This is a map of Cape Town to orient yourselves to where I am. I live in Mowbray (upper right area), and the City Centre if Cape Town is in the dashed box.

So to begin this entry I would like to answer some of the questions in the comments.

The apartheid era began in 1948 and ended in 1994. Tomorrow I am planning on going to the District Six Museum in the City Centre, so I will let you know more about

The picture below shows the Good Food Market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock. It had a few booths selling local organic produce, but mainly the market sold freshly prepared breads, spreads, and the like. It was definitely not like the farmer’s markets we are used to back home with a wide variety of local farmers goods, but it was the closest thing to it that I have encountered so far. I have definitely noticed a lack of recycling here as well. There are separate cans for paper, plastic, cans, and other garbage on campus, but as far as I can tell, there is no recycling separation required of residents. I am trying to figure out if recycling gets separated at the plant, but I don’t know yet. At the grocery stores here however, if you want a plastic bag to carry your groceries in, you have to pay 25 cents, or you can purchase a reusable bag or bring in your own.

You can do a lot of things at the grocery store. You can purchase rugby, train and bus tickets, and the most useful thing for the people living at my house is that electricity can be purchased there. There is an electricity meter by the front door to our house, and if the units run out, then we are out of power. It ran out once after we had just moved in, and I took the 1800 rand we collected from the housemates to the ShopRite to buy electricity. Then you punch in the code on the receipt, and the electricity comes back on. The landlord told us originally that we should expect to pay 70-80 rand a month, but I have a sinking feeling that it is going to be a lot more than that because the electricity we bought is almost gone already, and it’s hard to avoid using electricity in a house of 20 people who are constantly coming and going

Where I live, in Mowbray, is less of a nice neighborhood than some of the others where students are living, and I kind of like living in a place that feels a little less sheltered, because I get to see more of life of an average Capetonian as opposed to a more upper class one. ShopRite for instance is an inferior grocery store to Woolworth’s or PickNPay, but I get to see more of the products and foods that many people buy regularly. I need to go to PickNPay soon though, because I really want some fruit, and ShopRite does not have a great selection.

Anyway, getting back to the questions. The question of land ownership is an interesting one, and in South Africa it is quite complicated. Originally there were the indigenous KhoiSan people that lived in the Western Cape area, but when the Dutch came, they were literally hunted down like animals. In more recent history, land ownership was limited for “natives” in the Native’s Land Act of 1913, which marked the first major piece of segregation legislation passed by the Union Parliament, and remained active during the apartheid era. During apartheid, people were further segregated by race, and blacks, coloured, and Indian people were driven off the best land (fertile farmland, mountain areas, etc.). A specific example of this in Cape Town is in District Six, which became an official white area during apartheid. All non-whites were allocated to complexes in townships in the Cape Flats area, which is flat, bleak, and sandy as opposed to their previous residence nestled near Table Mountain near the docks. 60,000 were relocated from their homes starting in 1966. This kind of thing is the unfortunate situation to which I was referring. I have been to see the townships a little bit, and even from a brief trip, it is clear that these areas are not choice property. The interesting thing about District 6 also is that since 1994 the African National Congress (the ruling political party in SA) has recognized the claims of some former residents to the area and has pledged support in rebuilding, as many apartments were destroyed. However, this process has not proved to be very smooth, although some residents have returned in recent years. There has been a recent exodus of sorts of white South Africans who are not excited about being asked to return the land they stole years ago, causing some additional resentment from South Africans still in the country, because the people leaving are not helping to heal the country, rather they are hurting it in a way as they usually the educated ones that contribute significantly to the economy.

I am still not an expert on this complicated issue, and I am sure this discussion would benefit from additional research, but I hope it makes my feelings a little more clear. I see on a daily basis the blatant racial inequality. Even when taking the campus shuttle to school I see it. There are mostly black students on the shuttles and few whites because the whites have cars and drive to school.

There are also several wildlife preserves here, so there are not huge concerns in the country just yet about animal protection. Outside of Cape Town there is plenty of open space for animals.

So what else have I been doing here so far... I have been going to the various parts of town that need to be seen mainly I guess. I went to the Victoria and Albert Waterfront for dinner at a restaurant that served traditional South African food. I had the Boerewors platter, which had boerewors (SA sausage), chips (fries) and a piece of SA pumpkin pie (less sweet pumpkin pie filling in a pastry sleeve). One girl from my house ordered a sample platter of the African game meats, including crocodile, kudu (an antelope), springbok (the national animal), warthog, ostrich, and impala. There was so much food that all seven of us at the table were able to try each of them. Kudu was good because it tasted like chicken, and impala was like steak. They were all pretty good, but crocodile was my least favorite.

Alright I will update more later, bye!

Visuals to keep you occupied...

Baboon by the bus stop on the UCT campus. It tore down that garbage can like it was no big deal.

Me looking nice and awkward at Cape Point/Cape of Good Hope

Camp's Bay beach area

My bed and security door leading to my wonderful balcony!

The amazing view from my balcony. It will never get old, and I will never take it for granted.

Kirtenbosch Botanical Gardens

An African chicken (or something like that) taking a dirtbath in Kirstenbosch. This one's a male

The Atlantic Ocean side of the Cape of Good Hope. The sand here was made completely of seashells, and as you can see, the water was amazingly clear

Baboons at Cape Point, which includes a large nature reserve. The one on the left has a baby under her belly, though you can't really see it here. There are also zebra, ostriches, and some other antelope-type animals on this reserve.

An apartheid-era apartment complex in Oceanview, a township we were taken to on the trip to Cape Point. During apartheid, non-whites were moved from their land into housing like this far from the main city.

Below are some of the many penguins at Boulder Beach. Normally penguins nest on islands, but as people moved into the area, they scared away the predators of the penguins, and the beach became a protected nesting area.

Part of the story

Here was my schedule to get to Cape Town:

Tues, July 14^th: wake up at 8 am to finish packing, double check everything, and pick up some last minute things, like a converter for the plugs. South Africa has a unique plug that they use. It’s three rounded prongs in a triangular formation. One prong is slightly larger than the other two. Leave home at around 3:30 to go to SFO for the 6:50 flight to London Heathrow which will be my first leg of the trip. Security takes about 2 minutes to get through, so now I have a couple hours to kill. I realize that since I am not bringing my cell phone, I have no timekeeping device. I’m definitely going to need one once I am there because I know we have a ton on things scheduled. I look in the airport to see what they have, and of course they have really expensive ones, and they have a little heart shaped plastic keychain with a clock that says, “san Francisco.” I decide that I am not that desperate, and sit in the waiting area.

Looking back on that section that I wrote earlier, it is way too detailed for me to sustain, so I will try to get to the meat of things instead of blabbering on about little details. Here are a couple pictures from the flight. I have a ton of clouds, which made me realize how deep my obsession with clouds lies. Continuing…

So I get to Cape Town International at 8 am on Thursday July 16^th, and meet with the IAPO (International Abroad Program Office I think) student leaders who are to take us to our temporary residence at a UCT dorm before we move in on Saturday to our more permanent houses. I was amazingly alert, even though I only slept a combination of two hours total on the entire trip (even though some of the views are amazing on the window side, I am not sure if it’s worth it to sit there on such long trips by the way). The whole experience there is like being a freshman again, but it was strange because we were the very first group to arrive, so there were very few of us and it was easy to get close. Anyway, the IAPO leaders took us on little tours of Rondebosch, which is a part of town directly below the lower part of the university. It has little restaurants and shops and is generally pretty nice. There is Chinese food, pizza, frozen yogurt, sandwiches, anything you want really. I have subsequently discovered that Cape Town is very “western” in many ways. It could be very easy for me to just fit into the kind of lifestyle I was used to in the states, because there are the same kinds of stores and activities available here as in the Bay Area for example.

There is even a mall called Cavendish mall in Claremont that has many of the stores that we are used to in the US. It was an upscale mall like Westfield in SF, and it even had those touch-screen directories. The music playing in the stores was all American from what I heard. This one shoe store was playing Backstreet Boys and Eminem’s Stan, but otherwise the songs were current. These kinds of stores are pretty expensive and comparable to prices in the US, mainly because they are imported. Electronics, designers clothing, and the like are all imported, but South Africa produces more than enough food to sustain the country, which is one reason why it is so cheap. In the grocery stores, I have yet to really see any food item that is imported, it is quite nice actually. Many people do not know that South Africa is one of the world’s largest wine producers, and the wine here is cheap and good quality, and it also has a higher alcohol content because there is more sunshine here, which makes the sugar content higher and therefore the alcohol content higher or something like that.

However, it is not easy to escape the clear distinctions between races still, even in Cape Town, which is the most liberal and accepting place in all of South Africa without question. There are no white people driving taxis, cleaning the streets, begging on the streets, being guards or maids, etc. I have only seen black, Indian, or coloured people (coloured people are of mixed race/descent, it is not a derogatory term although it was created during the apartheid era to classify people) doing these tasks. While there are some black people that are better off, it is clear that white people still retain most of the wealth here, and live in even nicer neighborhoods than this.

Some things that are clearly different from what I am used to in the states include the following: Croissants are a big deal. They are everywhere, but usually occur in the form of sandwiches. Everyone gets around on taxis, which are not cars, but white vans squeeze in as many people as they can. They are constantly on the street, hanging out the windows and calling out the final destination they are going, but if you signal to them or look at them as they pass, you can hop on anytime and hop off pretty much anytime. They have set stops and fares, but these are not always followed strictly. These cabs are extremely efficient. Oh yeah and it is still hard to adjust to the driving on the opposite side of the road. It is probably the most disorienting thing I have encountered, besides the language gap. Drivers are also not considerate to pedestrians at all, and pedestrians cross the street wherever they want. It is actually pretty scary and I am slow at crossing. There are eleven official languages in South Africa, so there is no easy way to try and understand what is being said around you. Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa in addition to English are the most common, and Xhosa is my favorite because it incorporates three different types of clicks in the language. The word Xhosa itself is said with a click, but there is no way I can try to transcribe it here.

A lot of what I have been doing so far is the hand-holding orientation stuff that they probably do everywhere, and it is nice because it is easy. On Sunday, everyone in the program (approximately 400 international students this semester) was taken on a guided tour to Cape Point and some other notable locations. Everyone packed onto tour buses and went down the peninsula near Cape Town. The tour guide told us a lot of the history of South Africa from the Dutch arrivals to the Boer wars and apartheid etc, and pointed out all the evidence of this history, which really is wherever you look. There is an old Dutch castle in the middle of town, right next to district 6 which is one of the many places the white people kicked out the blacks and coloureds during apartheid so they could live there. The Bo Kaap area is where all the people of Malaysian and Indonesian descent (who used to be slaves) are centered. These buildings are bright colored and there are a few mosques over there. The Parliament building and the President’s office are only a few miles away from the Victoria and Albert Waterfront, where many upscale shops and restaurants are located, and next to that is the construction of the 2010 World Cup stadium, which still looks like is has a ways to go actually. Continuing on down the coast are many expensive houses right next to the water and are situated on the slopes of Table Mountain so nearly every one has a view of the water. These houses are owned mostly by white people, and you definitely don’t see as many black people just walking around like in the city centre. Right after the end of apartheid and the beginning of democracy, there was a lot of upheaval in the country, which of course affected the strength of the rand. In the mid-90s, there was 14 rand to one US dollar, so it was very cheap for foreigners to buy up all of this beautiful property. This is clearly messed up for so many reasons. I guess it is a wise investment, but there is no possible way that the people who had been oppressed by their government for so long in so many ways could ever afford to own a piece of their country and land that they were forced off after the end of apartheid, and here a bunch of foreigners can do so without a dent in their pockets. These absolutely gorgeous beaches and properties run far down the Western coast.

There is much more that has happened so far, but my house has decided that tonight it is throwing it’s first party, so I have to go and force myself to socialize. I am living in Charlton House, which is apparently quite notorious for being a party house. Right now we have 20 people (I think) living here, but that number could easily be tripled as the place is so huge. Only a couple people are sharing a room, and every room has a bathroom with a shower. I have two sinks in my bathroom, and my room has a wonderful balcony with a view of Table Mountain. One guy has a Jacuzzi in his, some people have fireplaces, we have a house cat (who is so cute but apparently gets a new name every quarter, and we are taking suggestions…), a maid, and a guard at nights. There are two gates to the front door, and security screens on every door and window. I guess this house used to be a hotel or something. The rent is extremely cheap for everything that is included. It’s less than $500 USD a month, which is unbelievable. It’s honestly tempting to think about buying a place here, because Cape Town is truly one of the most beautiful places on this planet without a doubt.

View of Table Mountain and UCT (main buildings are on the upper left) from Tugwell dorms, where we stayed for two nights.

Balcony outside of my room

Sorry for being so slow with this blog. There is so much going on, but I will do my best to keep at it. Bye for now!

One Day Til Lift-off

So, tomorrow I begin the 28+ hour trip to Cape Town, which is undoubtedly the longest and most uncertain of my life so far. I have only been to Florida and Nevada (which hardly counts) prior, so this is a huge deal for me.

Anyway, ignoring all my nerves and worries at the moment, it is defintiely exciting. I will be living in an old Victorian mansion in Cape Town for the next 5 months, along with 21 other people. 21 people in one house! I can't really imagine, but I am getting my own room, so that's good.

Instead of explaining too much history or stats on Cape Town or South Africa right now, here are some links that can do that for me:

http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/Pages/default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa

http://www.southafrica.net/sat/content/en/us/home

I will no doubt be learning more about the country when I am there, so I don't want to give a huge lecture right now. If you don't know already, there was a system of racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-Europeans known as apartheid in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. Apartheid is still a recent memory for South Africans, and many inequalities from that era still exist. I highly reccomend the film Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony which is about music and revolution from apartheid. The link to the movie is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9BXqbxC9tA

Oh and I ordered some rand, the currency of South Africa, through my bank, and it's really pretty! I only have the 200, 100 and 50 rand notes right now, but I sure the rest of the currency is just as awesome. Right now (because currency values fluctuate so often) 1 ZAR (South African rand) = 0.12 USD (United States dollar), or 1 USD = 8.23 ZAR. That's a pretty sweet exchange rate, so I am looking forward to that!

Back of rand

Front of rand. The 10 rand note has a green rhino, and the 20 rand note has a brown elephant. All of these animals make up the "Big Five" wildlife species of Africa.

I have two huge, 32" pieces of luggage that are only partly full so I can bring back tons of stuff. Right now I am scrambling to get everything together, both physically and mentally, and I think the physical part is coming along better.

Well that's it for an introduction for now. I need to print out my boarding tickets, and I need to calm down a little too!