Spring Vac is Here!

I have officially reached the halfway point of the UCT semester. I am not yet halfway through my visit, since we have a month of exams, but the academic classes are 50% finished. I feel so accomplished!

Spring Vac has arrived! (Yes, spring break in August/September. Cool, huh?!) Many of the computer labs are closing and I'm going on a big and exciting trip (more details when I return), so I won't be posting for the next week or two. I'm sorry that I'll be so out of touch, but I promise to write long entries on my spring vac adventures when I get back! Stay tuned for more updates, but until then: mum's the word!

Slang Dictionary

I've been trying to get the hang of South African slang. Here are a few of the things I've figured out since I've been here:

"Braai" - Cook out or barbecue, always involving copious amounts of meat - this can be a noun, as in "We're having a braai on Friday," or a verb, as in "What should we braai?"

"Cheers" - Like aloha in Hawaii, this means both hello and goodbye, though it is most commonly used as an exclamation upon parting

"Howzit" - This is a greeting. Although it looks like a question, it is actually a statement and if you answer it with "fine" or a similar adverb, locals look at you like you're a martian.

"Is it?" - This, like howzit, isn't really a question. South Africans use this phrase to fill the space where Americans would say "Really?", "Seriously?" or "Go on."

"Just now" - This implies an ambiguous period of time. If someone says, "I'll be there just now," this could mean 5 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, or even a few days.

"Now now" - A variation on "just now," this phrase implies more immediacy, but still bears no specificity about the interval of time.

"Petrol" - This is gasoline. If you say gas, people think you're talking about a bodily function.

"Roibos" - A type of tea available only here, which comes from a red bush (Roibos is Afrikaans for "red bush," how original!)

"Full stop" - Period, as in the punctuation mark, or a signal of finality or arrival at a destination.

"Boerworst" - This is a type of processed meat, much like a thin, spicy Bratwurst.

"As well" -(Note that "as" is stressed, rather than "well") - This phrase is tacked on at the end of sentences where Americans would say "too".

"Vac" - An abbreviation of the word "vacation", this is how students refer to breaks.

"Marks" - Grades

"College" - High school, or secondary school

"Varsity" - University - Using "college" to refer to "university" causes great confusion!

Conquering Table Mountain

On Saturday, Jenny and I set out to climb Table Mountain. There are lots of trails up the mountain, but we chose the Platteklip Gorge trail. The trail was more vertical than horizontal and we spent over two hours clambering up the rocks toward the top. We had beautiful weather for the hike, as well, with clear, sunny skies and temperatures in the upper sixties.

In order to get to the trailhead, we called a company called "Rikki's Taxi". This was an experience in and of itself. Rikki's Taxis are a mix between a pickup truck and a van. While they look like pickups, there is no separation between the cab and the bed. Instead of an ordinary truck bed, the back has benches along the sides and a roof. Passengers ride on these benches, so they are rotated 90 degrees from the traffic and hold on tight, since the benches have no seatbelts. The top half of the back is open, allowing passengers to look out at the drivers behind, who stare into the Rikki as though it is a circus tent. Definitely a fun and unique experience.

Platteklip Gorge was formed by water dripping down that part of the mountain for thousands of years. Thus, as we climbed up the gorge, we were surrounded by moving water. There were drips running down the sides of the rock on either side of us, which gathered into rivulets, streams, and even small waterfalls as they cascaded down the slope. Along the trail are lots of low bushes and ground plants. There are even several types of flowers that sprout up between the rocks on the trail, so the brown and gray rocks are dotted with yellow, pink, and purple blossoms.

As we climbed, we were passed by other hikers going both up and down the trail. The other climbers were all very friendly, smiling and wishing us well as we made our trek. We chatted briefly with a man from England who is spending five weeks vacationing in South Africa. We were joined in the last stretch of about fifteen minutes by a man who has climbed before and encouraged us to "keep going!" as we trudged up the last hundred meters.

When we finally reached the top, we felt incredibly accomplished. We hugged, despite the incredible amount of sweating we'd done, and began to look around the top of the mountain. To give you some idea of the location, Table Mountain is located literally in the center of Cape Town, at the base of a small peninsula. From the top of the mountain, you can see beaches on both sides, Robben Island in the harbor, the Waterfront, the Twelve Apostles (mountains that run down the peninsula), and Cape Point. We walked around on top for a bit, just to enjoy the view and look down on where we had come from. Only from that sort of height can you fully comprehend the sheer size of the city. It was amazing!

After looking around and taking tons of pictures, Jenny and I sat down to eat the apples and crackers we had packed for a snack at the top. As we were doing this, however, large rodents began to stalk us. There is a kind of rodent about the size of a beaver that is common atop Table Mountain. It looks like a hamster, but is actually related somehow to the elephant. In any case, these creatures obviously expect to be fed by tourists, so the little buggers surrounded the bench we were sitting on, then started closing in on us. A couple of them even came close enough to touch us, so we decided to put off our snack until we reached the bottom of the mountain.

Having exhausted ourselves on the climb up, we decided to take the cableway down. The cableway, which was based on a Swiss design, takes about four minutes to take passengers down the mountain. It has large, round cars with huge windows. As the car travels down the mountain, the floor rotates, allowing all the passengers to see out every side of the car during the descent. It is a really cool ride, though I was glad we hiked up.

So in one afternoon, I rode in a crazy open-backed taxi, hiked up a mountain, looked over the city, was stalked by R.O.U.S.'s (Rodents Of Unusual Size, for those of you who aren't familiar with The Princess Bride) and rode a Cable Car down a mountain. Now if only I knew how to get rid of spam in my blog comments...

This Old House

No, this entry has nothing to do with Bob Villa or his PBS show, sorry. This entry was actually inspired by my friend Caleb, who blogged a few weeks ago about his new apartment and the history there.

I'm staying in a 150 year old Victorian house with 12 other study-abroad students. I live in a double-room with a girl named Sarah from the University of Denver. Our room is in the "basement" of the house, a room about 5 steps down from the main level of the house, off the back of the kitchen.

The house, probably because of some combination of age and student residents, has a few problems. For instance, the roof leaks in two places when it rains hard. One of those places is in the center of my bedroom, so I get to sleep to the lovely dripping noise of water hitting the pan in the middle of our floor. The house wasn't built with warmth in mind, so it gets very drafty. The wind pours through the cracks in between the bottoms of the doors and the floor, as well as whistling through loose window panes. I also have yet to encounter a sink that didn't have a slightly drippy faucet.

I'm not sure quite how, but we also managed to break our washing machine, which resulted in tons of water leaking out of the machine. My housemates and I fought a losing battle attempting to catch the streams of water in pots and trashbins, then when that failed, wiped it up with mops and swept onto the porch with brooms. You can just imagine me standing in our kitchen sweeping rivulets of water out the back door of our house, right?

There is only one kitchen for all twelve residents, which also presents a problem. For the three hours around lunchtime or dinnertime, the kitchen is crowded with people, all stepping on each other and reaching around one another's arms trying to use the one sink and one stove in that room. You can also imagine, I'm sure, the piles of dishes that accumulate when 12 students with no dishwasher all conclude that "someone else will do it".

The house has some lovely nineteenth century quirks as well. The floors in the main area of the house are lovely, shiny-scrubbed hardwood floors. The house is marked with incredibly high ceilings, too, so footsteps echo through the house like stones down a well. Many of the rooms have secret back doors, either into the back yard, the overgrown side yard, or the mysterious courtyard. The courtyard, as we discovered in our second week here, actually attaches to a garage, which has two cars in it that are completely foreign to us. We have no idea where the cars came from, though we assume they belong to our landlord, Peter.

By far the most interesting problem with the house, though, is the power. There is one set of outlets in the house that, if used, automatically blows the fuse for the entire back half of the house. We also have another essential kitchen outlet that sometimes causes the fuse to blow as well. Instead of just resetting, however, the fuse sometimes refuses to stay on, leaving the back half of the house in complete darkness for hours on end. The light in the living room is also slightly possessed. It is on a dimmer switch, but it likes to dim, brighten, flicker, and occasionally impersonate a strobe light just for fun when no one is near the switch.

Ah, the eccentricities of an old house. It presents its own unique challenge, since you never know what might go wrong or what strange secret it may reveal next. At least we can never get bored of it!

Poetic Night Out

I went to a poetry reading last night. It was at a small coffee shop/bar/restaurant in a nearby suburb. The atmosphere was very welcoming and relaxed. All the people there for the poetry reading (about thirty people) crowded into what looked like the parlor of the old Victorian house-turned-restaurant.

The first half of the evening featured a woman from South Africa who shared poems she had written since she was sixteen. She told a little about her progression as a writer, about the four years she had spent working in America, and about the stage of her life she's in now. Her poems were incredible, some were really powerfully political, some showed teenage angst, some showed the disillusionment of nearing middle-age, several were feminist, and a few were light and funny. She had one that blasted American media and attitudes and the mixed messages they cause, which was particularly interesting because it showed the perspective of a South African woman in America to me, an American woman in South Africa.

After a short break, there was an open-microphone session, when anyone who wished could perform poems. It was amazing the diversity of poets and poems shared. A blind man shared a poem about his grandfather's death. An Asian woman read about the miscommunications between women and men. A black woman who studies at UCT did some freestyle poetry that had such amazing rhythm that it bordered on rap music. An older gentleman shared a poem about a stained suit jacket and the stories it told. A young woman spoke about her desire for love and acceptance. An older woman presented poetry about the beauty she sees in nature. All of the poets were recieved with enthusiasm and warmth by the audience, which was clearly a community of friends. It was an incredible experience to see such diverse people sharing their talents and emotions. I felt privileged to be present in such a place.

Left Behind

There's something about knowing that everyone at home is heading off to school that makes me feel a little left out and homesick. It's silly, I know, since I'm in an AMAZING place and having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but the idea of everyone moving back to school and getting ready for a new semester makes me sort of wish I were there.

I read about three of my friends moving back to school today. I, for one, hate moving all my stuff into a new place and having to set everything up and find plugs and things all over again. Yet the idea of everyone doing those things without me, of all of my friends from school greeting each other and swapping summer stories and lugging their possessions up staircases, makes me really sad. I wish I could be there, just to see everyone again!

It's sad to realize that for the first time in 3 years I won't be welcoming freshmen to the greatest dorm on earth; there will be strangers living in what was, for 3 years, my room. Not that I'm really attached to the tiny, un-air conditioned room with the perpetually sticky floors and the lousy lighting, but it's still hard to imagine someone else living there. I hope they're nice, though, and that they like it. For those of you who are still there, you'd better keep the FARC cool, even without the now-departed "Elder FARCers"!

To everyone moving back to school and getting ready to start the semester: Good luck with all your hauling, shopping, and preparations, and have a great semester!

This Place is for the Birds

The birds on the UCT campus are zany. The campus is pretty densely packed and there are lots of paved areas where people eat outside. In addition to the students everywhere there are birds doing strange things all over the place. For those of you who have, like me, been annoyed by the squirrels at Mizzou, these birds are much, MUCH worse!

First, there are the African geese. In order to understand the abnormality of their presence, allow me to explain that there are no bodies of freshwater on or near campus. The closest things to goose habitats are the small fountains and large puddles on campus, with the ocean across town as the nearest large body of water. The geese, however, have found a home on campus. Today as I was making the hike up the hill, I saw three geese on the top branches of an evergreen tree honking loudly at each other. It was a really amusing picture to watch these large birds on flimsy branches making all sorts of racket.

Next, there are the blackbirds. I don't really know what kind of birds they are, but wherever there's food, these birds congregate. They remind me of seagulls because they eat ANYTHING. I've seen them eating apples, french fries, crumbs, orange peels, random bits of sandwich, leftover Chinese food, leftover Indian food, and they even drink spilled coffee off the sidewalk. In addition, the like to use the fountain on campus as a giant birdbath, which is pretty funny to watch.

The most annoying birds on campus, though, are the pigeons. Pigeons are, to quote my father, urban turkeys. They're fat, slow birds that are often unable to fly due to their incredible girth. The ones on our campus have a greater color range than I've ever seen, including gray, brown, tan, white, black, and even a few that look sort of reddish. The pigeons have similar eating habits to the blackbirds, so no food is safe from them.

The pigeons, however, have made inroads where the other birds haven't: the pigeons have gone inside. The doors to the social sciences building are always standing open, so the opportunity was there, I suppose, but the pigeons have taken to living, eating, and flying around inside the large open spaces of that building. I'll be sitting on the stairs inside eating lunch with my friends, and pigeons will be swooping just inches above our heads. They threaten to steal your lunch if you look the slightest bit distracted, and they have even begun infiltrating the lecture halls. In the lecture halls on the second and third floors, pigeons actually fly around the students heads during class. I'm always concerned that I'll be inside, minding my own business, and have a pigeon fly over me and poop on my head.

The birds, I suppose, are a risk of going to school on an urban campus like UCT. Still, I don't think I'll ever get used to that look in a pigeon's eye when it is threatening to steal my lunch.

Women's Day and District 6

Yesterday, August 9, was Women's Day in South Africa. Women's Day is a national holiday in South Africa, so everyone gets out of work or school in order to celebrate females. I, of course, think this is a fabulous idea. In addition to the joy of having a day free of classes, I also received a free flower from the grocery store when I went to get bread. I celebrated being female by cooking a meal and sharing it with a male friend of mine. Ah, well, so much for full emancipation. It was, however, better than eating toast. Happy (Belated) Women's Day!

I spent this afternoon going to visit the District 6 Museum in downtown Cape Town. The museum is dedicated to a neighborhood that was a mixed-race neighborhood, largely housing "black and coloured" families, until the 1940's, when the Apartheid government named it a "white only area" and started a program of forced removals and bulldozing that cleared the area of blacks by 1968. The museum is an attempt to recognize and remember the community feeling of the area and provide a place for the former residents and their families to be remembered.

The museum features not only historical writings and quotes, but tons of photographs, artifacts, and lots of art and poetry by people who lived in the area. The main floor of the museum is covered in a canvas with a map of District 6 painted on it, on which former District 6 residents have marked their homes and the businesses they recall. There are mosaics throughout the museum that are a tribute to the broken community and broken possessions from the destruction of the buildings. There was also a mural being painted on one wall that showed people and things that District 6 represented. My favorite piece in the museum, however, was a sort of book that one former resident had put together that featured pieces of fabric with texts from the Bible printed on them, onto which shapes and words like "justice", "wisdom", and "love" had been sewn.

The museum, as well as the area it commemorated, reminded me oddly of FARC. (FARC, for the uninitiated, is the Fine Arts Residential Community where I lived for my first 3 years of college.) The sense of community that was present in District 6 is the same sort of feeling that pervades the FARC. The noise, different smells, and mixes of people and goods also reminded me of the diversity and unceasing activity of FARC. Most of all, the art and poetry used in the museum to capture the community feeling and the brokenness of District 6 struck me as similar to the forms of expression FARCers prefer. While I would never belittle the experiences of the District 6 residents by comparing their experiences to a college dorm, the similarities were fascinating.

Power Troubles

All of my classes for today were cancelled because power is out on most of Upper Campus. I don't have any idea why the power failed, all I know is that the electricity went off in the buildings where I have my classes. It's a rather cloudy day, so it was too dark in the rooms to have class. As I was discussing this with some of my classmates, one girl said, "This is so third world!" as she began sending a text message on her cell phone. I thought about it for a minute, then disagreed. "Third world" would be not having power at all, and she'd have a rock in her hand instead of a phone.

The situation reminded me of the power outages a few years ago on the east coast of the U.S. To name a more recent example, I could point to my home town in January of this year when a huge ice storm knocked out power for several days. Power outages often occur in the U.S., albeit usually caused by natural disasters of various sorts.

While I don't find this power outage strange, I do find the South African power system a little... quirky. In many areas of Cape Town, power is prepaid. You put Rand in for your power, then when the money runs out your power shuts off immediately. Some homes have the U.S.-style billing, but the prepay system has been implemented to keep people from getting into debt. Cell phones work the same way: you purchase minutes and enter them into your phone, then when they run out you lose the ability to make outgoing calls until you purchase more minutes.

This left me with a really amusing image: the University on prepaid power. I can just imagine classrooms full of students during finals week and all of a sudden the Rand runs out on the University account and everyone is plunged into darkness mid-essay. A University employee, probably somebody in lower-level administration, is then seen running down the mountain toward the local gas station to put more Rand on the University account. I'm sure that isn't the way it actually works, but I really like the image!

Fences

Walking down the streets in Cape Town you see endless walls and security fences. Every single house has an enormous wall or a giant wrought iron fence or a hedge with a chain-link fence in the middle. The walls and fences are all topped with metal spikes or barbed wire or razor wire. In the U.S. this type of security would only be around military compounds and high-voltage power stations, but here it's around every house. While I realize that the purpose is to keep thieves out, it seems like more of a social barrier than anything. It's as though the people with money are trying to insulate themselves against the outside world. They stay inside surrounded by huge walls and fences so they don't have to look at the poverty and need outside. Surrounded by fences and barbed wire you begin to feel as though you're living in a prison rather than a house. All the wealthy people living in their gilded, barbed wire cages.

I can't discount the value of security, though. Four people from my program have been mugged since we've been here. A woman was mugged a few days ago as she was walking the same route that I walk two days a week to go work at SAEP. Beggars come to our gate several times a week asking for money or food and I walk past homeless people on the way to the grocery store and the restaurants in my neighborhood. It's just sad that socio-economic conditions here are so stratified that these situations occur.

Mixing 2 Great Things

Check out the article HERE.

A little context:
The Springboks are the South African National Rugby Team. That's right, enormous, tough rugby players talking about Harry Potter. Not only that but one of the players mentioned, Tondi, is an acquaintance of mine and a really good guy. The whole article, which was reprinted in The Varsity, the UCT newspaper, made me really excited.

Kid Stuff

I had my first workday in the SAEP creche yesterday. I am volunteering with three other American students in a creche that has 192 children on the roll, though there are never that many there at once. I entered the creche expecting to be told what I could do to help. The days have so little structure, however, that we couldn't just step in and help with activities, there were no activities to help with. The only evident structure to the afternoon was which times the children were to be outside and when the were to be sent inside.

When we first entered, the kids were all inside eating their snack. As soon as we sat down with them, we were swarmed with curious children. I ended up doing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" with about six kids, then counting to twenty in English repeatedly and doing hand clapping games. I found myself surrounded by seven pairs of big brown eyes and 14 tiny hands all desperate to touch, hug, play with, and understand this peculiar person in their midst.

After about 20 minutes of inside time, the staff herded the kids outside. Despite the language barrier (the kids speak only Xhosa), we taught them "Duck, Duck, Goose". That entertained them for about 20 minutes and, after unsuccessful attempts to do "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" and "Red Rover", we ended up simply being clobbered by children all trying to hug us and shake our hands and have us swing them around in circles.

By the time we left, the three of us were determined to be prepared next time. We're going to buy art supplies and balls (they have no toys to speak of) and plan activities for the next time we go. We're hoping to learn a few phrases in Xhosa and to teach the kids a few words in English as well, since most of the children we're working with will be starting school next year.

I decided to unwind after this crazy afternoon by going to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with some of the girls from my program. Going to the movies here is a different experience from going to movies in the states. Rather than buying tickets, then entering the theater and selecting seats, movie tickets here are sold for specific seats. When you purchase your ticket, you are asked where in the theater you'd like to sit. You have to make sure that you arrange for seats near the people with whom you're watching the show. In addition, many of the movies here are way behind their American release dates. While blockbusters like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Fantastic Four" come out the same time as in the U.S., lower budget films like "In Good Company" and "The Longest Yard" haven't arrived in theaters here yet. The movie was enjoyable, though, and it was nice to have a girls' night out instead of sitting in the house reading articles for class.

Ordinary Day

Each morning I wake up at about 8:30, always before my alarm. I do a little Bible Study while I eat my breakfast, then I walk resolutely out the front door and let myself out the security gate, stealing a glance up at Devil's Peak to see whether I'm going to get rained on.

Once outside the gate, I trudge the five blocks and 280 stairs up the hill to Upper Campus for whichever class I have that day. I actually counted, so I know that there are 280 steps. It's like starting your day with 15 minutes on the stairmaster. I'm always reminded of the line from Legally Blonde, "Exercise produces endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands!" Mostly the exercise on the way up to class produces sweat, so I sit in my classes wondering how bad I smell, but perhaps the endorphins will make up for the stench.

After class I usually grab lunch from one of the sidewalk vendors on campus, then walk back down to Middle Campus to check my mail. From there I walk all the way to Lower campus for computer lab time, grocery shopping, studying, SAEP, or whatever other things I need to do.

Sometime between 4 and 7 I usually get hungry, so I cook myself dinner. Now, when I say I "cook myself dinner", I really mean that I scrounge whatever I got at the grocery store. I dislike cooking and it's time consuming, so I eat toast every day, often with fruit, soup, or cheese. Toast, however, is the staple of my diet: toast with Nutella, toast with peanut butter and raisins, toast with peanut butter and jelly, or toast with jelly and butter. In theory I could actually cook something more involved, but that would be much too complicated.

After dinner is more reading for my classes, usually interrupted by conversations with my various housemates as they arrive, cook, eat, and complain about studying. Sometimes we watch movies on someone's laptop or read things that don't have to do with class. Whenever we get tired, we meander to our own rooms and head for bed.

That, with some variation, is a typical weekday for me. Lots of stairs and lots of toast. Ah, the joys of being a student.