Caught in Between

Hello friends,

In the spirit of the New Year, even though this is an old blog, I thought I’d make some resolutions.

are you not making resolutions? shame.

This is my first time back at Hopkins since last spring, and I want to make the most of it. Terrifyingly, this is the beginning of the end of my time here (countdown: 3 semesters) and even if I try to avoid thinking about it, the stacks of job applications, GRE books, and general proof of real life are everywhere I go these days.

maybe “be neater” should be one of my resolutions.

As I mentioned before, I’m now back on campus, settling into a charming (read: old) apartment on North Charles Street. My roommate Laura and I are finding out about fun things like electricity bills, parking tickets, and painting. A crash course in real life living.

But before I get too carried away talking about my apartment, though (more to come on this topic later), I’ll dive right into my resolutions.

1. Get organized at the beginning of the semester (no buying notebooks in the third week of classes). This should help with….
1.5 Keep up with reading for classes so I don’t suddenly have an entire book to read by tomorrow
2. Explore Baltimore (and Maryland) like a study abroad student.
3. Take better care of myself. I’m notorious for being sick…all the time, and after my little bout with pneumonia I’m not eager for this to continue into the new year. Go running at least a few times a week, learn how to cook properly and stop eating soup or cereal three meals a day, drink less coffee etc.
4. Once a week see someone I don’t usually hang out with (coffee with people who actually don’t live in my apartment building?!)
5. Save money for travel.
6. Keep in touch (I’m known amongst my friends at home for being terrible at this, and now I have a whole extra group of friends—from abroad—to keep in touch with as the year goes by)
7. Get. A. Job.
8. Read a book (not a textbook) every two weeks.
9. Do the things at Hopkins I talk about on campus tours but never get around to doing ($10 Tuesdays at Gertrudes, art classes, Peabody)
10. Never complain about being “bored.” Do something. I noticed when I was abroad I never ever said I was bored—and the people who did, freaked me out. Now that I’m back in the States there’s no reason to be bored here either, and I’m going to try to fill my time the same way I did when I was in South Africa—with new things, exciting things, and only the occasional day spent lounging on the couch.

one of the many “not bored” things i’ve done recently. impromptu trip to new york coincided with a huge snowstorm!

Hopefully writing these resolutions out—and online, where they’ll be forever—will help me stick to them. Classes resume on Monday and I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things. And, big nerd that I am, I’m excited to put on my glasses, pack my backpack, and head out for another semester of intellectual stimulation. I’ve never been more of a Hopkins student. And just in time.

Happy 2011! Hope you are happy, healthy, and never bored.

Lauren

hello, all! happy new year

this will be a brief one, as i’m off in the morning to move into my very own off campus apartment with my lovely roommate Laura! naturally i left all the packing to the last minute, so i’m frantically throwing piles of recently folded clothes into duffel bags as it gets later and later. more updates to follow, and perhaps even a cribs tour of our soon to be decorated home. we currently have not a single piece of furniture to our name, so this should be a real adventure.

anyway, i’m just back from a lovely vacation in the great state of Ohio (where Laura lives). my younger sister and i ventured out there several days ago as part of the longest road trip i’ve ever taken. 1000 miles, one speeding ticket, some insane souvenirs and a lot of coffee later, we are all back in NJ, prepping for move in and intersession, and for me at least, a return to hopkins after a nearly 8 month hiatus. wow.

christmas was celebrated here with nearly two feet of snow and a lot of postponed plans. we managed to eventually see the whole family–including five cousins who were born during my time abroad. it was lovely to see everyone and catch up, chat about south africa and hear about everyone’s lives over the past year or so.

as promised, this is a very short post, but ill be back in the next couple of days with pictures of our apartment and a better review of the christmas holiday and (i promise) a more reliable blogging schedule

hope everyone had a lovely new year!

-lauren

So unlike the rest of the SAABers, who are writing to you after an exhausting week of exams, I’ve had a slightly different December. After an amazing weeklong trip to visit friends studying abroad in Paris, I came home with what I thought was a bad cold and turned out to be a nasty case of pneumonia that landed me in the hospital for three nights. I’ve been recuperating at home for the past few days, on a veritable pharmacy of medications, wearing sweatpants round the clock, taking far more naps than I ever thought possible for a 20 year old, subsisting on tea and soup, and I finally seem to be feeling a bit better.

So I apologize for the delay in blogging, but I really didn’t see this one coming! Now that I’m on the mend I’ll recap December for you.

After Thanksgiving, feeling a little stir-crazy at home, I trekked out to Bethlehem, PA to visit one of my best friends from high school. I spent a fun few days there, seeing another college, braving the insanely cold weather, and catching up with a few other classmates also studying at Lehigh.From there I headed down to Baltimore, arriving just in time for Phi Mu winter formal, which I attended as my lovely little’s date (thanks, Becca!). Formal this year was held at the top of the Belvedere, a schmancy hotel in downtown Baltimore with a really cool bar on the top floor. We got to dance the night away and look out on the whole city. It was a great re-entry back into Hopkins, and a really fun evening.

Early the next morning I Bolt Bus-ed up to New York, in time to say a quick goodbye to my family, and headed off to Paris that evening. Needless to say, Paris was beautiful. I arrived on Tuesday morning in a cloud of snow that didn’t stop until late Wednesday night. It was such a wonderful winter holiday, and I had an amazing time tripping around the city with my friend Dani–by now nearly a native Parisienne–as my guide.

I walked along the Seine, pretended I knew French (I barely speak a word), ordered cafe au lait, tried to avoid getting mowed down by bicyclists, and generally just enjoyed the city. It was hard to hold a candle to those cool French girls in the freezing cold weather, but I observed, and I am determined to grow up to be a Parisian woman.

(all pictures from thesartorialist.com)

Paris was a quite a sight, especially in the snow, so I’ll leave most of the describing to the thousands of pictures I took, but before I sign off I just wanted to wish everyone an amazing, healthy, snowy, cozy December and a happy whatever holiday you celebrate!

-Lauren

P.S. CONGRATULATIONS NEWLY ADMITTED CLASS OF 2015. YOUR LIFE IS SO IDEAL RIGHT NOW! MAKE SURE TO CELEBRATE, WE ALL CAN’T WAIT TO HAVE YOU HERE AT HOPKINS.

I’m in Heathrow airport now, waiting out my layover and spending a little bit too much time in my own head. My 12 hour flight from Cape Town turned into a 14 hour adventure, which will be followed by a six hour layover and 7 hours back to New York. Lots of solo travel time, and lots of thinking time.

It feels surreal to be sitting here. Yesterday I was in Cape Town in the height of summer, eating lunch at the beach with my friends, running around to say last minute goodbyes, packing up the last of my belongings. Today I’m sitting in London, it’s raining, the whole airport is decked out for Christmas, and I feel like a confused extra in Love Actually.

I had heard from my friends who left earlier this week that coming home was overwhelming, and I can see how it’s going down that road already, but I’m still not sure quite what to expect. I can tell, just from the past few hours, that it’s going to be really hard though.

Waiting in line to check my bags, I started talking to another American student. It came up (I have maybe 200 pounds of luggage) that I was on my way back from study abroad. “South Africa?” he asked, “That’s crazy. Was it like Blood Diamond?” I put my iPod headphones in. No, it was not like Blood Diamond. UCT is surprisingly not situated in a conflict diamond mine.

I’m exhausted and upset to be leaving South Africa, so my patience for this question was pretty minimal, but I think unfortunately I’m going to have to get used to it, and learn how to respond slightly better

After exams I headed out to Mozambique with my friends Nicky, David and Elias to spend a few days relaxing on the beach. While we were there we happened to meet an American from Nicky’s home town in California, who was just finishing up two years with the Peace Corps in Mozambique.

He had also studied abroad in Ghana. Dreading going home, we asked him “How bad was it?” [to leave Africa]. He laughed. It was awful, he said. Not reassuring, but it was good to hear someone talk about it. We were warned to get ready to answer the question “Why Africa?” a lot, to ease slowly back into American college life, realize that it would take a few months, answer a lot of silly questions, and recognize that most people won’t have any idea what you’ve just done. But the best advice we got was to involve ourselves back home with something that reminded us of this experience. That, he told us, would help you feel less homesick and out of touch.

Right this moment though, that’s not going to help me, and I’ve realized that the next couple of weeks are going to be rough. Coming “home” to a place I haven’t seen in months will be a culture shock, a difficult process, and I’m sure, really emotional. On the plus side though, I know now I have more than one place I can call home. Part of what’s so hard about leaving Cape Town is leaving the home I made there these past few months. As hard as this will be, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

I’m off now to spend the last few hours of my layover preparing for America the best way I know how–Christmas coffee cups at Starbucks.

See you Stateside,

Lauren

Over the next few weeks, Hopkins Interactive bloggers will all be reflecting upon their own decision to enroll at Hopkins. Whether we made that decision last year, or nearly four years ago, we think that our thoughts on the application and decision process might help you too. Good luck!

Being away from Hopkins this semester has given me a lot of time to reflect on my experiences there over the past few years. If I had to guess four years ago where I would be now, I can guarantee you I wouldn’t even be close—I couldn’t have predicted I’d major in Public Health, join a sorority, work in Admissions, or almost any of the things I do now. I didn’t even know where I wanted to go to college, for that matter.

Four years ago, I was just beginning my Junior year at a tiny private school in Summit, NJ. I lived at home with my charming family, and spent my time outside of school singing in several choirs and running on the Varsity cross country team. Today, I’m 20 years old, studying abroad in South Africa, trying to find a summer internship for my senior year at college. I’m moving into an off-campus apartment, decorating it with my roommate, facing small issues like paying rent, getting a job, and making sure my car insurance will be paid when I return to Baltimore. How on earth did I get here? Well let me tell you.

I went to a lovely little all-girls school called Kent Place. I graduated with 56 girls, and though it was a pretty intense place academically, it was so small that you got an incredible amount of attention and support in everything you did. Our sports teams were small, our advisors knew our whole families, and classes were capped at 17. Naturally, the college application process was no different.

graduation, all 56 of us.

Junior year in January, we all met with the college advisors and our parents to chat about what we wanted. Afterwards, I filled out a form (I believe it was the “pink sheet,” all our forms were color-coded), circling my preferences on everything from school size to location, writing the names of schools I’d visited, liked or hated. Two weeks later, I got back a list of about twenty schools my advisor thought I should consider, and what do you know, Hopkins was smack in the middle of that list.

My mom and I planned to visit schools at the end of Spring Break that year. I was dead set on beelining for Washington D.C. where I was convinced I wanted to attend a certain school with a G. My mother, reasonable woman that she is, argued that we should perhaps stop along the way, and imagine that! Baltimore is a good halfway mark.

beautiful hopkins.

Not expecting very much of the visit, and being generally grumpy in the way that sixteen-year old girls are, I agreed to stop in Baltimore. We rolled into Charles Village on one of those beautiful sunny days I now know mean springtime in Baltimore, but it was a surprise to me then. 20 degrees warmer, blue skies, green campus, beautiful brick buildings, I was already coming around to Hopkins before we had even gotten out of the car. We hopped on a tour, finishing at the bookstore where I tentatively bought a sweatshirt. Maybe this place was okay after all.

little did i know this would be my home in two years!

The next day though, I toured that school in D.C. and pushed Hopkins out of my mind entirely. I was infatuated, despite the fact that it had some big dealbreakers in my mental list of college qualities (which need not be named here). I drove home convinced that was the school for me, and more or less forgot about Hopkins for a few months.

Over the summer I worked for a Hopkins alum, and he couldn’t say enough good things about the school. I still wasn’t convinced though, and became generally pretty indecisive about the whole college process. Submitting eleven applications, all turned in on paper because I somehow decided my great handwriting would get me into schools, was a hassle but a necessity given my indecision.

When March rolled around, I weighed my options. It had come down to Hopkins and a few other East Coast schools that I really liked. I signed up for an Admitted Students Day at Hopkins, and on the morning of, drove down to Baltimore insanely early with another Kent Place girl who had been accepted. We convinced her dad to spend the day in the Inner Harbor, and we tackled the Open House solo, feeling grown up, if slightly lost. We attended presentations on psychology, English and Public Health. We peeked into the FFC. We took dorm tours. We bought another sweatshirt. We pretended to be students. We drank coffee at Barnes and Noble and people watched. We met people we knew we could be friends with.

diploma in hand, time to enter the (almost) real world.

I left that day feeling pretty good, and the next day wore my Hopkins sweatshirt to school, albeit inside-out. I hadn’t made the decision yet, and a small all-girls school is slightly nightmarish around college applications. My mind was going at full speed trying to weigh my options. I’ll admit I’m a serious list-maker, and I’d be lying if I said my decision didn’t involve some pro-con lists. Ultimately, though, it came down to the fact that I felt at home at Hopkins, both academically and personally. I knew I would be able to take my interests and run with them, and the school would have the resources to support me. I knew I could live in Baltimore and not get bored after four years. I knew that no matter what I decided to study, Hopkins would have a strong program in that subject. I knew I would end up doing things I could never imagine at that moment. In the end it was these things, more than any Post-it note list, that convinced me Hopkins was the right place for me. At dinner one night with my family I pulled out a computer and we ordered Hopkins gear, most importantly a bumper sticker for my beloved Prius, the subject of my Common App Essay, crucially responsible for getting me into schools like Hopkins. The Prius needed to be included in the decision.

the prius, two years later and with another college bumper sticker.

When I swung through the college advising office around the deposit deadline to inform them I’d decided to go to Hopkins, my advisor smiled and said “I always saw you there!” I scowled at her. Why couldn’t she have told me that sooner?

so thrilled to be going to hopkins!

the "college sweatshirt photo"...for my little sister's graduating class. feeling old.

I needed to come to that decision on my own, though. I needed to find out for myself that Hopkins was the right place for me, and in retrospect I’m so glad she allowed me to do that.

Needless to say, nearly three years later, I couldn’t be happier at Hopkins. The school has grown with me and challenged me over the years, made me into who I am today, and continues to surround me with a fascinating, crazy, amazing group of people who I get to call my peers. The past two years have been an incredible adventure, and I can’t wait to see what the next two will bring when I return home to Hopkins.

-Lauren B.

Sanibonani, Blog Followers

I am writing to you as someone who has officially gone to one of the most dangerous cities in the world. And I loved it. According to various semi-reliable online sources, Johannesburg South Africa is more dangerous than Baghdad, Bogota, and all of Thailand. However, this same website informed me that “going out at night is not recommended”…..in Cape Town. Whoops. I think they might be alarmists.

how dangerous does this look? these beautiful purple trees were everywhere!

Despite the international impression that Joburg is Crime City, SA, I had an amazing weekend. I did, however, make sure not to tell my mother I was there (sorry, mom). My dad got the inside scoop, and we planned to surprise her in the Joburg airport on the layover on their way to Cape Town. Alas, that plan didn’t quite work (more on this later) but I did get to meet up with my Dad on his way.

Before heading to Joburg, I was told by numerous people that it would help me to understand Cape Town better. Not quite sure what that meant, I set off with my friends Avery, Nicky and Mike on a whirlwind three day adventure, unsure of what we’d find in Joburg, but excited to see what all the fuss was about.

Friday morning, at an hour I don’t often like to see (turns out it is light at 5 am though, who knew?) we met up in Mowbray, our little neighborhood in Cape Town, piled into a taxi and headed off to the airport. We all congratulated ourselves on our light packing (backpacks all round) and tried to strategize about our first moves when we got to Joburg.

After a two hour flight we landed in weather nearly twenty degrees hotter than what we’d left in Cape Town, and searched without any success for our hostel’s pick up car. We had given them Avery’s name, somehow failing to realize after four months here that Avery, Lauren, and various other American names (Pearl, Whitney, Courtney, anything slightly gender ambiguous) tends not to translate very well into South African English. We eventually located the man looking for “Army” (Avery?!) and piled into another car, off to our crazy hostel.

Our hostel, Brown Sugar, was the old mansion of a Russian mafia member stationed in Joburg. We got a great four person room in what we can only guess used to be a very fancy car garage. From Brown Sugar we headed off to Parkview to look at some galleries–Avery is completing an independent study in Contemporary South African Art. We got to see some amazing photography exhibits on Joburg and the World Cup, which was a great way to start the trip.

outside the museum: freedom, respect, diversity, democracy, reconciliation and responsibility.

Friday afternoon was a trip to the Apartheid Museum, which was intense, amazing, and an incredibly well done museum. We spent hours there, looking at exhibits that covered everything from Nelson Mandela to Afrikaner nationalism, segregation, political prisoners, the ANC, the Soweto Uprising and the changes after 1994. It was definitely emotionally draining, and overwhelming to take in so much information at once, but it was an incredible museum. I’m glad we got the chance to be there, especially towards the end of our trip, when we know enough about South African history to really understand it.

in the apartheid museum, a view of pre-94 South Africa: “net blankes” (whites only)

Friday evening we called it an early night after an amazing dinner, where we mysteriously got a ride home from our waiter after inquiring if he could call a cab for us. Saturday was jam-packed. We woke up early and headed off to Melville, a cool artsy neighborhood, to have breakfast, and spent the rest of the day on a serious adventure.

me and avery on our bike tour of soweto, and one of the kids we picked up along the way.

After breakfast we headed to Soweto (South-Western Townships) where more than 5 million Joburgers live. We spent the night in Lebo’s Soweto Backpackers, but before that we had an amazing four hour bicycle tour of the township. We saw Orlando West & East, the informal settlements, Nelson Mandela’s house, the Hector Peterson museum, Desmond Tutu’s house, and visited two shebeens (semi-legal township bars, basically off-licenses) where we got to taste traditional township beer, called umqombothi (the Q is a “click” in Xhosa…try pronouncing that one).

Soweto was amazing, everyone was incredibly friendly, and I don’t think I’ve ever met so many people in the space of a few hours. Our guide talked about how in the wealthier areas of Joburg, people were so afraid for their safety that no one was out on the streets, while in Soweto a real sense of community and ubuntu (go to 0:26 to hear Mandela explain the idea) existed, and I couldn’t agree more.

next to Mandela’s house, and the only street in the world where two Nobel peace prize winners live!

The northern suburbs of Joburg were definitely beautiful, with green lawns and sprawling parks, but the streets were deserted and the houses holed up behind high brick walls and electric fences. In Soweto, the people were beautiful. I was taught secret handshakes, kids danced with us in the street and little girls played with my hair, we passed our cameras around, people invited us into their homes for a drink or a chat, and every single person looked up when we rode past and waved, yelling back “hi” in a great imitation of our American accents. I really could have stayed there.

We all felt so lucky to be able to spend the night in Soweto! It’s an interesting position, being a long-term tourist here. A two week trip can’t possibly begin to cover everything you’d want to see here, but people who’ve lived in SA for their whole life often haven’t been to townships or things like Mzoli’s in Cape Town. We’ve gotten the best of both worlds–we’ve been able to really get settled here, we’ve had enough to time to do almost everything we’ve wanted to do, but there’s still a time constraint to put pressure on you to get it all done.

a few more shots of Soweto…

my dancing partner

Saturday night we got to braai with the rest of the people staying at Soweto Backpackers, and then headed back into Joburg after a slight change of plans. We’d met a few American Davidson grads at a music festival a few weeks ago, who are currently living in Joburg to spend a year with Grassroots Soccer, a really awesome program. When we told them we’d be in Joburg, they insisted they take us out and show us around–it was amazing! Joburg is such a diverse, crazy, fun city, and it was so cool to get to go out there. It felt very different from Cape Town somehow.

After all this, it was nice to head back to Cape Town, and even better to see my Dad after such an insanely long time (four months and counting) away from home. I couldn’t help but think of that scene in Love Actually as I sprinted across the arrivals hall in O.R. Tambo airport, all but knocking him over with a hug. It’s been so, so nice to spend time with my parents this past week, and as we speak I’m waiting for them to arrive back from a safari in Kwandwe Game Reserve, out in the Eastern Cape.

shebeen numero dos.

As promised, I’ll explain my mom’s delayed arrival. So it turns out that you need two blank pages in your passport to get on any flight to South Africa. My mom is quite a worldly traveler, and unfortunately, the only member of our family without dual citizenship, so her passport is extra packed. Needless to say, we did not investigate this silly rule prior to boarding the plane, and she had the terrible luck of finding out only as she went to pick up her boarding pass in the airport last weekend. Two days, a trip to the passport office, and an insane level of stress later, she met us in Plettenberg Bay, out on the Garden Route.

In an hour or two they’ll both be back in Cape Town, and we have a crazy-busy week of activities planned (somewhere in there I’ll be taking two final exams as well). I can’t wait to show them around!

I’ve officially passed the very sad marker that I have less than a month left here, and I’m very tempted to make the move many of my friends have made, pushing their flight home later and later, way into December. Quite a conundrum. For now though, I’m busy enjoying my time here, and now now I’m off to collect my parents from the airport.

SIYABONGA,

Lauren

P.s. thanks to my lovely travelers for providing the pictures for this blog

P.p.s. Yebo = Yes, Siyabonga = thanks, Sanibonani = Hello (all in Zulu)

P.p.p.s for those of you who actually know me, as you may have surmised from the pictures, I got my nose pierced recently. When in Africa…

Perhaps you have noticed (or perhaps not) that I haven’t blogged in a while. Where have I been? Well, the past month has been amazing, and amazingly busy.  I’ve gone on quite a few adventures, everything from a township home stay to a weekend-long music festival. There have been birthdays, beach days, a whale festival and some serious travel planning.

camps bay, cape town

Cape Town summer is now in full swing, meaning 75° and sunny is the norm. Heading back to winter will be a real shock to the system. Needless to say it’s been a struggle to stay focused on school, particularly in a city with so much to do outside. We’re surrounded by beaches, there’s a giant mountain in the middle of the city, and a 40 minute train ride will bring you either to more beaches, or beautiful wine country. It’s a tough life but someone’s got to do it.

Now, a bit more on exactly where I’ve been the past month. I’ll start at the very beginning.

After spring break, my program organized a home stay for us in Ocean View, a Coloured, Afrikaans-speaking township about 40 minutes outside of Cape Town. Ocean View was established in the late 1960s, when the apartheid government evicted Coloured South Africans from all the coastal towns in the area. Most residents used to live in Simonstown or Fish Hoek, but they’ve been in Ocean View for the last 40 years.

Unlike some of the other Cape Town townships, Ocean View is mostly made up of permanent residences (i.e. traditional houses, with a foundation). Other townships, Gugulethu and Khayelitsha, for instance, are mostly “squatter” townships, meaning that their houses are made of corrugated metal. Ocean View has about 20,000 people now, a high school, primary schools, churches, shops, basically everything a town should have, except it was all constructed in a matter of months when the government classified the surrounding areas as white in the mid-1960s.

About 75 Americans headed out to Ocean View for the weekend, bringing flowers and baked goods for our host families. I was placed with a really nice couple with two little boys, and twin two-month-old girls. So much fun, and so much babysitting! The sense of community at Ocean View was one of my favorite things about staying there. I’ve never lived close to my extended family, but entire families lived together on the same streets, seeing each other daily, eating and braai-ing together. I must have met fifty cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and little kids who ran around underfoot. It was such a cool weekend and a great experience to see a totally different side of Cape Town.

fellow Hopkins kid, Pearl.

After I headed back from Ocean View, we all celebrated my housemate Whitney’s  20th birthday. The next weekend was a three-day weekend for National Heritage Day (celebrated with a huge braai….I love South Africa). We spent Saturday out at the Hermanus Whale Festival. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and we got to wander around the festival. In the background of all our pictures you can see the whales—they were everywhere! Wandering around the town, I stumbled upon what initially seemed like a scene from a movie—a choreographed dance routine in the middle of the street. It was the Afrikaans equivalent of country music, accompanied by 40-50 dancers, decked out in cowboy hats and boots. Quite an entertaining discovery.

beautiful Hermanus!

After Hermanus was a weekend of exploring Cape Town art galleries with my friend Avery who is studying Art History here.

After galleries was an amazing hike up Lionshead Mountain at sunset, and after that, the highlight of the last few weeks, Rocking the Daisies (are you maybe seeing why my blogs have been delayed?)

Rocking the Daisies, a three-day music festival out in the lovely wineland town of Darling, was insane and amazing. Wecamped (apparently my new favorite South African activity) in tents that were about a quarter of the size you’d want them to be. Despite the incredibly high level of dirt, and overwhelming lack of sleep, it was one of the best weekends ever. I have officially gotten used to South African music, meaning house, electronica or dubstep without any words and the loudest bass you can imagine. It was gorgeous and sunny all weekend, prompting us to spend all of Saturday outside, lying on the “beach” at a lake that was mysteriously in the middle of the wine estate. Rocking the Daisies was also my friend Stewart’s 21^st Birthday, which she celebrated in style.

daisies!

Unfortunately, Rocking the Daisies marked the beginning of the end of classes, meaning it’s time to buckle down, write lots of papers, study for exams, and generally wrap up the semester. As I wrote recently, the end of the semester is a fairly scary concept, but I have some amazing things coming up in the next couple of weeks to distract me. This weekend my parents will be arriving on Sunday afternoon. They’ll be spending two weeks here and we’ll be driving the Garden Route, which I’m so excited for! In between exams and going home I’ll be heading out to Mozambique with my friend Nikki. We’re going to lay on the beach and recuperate from a week of finals. I can’t wait!

off to Mozambique!

-Lauren B.

One of my housemates here, Courtney, volunteers with an amazing program called Youth in Prison (YIP). The other day she came home and relayed the following story to us.

They were talking about the concept of superheroes…and somehow the topic of Angelina Jolie came up.

Superheroes, they decided, were people who helped other people. Particularly in Africa, where a lot of her UN work has been focused, Angelina is a little bit of a charity celebrity. Or, as we might now call it, a charity superhero. The group talked about her, the work she’d done, and about Brad and Angelina as a superhero duo. One of Courtney’s students interrupted though….didn’t she know that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had broken up?

We had not in fact heard that.

As Courtney relayed this story later, we couldn’t stop laughing (more later on the amazing volunteering, but this blog deals with something else). What had happened in our lives that we were getting American celebrity gossip from Capetonian teenage boys?

On the last morning of our holiday in Zambia, we went to the campground office to settle our tabs. Nearly an hour later we returned…there had been a TV at the bar. We sat there transfixed, watching news we couldn’t even decipher. Zambian news, you will probably not be surprised to hear, has very little to do with the news you might be hearing back in the States. Regardless, we couldn’t tear ourselves away. When we tried to recall the last time we had watched TV, we realized it had been (for most of us) in June or July, back in America.

I’m not living in the wilderness here, but I am living in a bubble. I know lots about South African news, particularly Cape Town news, and even more about local neighborhood news. I could tell you a great deal about the recent teachers strikes here, or the hospital strikes in Jo’burg. I could probably tell you more though, about the bickering politicians and the raises the Springbok coaches have been getting.

See, we have an interesting method of getting the news here. Our internet is rationed by the credit, our cell phones are pay-as-you-go, and American newspapers are not readily available. Go on a run, walk, or drive anywhere through Cape Town, though, and you will see broadsheets from the Cape Argus pinned up on lamp posts and bus stops. Mostly in Afrikaans, sometimes in English, and very occasionally in Xhosa, they give you headlines like…

“SAA Prez Owes R25m to Disgruntled Passengers”
“Dagga? What Dagga? Says Movie Star.”
Or this recent gem: “Sex Tape: It’s All Lies! Says Joost”

Needless to say, this doesn’t help me stay up-to-date news-wise. I don’t know who Joost is, for one thing. It is telling that most Americans have only just realized these headlines are not in fact jokes, and actually correspond to real news stories. You can imagine the slightly more risqué ones that I refrained from including here.

We’ve missed out not only on American celebrity gossip and television, but also those slightly more important news venues, like the New York Times. The one paper I do have access to is the Rondebosch Newspaper. Rondebosch, the neighborhood UCT is located in, is a semi-suburb of Cape Town. Accordingly, their newspaper deals with high school sports teams, city hall meetings, and the possibility of repainting the local laundry shop from the bubble-gum pink that residents currently find unattractive, to a less offensive beige. The painting has in fact been carried out, and the girls’ school hockey team is apparently doing very well, but that still hasn’t helped me feel any more knowledgeable.

I’m really starting to feel a little bit confused. My grocery runs now include copies of The Economist, which is doing a lot in the way of staying informed, but made the situation worse at first, as I realized just how much I’d missed out on.

It was nice to take a break from the constant onslaught of information I’d gotten used to at home (helped along by minimal internet usage and lack of cable television here) but I really think I need to ease myself back into the international news scene, and just rely on the Cape Argus headlines for entertainment on my runs from now on.

I hope you’re enjoying your magical wi-fi and English speaking newspapers!

-Lauren B.

P.S. We still don’t know if Brad and Angelina broke up….

Hello again!

Since I last wrote a lot has happened. While other study abroad students have been planning trips to Oktoberfest or Amsterdam, here in Cape Town we’ve already hit the halfway mark of our semester, and celebrated spring break this past week! I had friends jetting off to Johannesburg, Durban, Kruger, and the Garden Route, or slightly further away to Mozambique or Namibia. I went on a 10 day adventure to Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe (in order, below).

It was ten days of beautiful scenery, hot weather, camping, minimal showers, lots and lots of animals, learning how to cook on the side of a truck, and some extreme activities at the end. It was incredible.

We started the trip with a flight to Jo’burg, and a very, very long drive up to Maun, Botswana. We had about 25 of us on a truck, and one of the first lessons we learned was how to put up and take down our giant tents. It looked complicated, and I got smacked a couple of times by giant metal poles swinging back at me, but by the end of the trip we had it down to a science, and could take down our tents in five minutes before the sun even rose. It also turned out that these tents were both mosquito and monkey proof, but more about that later.

This truck was “home” for the past week.

We spent a night in Maun, packed up an even smaller bag than the one we came with, and prepared to head into the Okivango Delta for two days. We switched from a big truck to a slightly smaller safari truck, piled our stuff on board, and drove about four hours further into the wilderness. After about an hour we were off the road, into the National Park, and driving through rivers and lakes that looked much too deep. Once we arrived at the water, it was into a mokoro (a flat boat carved out of a tree) for a three hour ride further into the delta. It was insanely beautiful. Elephants wandered through the grasses, and our mokoro driver showed us how to make necklaces out of lily pads.

Traveling into the Okivango Delta!

Our time in the Delta involved a lot of game walks (basically a safari on foot, very cool but slightly scary at times), animals everywhere and a lot of mokoro-ing. You’re about a six hour boat/walk/drive combination from almost anything, which was incredibly relaxing and forced us all to finally take off our watches and embrace Africa time, which we’d been trying to resist back in Cape Town. Things happen in the Delta (and in general in Africa) on a schedule of now or later, with now being a fairly relative term. It was great to have nothing to worry about except whether to go swimming now or “now now” (slightly sooner than now, could still be in a few hours though).

Hippo friends.

Our only real concern in the delta was the presence of hippos, which despite their fat, jolly appearance, are the most dangerous animals you can encounter. Their jaws open 180 degrees, and though they are vegetarians, they’ll happily chop you in half if you get in their way. One mokoro ride took me rather closer to hippos than I’d ever planned on being. The hippos make a horrible sneezing angry sound when they are displeased, and they were certainly not happy to see us there. Every time they popped up from under the water there were more of them, and they kept getting closer. Though our mokoro driver laughed at us and promised us there was nothing to worry about, he suddenly sped us away (as fast as one can go on a mokoro) all the way back to our campsite. Concerning.

Giraffes and elephants wandered around just near our campsite in the delta.

On our last night in the Delta, we had a sort of concert with the people who lived there. They performed incredible songs in Setswana, while our contribution was the Macarena and the Star Spangled Banner. They definitely won. Bright and early the next morning we started heading back to Maun, arriving after a few mishaps around lunch time, where we took long awaited showers, packed up the truck, and headed north for the Zambia border.

We split the drive to Zambia into two days, and had some adventures crossing the border-we had to station people on the truck in shifts and a man selling curios followed us to our camping site. Once in Zambia we headed for Livingstone and Victoria Falls, a major change from the rest of our trip. Zambia was adrenaline junkie heaven. In the three days that we spent there, I rafted twenty five white water rapids on the Zambezi River and bungee jumped off a bridge over those same rapids. Other kids on our trip walked with lions, zip lined over the gorge, or body surfed the river

On the bungee bridge!

Rafting was insane–maybe even scarier than bungee jumping–but it was so fun. We flipped over, we cliff jumped, people fell out, we spotted crocodiles, we swum a few of the easier rapids. It was an amazing day! Early the next morning, we woke up and took the most absurd taxi ever to the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. The taxi had no door handles, drove off the road the whole way there, and best of all, when we got into the taxi the driver informed me I would have to “crank it.” He then hopped out of the car, popped the hood, and proceeded to fiddle around as we figured out that “crank it” meant I would be turning the ignition. Interesting ride. At the border he then warned us to watch out for backpack stealing baboons. I love Africa.

Amazingly this was not a rapid we flipped on.

Bungee jumping was absurd, and we then crossed the border into Zimbabwe and spent the afternoon there. Zimbabwean currency involves a mixture of US dollars, trading, bartering, and vouchers. We used all of these at the market, and came home with some really great souvenirs. Our last day wrapped up with a boat ride down the river at sunset. What a perfect end to an amazing trip!

Still can’t believe I did this.

We finally found our way back to Cape Town around 9pm on Monday night. It was wonderful to get away from the city for a week and travel, but I missed this place! As our plane touched down at the Cape Town airport and we babbled about how excited we were to be back, the woman sitting next to me asked if this was my first time to Cape Town. My friend Courtney happily informed her that no, we lived here. It felt good to be home!

I’ll be posting again soon with thoughts on being halfway done with study abroad. Can’t believe it!

-Lauren B.