go and once we told him “Rosebank” he looked at us and kind of chuckled as he said “you are a long way from Rosebank, just follow this street down to the main road.” We did just that, found a minibus (they are a really funny system, which I will have to tell you more about later). We made it home fine, but after having to pay for the minibus only ended up saving R1 on the whole trip… thus is life. It just shows that if you are meant to do something, the universe will make it happen.

Today was class registration day. This meant a looong day of standing around waiting in queues. At the present moment I have two classes I am for sure taking and either one or two that I don’t know about. I am taking an Art History class called Art Narratives: Traditions and Tensions and a The History of South Africa to 1900 for sure. I might be taking Religions Past and Present and another 100 level history or art history class, otherwise just one 200 or 300 level history or art history class. I have to figure that out soon though…

I also attended my first Brai (what they call a BBQ in S. Africa) yesterday. The University put it on for everyone, they called it Freshers Brai, so I assume it had something to do with Freshman. We are having our own Brai tonight (Friday) for dinner because last week we decided that we were all going to cook/eat dinner together on Friday nights.

It has been really fun getting to know everyone in the program. I feel like after two (ish) weeks I am finally getting comfortable with everyone. I think that my goal for the next week (before classes start) is to A. figure out my classes and B. strengthen all the friendships I have started so that once we are all on our own schedules they don’t fall through the cracks.

I shall leave you with a few things I find weird/comical

• ·      Buying electricity at the grocery store (yes, now you can add that to the grocery list)
• ·      The National Shark Sighting Code (which I will have to look up and post at some point.
• ·      Megabyte Internet system (we pay for our internet by the megabyte)
• ·      Darcys (they are weird fat gopher looking animals that we saw on our hike to the Cape of Good Hope)
• In England they call University Uni, which I think is pretty cute but here they call it Varsity, which to me sounds a bit funny.

Thank you and goodnight.