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!