Photos posted!
Hello!Sorry for the huge lag between posts, but my camera has glitched out on me and I am not sure how to fix it here, so I have been struggling with the photo aspect. I am trying to borrow others, but it has been annoying, and I have been really busy with the last bits of school as well, so I have not done many exciting things in recent days. Excuses, excuses I know this is annoying for the curious readers and I do apologize. Don't worry though, I will eventually post as much as I can, especially when I get back to the States.
Here is a quick update on the things that have happened in the last couple of weeks that I can remember offhand:
SHAWCO ended, and the ARTS group held an exhibition of the things the kids had been working on this semester. Normally, I went to Manenburg Primary on Tuesdays to help the kids with general arts and crafts activities, but then not enough volunteers came after a while, so I had to go on Fridays instead. On Fridays, volunteers helped the different age groups of kids to organize a dance, song, or other performance for an exhibition on October 24th. It was really hard to get the kids to focus on anything, but that is to be expected with kids I guess. The exhibition was held on a Saturday and turned out to be really fun even if it was pretty disorganized. The parents were invited, but not many showed up, which is unfortunate, but we aren't sure how many of them actually even knew about it. For me it was kind of annoying that I came into the project so late because I didn't get to connect with the kids that much, and the grade 3-5 boys that I was working with were pretty much just written off by most other people for being too unruly, so they weren't given much attention in preparing for the exhibition. They were basically given drums at the last minute and told to play something. SHAWCO is a great program that has been around for 60+ years and has great resources available, but without more involvement and organization, it really suffers. Someone mentioned that volunteering should be mandatory at UCT, and I completely agree with that considering there are third world conditions literally a few kilometers from the campus. UCT is situated at the base of Table Mountain where it is protected and lush and beautiful, but it is so removed from the reality of the conditions of most of the people in the city, and it seems a little irresponsible for the supposedly "best university on the continent" to be this way. I am just a little disappointed in the amount of community service by most of my peers I guess, and I am also a little disappointed in myself that I did not try harder to do more. That is really my only regret about my stay here.
Here are some more images of the townships by the school.
Enough with the downers. The house that I am living at, Charlton House, has a reputation for being a big party house, especially for Halloween. With 20 people living in such a huge place, it makes sense and we were definitely excited about Halloween, but there was a lot of talk leading up to the party and the expectations were a bit intimidating. South Africa has essentially only learned about Halloween from the foreigners, especially the Americans because we do it best it is an undeniable fact, so they don't really have Halloween stores or decorations and things like that. But the house pulled our resources together and found some fake cobwebs, a few signs, some orange streamers, and massive amounts of black garbage bags to cover the walls. The decorations looked great, the costumes were creative, we got a dj (sort of - long story) and a huge amount of people came. A unique aspect of our party was the kumquat shots. Thanks to my good friend Debo G, I am obsessed with kumquats and have introduced many a newbie to them here. One of these noobs decided that it would be awesome to inject the little orange fruits with vodka or another liquor and call them kumquat shots. Somehow (it is still mostly a mystery) the day of Halloween a housemate found a massive amount of kumquats which I hadn't seen in grocery stores for weeks, and large syringes with which to inject the cane vodka. A system was formed and we made a huge bowl of these things, which did not hold very much alcohol, but the novelty of the idea was ingenious and I am so happy that it actually happened. I dressed up as a "gold digger." I was basically a South African gold miner with the blue worker's jumpsuit that a lot of them wear, a headlamp, "dirt" (brown eyeshadow), a cardboard and foil pickax, and gold shoes and gold jewelry. So it was kind of a subtle double costume thing. And if I wanted to BS, I would say that it is a commentary on the inequality between the actual process of mining (which sucks a lot) and the product. But yeah mainly I just wanted a reason to buy a blue suit, because literally all the construction workers that I have seen in Cape Town and around South Africa have these bright, royal blue uniforms and I wanted one. And there are a LOT of construction and road and I guess you could say "blue suit" workers (instead of blue collar haha I know I am clever) in this country and you can probably guess that nearly all of them are black. So there is another tangent for you.
Here's the outside of my house:
Before everyone came.
I just came back from a 5 day trip on the Garden Route, which is what they call the coastal region of the Western Cape. It was beautiful and the weather was much better than if we had stayed in Cape Town, which apparently rained for three days straight. Some of the activities I did were cave adventuring (Cango Caves), ostrich farm (some people rode them), monkey safari, bungy jumping off the highest single span bridge in the world, lounging and watching surfers at one of the best surfing spots in the country (J Bay), and lots of driving (1200 km at the very least). Got to know some of my housemates better and the country as well, which is so very beautiful.
Um so those are the major things off the top of my head at the moment, but I sure there are things that I am forgetting. I will work on getting photos on here asap, because personally I know they are the most interesting part of a blog. I will be seeing my homies in the States soon! I am definitely ready for seeing my friends and family, but I am going to miss this place so much. It sucks that it is 10,247 statue miles away! If anyone has some frequent flier miles they need to use, they would not be wasted on a trip to anywhere in Southern Africa because there is something for everyone.
Oh and to answer a question that was posted to me a long, long time ago, the pizza here is consistently of a very high quality. Even fast pizza, or chain pizza places, are more gourmet than in the US. And really, food here is so cheap, so I have been eating almost too good here. At restaurants, food that you could get here in the US for $15-20 ranges from R50-70, which is like $7-10. Awesome. It is going to be so hard to come back and pay so much for food ack! A lot of people here have gotten into wine big time, because a lower but still pretty good quality wine is about R25 a bottle ($3.50). Yeah you can get the two-buck chuck from Trader Joe's (which I miss!) back at home, but the quality is far inferior. Wow I am great at tangents, but yeah South Africa is great - you should be here!
Here are some more shots of Cape Town:
