Caught in Between

Let’s try this microblogging thing again. Today is going to be a crazy packed day with hardly any time to breathe so may as well document it! :P

Monday, March 7th:

4:30 am. 4:30 am?? Why am I up? Dang it…I fell asleep in the library…ew…and now it’s 4:30 in the morning. My Spanish essay and my internship application are still not finished and I really feel like a huge loser for falling asleep here…guess I better get started on these things…

7:31 am. Ok finished! The Spanish essay took me way longer than I would have liked it to, but the application wasn’t too bad because I had some drafts already written. Ok time to blow this popsicle joint! I can’t believe I fell asleep in the libs for so long, it’s really embarrassing. I promise I never do this so don’t judge me!!! lol.

8:45 am. I am back at my sunny apartment eating oatmeal, as I get ready to dash to my 9am physics class. I haven’t been there in a long time…like a reallllly long time…so what better day to turn over a new leaf than a Monday? Ok gotta go!

10:11 am. I’m out of physics and I must say I am impressed with myself. After a 2 week hiatus, (that is SO shameful!! I never do that but somehow for the past two weeks, except for one day, I have had some kind of homework or grading that kept me from making it to class. :(  ) I was able to sit in the front row, pay attention and take legible and detailed notes! Go me! Now I am motivated to go to every single class for the remainder of the semester. IT’S HAPPENING.

10:20 am. I am waiting in the AMR II housing office to have a meeting with Andrea, who is the supervisor for Buildings A/B and the AMRs. I’ll be an RA in  one of those lovely dorms next year (YEA!!!) so she wants to meet with the new RAs to get a taste of who we are and stuff. Excited!

10:52 am. It was a nice short but sweet meeting…I saw her weekend liquor confiscation from residents in those dorms…so looking forward to that! lol. But the meeting just made me more excited and grateful to be able to have this opportunity for next yr. Who knows, maybe one of you will be a resident of mine! ;) Now, off to Spanish!

1:44 pm. Ok. So a lot happened since the RA meeting. I had Spanish class and this unit is about crime and gangs… el profesor se rio mucho cuando dije que siempre llevo “pepper spray” en mi mochila…jaja…anyway it was an interesting class and there were more laughs than usual! That’s always nice. After than I rushed to my fav class, Sociology of Disability, and we watched a film about a woman who adopted 13 children, ALL with special needs. One had cystic fibrosis and mental issues, many had missing limbs, one was a burn victim…it was both heartbreaking and inspiring to see how this woman took it upon herself to adopt children that most other people wouldn’t want. We’re gonna discuss on Wednesday so I’m looking forward to that!

Then after that class I had to rush to my academic adviser’s office to pic up a rec letter for an internship…in the process of doing that, I missed the shuttle to my volunteer position with Yo! Baltimore! >.<

So I am now waiting for the 2 pm shuttle. YO! Baltimore is an organization that helps youth aged 16-22 get their GED…and I love it! I convinced my friend to start doing it with me at the beginning of the semester because it was ridiculous for me to be a 2nd sem junior with no steady volunteer position…so I just joined this on a whim and I loveeeeeee it!

4:47pm. Just got back from tutoring. Today we

me as a teacher? remember when you could yearbook a fy yourself..someone did this of me and i thought it was hilarious so i thought i'd share.

actually taught instead of doing one on one tutoring…yep taught as in white board and handouts and stuff. I actually like that A LOT and it’s really making me think about becoming a teacher, either for a couple of years or as a career–not sure yet. I’ve always thought about it but I’ve never really thought about it, lol. It’s different because students in this program are a bit more focused than students in regular school because they’ve made an active decision to come back to learn to get their GED–no one forced them to. So there aren’t really any discipline issues (plus many of them are my age and that would just be weird haha).

Ok I have a Public Health info session meeting to go to now…

5:58pm. Info session over. It was about BA/MHS programs that the Bloomberg School of Public Health has for Public Health studies undergrads…you canbasically do your undergrad degree and a master’s in 5-6 years. I’m eying the one in Epidemiology but we’ll see. Ok I have a SAAB meeting in 2 minutes so I”ll be back!

7:45pm. SAAB meeting over! I love SAAB (we bring you Hopkins Interactive!), I look forward to it on my Mondays because it’s def the coolest and most uni

que thing I do. But nowwww I have to go meet my group project members for my Sociology of Disability class. We have been assigned the task of assessing how disability friendly research labs at Hopkins are. So we somehow got a wheelchair and will now test how easy i

t is for someone in labs to get around.

8:47pm. Ok well that was cool! I learned that I am in huge trouble if I ever need to use a wheelchair because I can’t steer them at all :( Kept crashing into walls. well we found out that the chem lab is def doable for someone in a wheelchair…we’ll test the organic chem lab tomorrow and the bio and physics labs next week.

OK I FINALLY GET TO BREATHE! This was an odd day in that I literally had NO time to just PAUSE and take a breather.

And with that, I’m going to bed soon lol. I am pooped. Yes I am being an old lady tonight.

sleeeeeeeeeeeepy

Thanks for reading yall! :D Don’t stop til you get enough…I love being busy!

-Dominique

hello all!

hope you had a wonderful weekend.

i’m writing to you after a whirlwind week that included lions (phi mu rush) and a bat (no joke) as well as my computer’s hard drive taking a turn for the worse, a big interview, and the (real) start to the semester. phew.

our phi mu mascot, sir fidel the lion.

so to recap….

last week was the beginning and end of formal recruitment period for the sororities on campus. we began on saturday with “ice water” and had several back-to-back days of big events, voting, girl flirting, and generally fairly exhausting, extremely organized socializing. on thursday night we got 38 fabulous new phi mu’s, and i’m so excited to get to know all of them! friday night we had sister dinners, a hilarious and great way to meet all of the new girls. and Lucie Fink, another SAAB-er, is one of our fab new additions.

after a very late rush event, my lovely roommate woke me up to inform me that there was a bat hanging from her ceiling. a bat. i struggled to comprehend what she could mean (8 am practical joke?) but the look on her face confirmed she was quite serious. a few calls to maintenance later, a bat exorcism was performed with a large cardboard box and a broom, while our landlady screamed hysterically (at least it wasn’t in her room).

not the nicest way to start the morning, but it did make for a funny story, and a lot of confused looks. our apartment is otherwise great though, and laura’s mom brought us a couch this past weekend so we now have seating for more than just the two of us. our previous arrangement was fine but resulted in a lot of games of charades and spontaneous dancing, as in any group larger than two or three, it was standing room only. it’s now looking much better and a lot more useful.

last week, though actually the second week of the semester, was for all intents and purposes the real beginning. work picked up, classes ran all the way through the allotted time, meetings began, and the library was filled with more than just people getting coffee.

for my first real week back from abroad, this was a bit overwhelming. between school, rush, preparing for an interview, and fending off bats, i hit the ground running.

crazy busy first week!

i had a very exciting interview for a summer position in washington d.c. this past friday, but it seems like bad karma to give any more details so ill be silent on the subject until my plans are more definite.

on the way to the interview, heading out the door, i decided to print an extra copy of my resume (heeding the career center’s advice). if any of you have a mac you’ll know the significance of what I saw when I opened my computer…the blank white screen with the sad question mark. that, coupled with a crazy clicking noise coming from somewhere inside my laptop, told me i would not be printing my resume anytime soon.

after marinating in its problems for a couple of days, the laptop has been resuscitated by the lovely people at the apple store. luckily they are amazing and i clearly looked pretty distraught, so i now have some/most of my files back, on a brand spanking new hard drive. the casualties were my entire itunes library and all of my pictures from abroad–which to be honest, i would have traded my files from freshman year for, but i didn’t get to choose, despite making puppy eyes at everyone in the store.

my laptop is now the proud owner of a brand new case (just try to break again) and I will be backing up my files much more frequently in future, as my parents kindly pointed out that my external hard drive is actually not a desk accessory.

my phi mu "family"

it’s been a good, if busy, start to the semester, but hopefully this week will be a bit less insane, with a few less woodland creatures in my apartment.

until next time,

-Lauren B

p.s. sorry for the boring pictures this week, as i said, my pictures are all gone!

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

My first attempt at microblogging…I hope it isn’t a failure…

12:00 a.m.: I’m up because I took a really stupid nap from 6-10 pm and now I can’t go back to sleep. And to make things even weirder I fell asleep under my bed on top of my shoes…I think I like the smell of rubber soles. And my hip hurts. Don’t ask…

yea, i fell asleep under there..

1:20 a.m.: Catching up on sending some emails that should have been sent weeks ago. I sent one to my financial aid adviser, who informed me that I was awarded too much aid so they had to take some of it back to preserve funds for other students..although said aid was a merit scholarship I received completely independent of aid need and of the school. From what she said, it looks like I’m gonna lose the battle… but not without a fight!

I just sent some syllabus revision suggestions to an instructor whose course I will be TA-ing next week.

I sent some other random emails and was able to cross a lot of things off my to do list, which feels soooo good :)

just added more to it

2:31 am: Yep, I am still up and still not feeling sleepy…my head and stomach really hurt and I’m wishing I could just sleep it off. But instead I’m doing my homework assignment for my “Radical Cinema in Latin America” Intersession class. We watch movies in Spanish with subtitles and discuss how they were aesthetically and politically radical, for their time. I like it a lot and the instructor was my Spanish teacher last year, so that’s cool. I have to write a 1 pg double space response paper to the movie…not bad..not bad at all!

4:00 am: Ok, this is getting redonkulous! I tried to lay down and make myself go to sleep but I just ended up tossing and turning… >.< I’m listening to the salt trucks outside trying to clear the sleet and ice off the sidewalks and watching some old Hey Arnold! episodes online..man that show was brilliant…BRILLIANT!! Ok I’m going to try to go to bed again.

football-headedness awesomeness

8:24 am: Well,  I somehow fell asleep..I feel like crud though…I tossed and turned and now I feel like I got hit by a truck because my head, neck, and shoulders hurt. I  think I look like a raccoon too. I’m gonna make some tea and do some stretching to see if that helps.

10:41 am: I’m making breakfast and checking my email while I get ready for my class at 1pm. Gotta leave earlier so I don’t have to sprint to the library to print my HW out minutes before class…plus I need to return some overdue books.

12:45 pm: These books cost me 8 bucks! I thought books were like .50 or .25 cents per day…but the ones I took out were special and were a dollar per day..oh well. I learned my lesson. Off to class!

4:00 pm:  Well that movie was odd..it ended with us watching 4 minutes of a dead Che Guevera’s face. 0_O Awk. Naptime!

6:46pm: Arghh I overslept my alarm! I have to run to Bible study now and I missed dinner :(( oh well, must have been tired!

here's a pic of a random dinner so I can fantasize about the dinner I missed :/

10:00pm: Got back and there’s a Mary Kay presentation going on in the living room, coolness…I’m gonna go watch my guilty pleasure show: Pretty Little Liars. It sounds dumb but it is quite surprisingly a good, well thought and developed show with a ton of mystery and suspense…when you find something out, another mystery appears. Kinda reminds me of LOST.

11:00 pm: sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy…G’nite :)

The senior Blue Jays

stand welcoming the New Year,

graduation year.

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (L) with brother Milton Eisenhower at Johns Hopkins Univ. commencement. Photo credit: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/50318653?esource=life_license

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.

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…

I’ve never really considered myself a morning person, although I definitely have more energy than most people in the morning. (Wait…does that mean I am a morning person?) But I do really appreciate the possibilities that come with a new day.  And there’s something special about the morning part of a new day, specifically. Where your roommates are still sleeping, the birds are chirping, and everything else is pretty much so quiet.

Am I crazy? Like this morning, I woke up at 7am (because an awful migraine forced me to bed at 9pm last night) and I was slightly excited because I felt rested for once and I thought WOW it’s 7am…how much can I get done before the normal college student even wakes up?? How much can I get done without disturbing anyone else? It’s thrilling in a sense!

pretty daytime sunshine at school

As college students, we tend to use weekends to crash (and I mean CRASH) because we are so sleep deprived during the week. But personally, if I sleep too long (like past 9am), I feel like I’ve wasted my day (and sleeping too long is a migraine trigger anyway). But I think there’s so much value in waking up early to appreciate the morning, then to use it to get what you need to get done in a peaceful setting.

So this morning, I woke up and graded some papers, then I decided to go to the Farmer’s Market  ( http://www.32ndstreetmarket.org/index.html ) so that I could get some air and hopefully some good produce while supporting local farmers. I was fortunate enough to get a bucket of apples the vendor wanted to get rid of because they weren’t as good as the others for 3 dollars…but they were actually fine:

yum

Morning’s also a great time for reflection and organizing. We get soooooooo busy in college that we forget how to slow down and take time to plan our days and weeks and create plans of attack for getting our homework and extracurricular obligations finished.

Annnnnnnnnnd with that being said, I’m sad to say that the break of dawn is over, as it is now 2pm, but here’s to tomorrow’s morning! ;)

Until next time,

Dominique

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.

Posted by Lauren B.

Hello again!

Though I didn’t videotape a real cribs video like the freshmen (my room has never been clean enough for such a thing) I’d like to give a quick tour of my lovely suite in Charles Commons…..

Our room, 1221, which we always refer to by number, is a strange and overly decorated suite of four single bedrooms and two bathrooms. We picked a semi-tragic lottery number, and by some small miracle still ended up in Charles Commons, but on the 11 month lease side. The 12th floor, the penthouse of Commons, has a huge common room on the floor with tables, couches, and a TV just steps from our door, which is why you won’t see one anywhere in our suite

Last August, my roommate Laura and I were the first to arrive, as we had signed up to be Peer Ambassadors for the incoming freshmen. Given the fact that we moved in with only a small group of other sophomores, we were able to take some decorating liberties, dragging lots of stuff in and clogging the elevators with many, many trips up and down. You can see the trajectory of our decorating, and it seems to have gotten worse over the course of the year. During intersession, Laura and I once again were the only ones here, and that seemed to cause some problems. Cabin fever worsened during Snow Week and we put up some insane decorations in the common room.

final stage of living room madness

Moving from the AMR’s to Commons last fall was a huge transition, and it’s definitely the biggest jump in terms of housing. I went from a very snug single room sans air conditioning, where I shared a bathroom and shower with about ten other girls on my hallway, to this lovely abode where I have a small kitchen, my own bedroom, and enough space to actually have people over. It’s a great place to live, definitely, and they obviously gave a lot of thought to the layout of the building in terms of community–we have a lot of communal space, all of the suites have pretty big living rooms, all the floors have common rooms, study rooms, or both. We also have a gym, a kitchen, laundry facilities, a cafeteria, and some huge conference rooms that they use to screen movies in and such. You can check it out here http://www.jhu.edu/hds/oncampus/buildings.htm

That’s enough information about the building itself though, so here are a few more pictures of my room!

Our front door, the fridge, and the door to Laura’s room.

My desk, and the kitchen (lots of dishes to do).

The living room, all of our schedules, and my room.

and below, my room and the lovely sign we put up reminding ourselves of where we live.

Just a little decoration in my room and in the hallways.

…..and last but not least, the door to my room!

Hope you enjoyed the scenic tour of 1221!

-Lauren