Caught in Between

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.

In the spirit of everyone in the States going back to school these next few weeks, I thought maybe I could finally get around to talking about my classes at the University of Cape Town.

It’s strange enough to be a month into school in the middle of August, but everything from the classrooms to the professors have been totally different here. I’m taking four courses–Medicine in the Making of Modern South Africa, Third World Politics, History of Southern Africa in the 20th Century, and a really interesting Sociology course called Race, Class & Gender.

my lovely new school!

Third World Politics talks about the idea of the Third World, how it developed over the last 100 years, resistance to being labeled “third world” and then looks at case studies of Brazil & South Africa.

Medicine in the Making of Modern South Africa is really interesting. I have a great old professor who manages to make even the more boring topics entertaining just by the way he speaks–he’s so excited about Public Health, it makes it a very interesting class to attend. We’ve talked about the development of biomedicine and traditional healing, medical history in the Cape Colony, and public health approaches to the AIDS epidemic, amongst other things. This is definitely one of my favorite classes at UCT.

History of Southern Africa is admittedly not my favorite–between being at 10 am and having a professor who relies a little heavily on the slide projector, it’s not the best. It’s interesting to learn about South Africa beyond and before apartheid, though.

Race, Class & Gender is my first sociology class, and it’s amazing! We talk about the social construction of the idea of race, the history of prejudice and racism in South Africa, and I’ve gotten a way better understanding of the extraordinarily complex racial hierarchy here.

Today in my Race, Class & Gender “tutorial” (UCT-speak for section) we were discussing the idea of “everyday racism.” The tutor stood up and asked if the Americans in the class would mind answering a few questions about racism in the US. We agreed, not sure what to expect, and spent the next five minutes explaining to a boy from Jo’Burg precisely what a redneck was. After using the phrases “farmer’s tan” and “y’all” in the space of 30 seconds, we realized we had totally lost him, and the class dissolved into laughter. I got asked if there was “anything rural” in America, what the public schools were like, and what the Midwest was. We didn’t ever really get to the point of actually discussing racism in the US, but it was a better learning experience for both groups than any class could have given us. It was funny to realize their only conception of the US came from shows like The Wire, rappers, and American magazines–no wonder we aren’t so popular internationally.

I can’t say I have experiences like that every day in class here, but it is incredibly different. It’s so interesting to be able to study American events from a non-Western perspective, to be a minority in a class, hear four or five languages of chatter before people settle down. It’s overwhelming to realize I don’t understand any of the cultural references, and probably won’t unless I move here. It’s an odd experience in a country with no language barrier to hear something and immediately have to turn to the student next to me, asking what they meant.

I didn’t realize how much background knowledge every class assumes you have. Not academically, necessarily, but culturally. No teacher is going to stop a class to explain the difference between coloured and mixed race, or that “Zim” is short for Zimbabwe and no one really calls it Zimbabwe anyway, or where exactly Pretoria is, or what a certain type of food is. Often someone will tell a story and I’ll have no idea whether this event occurred at a bar, a gas station, a restaurant, or in their neighborhood at home. Imagine not knowing what McDonalds, Starbucks, Oklahoma, Chicago and NBC are, not knowing who the president, Britney Spears, the Kennedys and Donald Duck are, and not knowing what it means to be “a New Yorker” or “Southern,” transfer that to South African culture, and you’ll have an idea of how confusing it can be.

Despite being slightly confused a lot of the time, I’m really enjoying going to school somewhere else. It’s totally different from Hopkins. There are over 20,000 students, I take a bus to campus, the exams count for almost all of your grade, and a 75 is considered “top marks.” I miss Hopkins a little sometimes (particularly if I can’t find the building my class is supposed to be in, or don’t know where to get coffee) and it does feel a lot like being a freshman again, but I love it here.

If you’re about to head off to Hopkins, I’m so jealous! I hope you love it! You will. For everyone else, have a wonderful start to the school year!

Lauren

This past weekend my friends and I rented a car, filled it to the brim with stuff, and went on an adventure across the Southern coast of Africa, otherwise known as the Garden Route. It was an amazing road trip and we got the chance to stop by a number of really cool cities along the way, but it was definitely a “journey is the destination” kind of trip, involving lots of driving, and a few harrowing moments on the highway.

This is all one lane on SA’s N2 highway. Bold move.

It turns out that it’s common practice in South Africa to use the lane of oncoming traffic to pass people when they’re not going as fast as you’d like them to–which, in our ancient rented Kia, happened to be us a lot of the time. We managed to nail the etiquette of this process though, and by the end of this trip we were passing cars like a pro. We figured out that flashing your brights at someone makes them move over into the shoulder, and once you pass you should always put your hazard lights on for a few seconds to thank them. It sped up the journey, but made it feel a bit like a video game at times.

We stopped by Mossel Bay, Wilderness, Knysna, Jeffrey’s Bay and Plettenberg Bay along the way. We were lucky enough to have a three day weekend at UCT (thank you, national women’s day) so we headed out on Friday morning with barely any plans, except the vague idea of maybe making it all the way to Port Elizabeth. We hadn’t booked a single hostel, and our research consisted of a quippy “Coast to Coast” and a few other guide books

I took the first shift of driving, my friend Stewart narrated our journey from the passenger seat, and my fellow Hopkins pal Pearl was our official photographer in the backseat. Five hours later we were in Mossel Bay, searching for the hostel we had booked just minutes before. We stumbled out of our car at the beach, headed to dinner at a Cuban restaurant, and spent the night at a crazy old train-turned hostel. The next morning we headed off to Knysna, by way of Wilderness, a stop at the beach, and a detour through a coffee shop.

The amazing cheese shop. “Lekker” is Afrikaans for “nice.”

Sunday was rainy, and we took the long drive out to Jeffrey’s Bay, the beach known for the ubiquitous dorm room poster, “In Search of the Perfect Wave.” Along the way we stopped at another highlight of the trip, a cheese farm on the side of the road where we were served possibly the best lunch ever by a friendly woman who obliged our requests to take pictures and answered our many questions about the cheeses. We briefly considered bungee jumping–the world’s highest bungee is on the way to J’Bay–but decided to save it for a less rainy day. Jeffrey’s Bay was beautiful but insanely windy, and deserted.

Jeffrey’s Bay!

On the way home we stopped by Plettenberg Bay to break up the journey and get out of what had turned into a very nasty storm. Plettenberg Bay was one of the first places the Portuguese stopped at in South Africa, naming it “Baia Formosa.” It certainly lived up to it’s name, and it was a relaxing and lucky stop on the way home. After driving circles around Plett trying to find our hostel in the rainy night, we pulled a U-turn in the driveway of what turned out to be a cozy B&B we had picked up the brochure for earlier in the day, half-joking (we’d been staying in hostels for about $10 a night, certainly not real hotels). We ran inside, drenched, and begged for a room. A lovely woman led us to a room with heat, a hot shower, and comfy beds, where we proceeded to pass out for the next ten hours in preparation for the long drive back.

Pearl making a mad dash for the Indian Ocean.

As we finally got back to the city on Monday night I realized I’d been looking forward to getting “home” to Cape Town. We’ve all been here a month now, and this place really is starting to feel like home to me. Not that I don’t get the odd pangs of homesickness for my family, little NJ quirks, or things like American coffee, but I really do love South Africa. I’ve gotten to do so many amazing and strange things since I’ve been here, and this weekend just added to the list–driving on the “wrong” side of the road, stepping into the Indian Ocean, taking a real road trip, seeing ostriches. I’ll be heading up to Stellenbosch wine country this weekend, and we’ve all decided to take a trip to Botswana and Zambia for Spring Break in September! There’ll be more updates to come soon, hope everyone’s having a great end of summer!

-Lauren

Hope everyone’s having a great last month of summer!

Cape Town has continued to surprise and amaze me over the past week. I feel more like a “Capetonian,” and as of today, I’ve officially become a University of Cape Town student. I’m taking great classes (or so I hope) but as I haven’t really spent too much time in the classroom, I’ll save that for a later post.

Since I last wrote, we ventured out of Cape Town to the beautiful beaches of Muizenberg, explored markets downtown, and experienced the highlight of the trip so far, a day at Mzoli’s Place. Mzoli’s, a part of Gugulethu township, is legendary for its Sunday braai, when hundreds of locals and tourists turn up for a day of music, drinking, dancing, and incredible bbq fare made with the restaurant’s secret sauce recipe.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The township itself is an extended network of shanty houses, some made from corrugated steel, others a little more solid. Gugulethu and other townships like it are more or less permanent structures, and many have been in place for decades. The government has tried to encourage the residents to build traditional houses, and a few have cropped up where the government has financed them, but most of the townships look like an endless field of steel roofs. Between the houses run dirt tracks, and as you move towards the edges, paved streets that lead back to the main road. Most of them are fairly safe if you know someone who lives there, but we aren’t encouraged to wander about, and they can actually be quite dangerous if you don’t know where you’re going. Needless to say, it was a great opportunity to be able to be there, and such a fun day as well.

We all piled into a few minibus taxis and headed over to Gugulethu, not quite sure what to expect. When we arrived there were hundreds of people already there, and at the early hour of 11 am the club music was already going. We got in line and each chipped in R30 (about six US dollars) for what later turned out to be a bucket of meat and a bucket of maize (ground corn). It was well worth the wait, and we passed the time with some serious people watching before literally digging in to our lunch when it arrived. We traipsed back to Rondebosch around four, covered in barbeque sauce. Not the classiest of days, but a really interesting introduction to Cape Town.

This weekend we also got the chance to explore the markets downtown, test out our haggling skills (mine aren’t so good) and stop by a food market as well. Another great adventure was our day trip to Muizenberg, a beach town about an hour outside of Cape Town famous for its multicolored bathing huts. It’s not quite warm enough to swim yet, but a few brave souls ventured in wearing wetsuits to surf.

We’ve all been planning trips, and hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll be able to report back on Stellenbosch (the beautiful wine country outside of Cape Town), shark diving, or the Garden Route, along with maybe a little bit about school as well.

Hope everyone’s enjoying their summer/Southern hemisphere winter! There’ll be more pictures to come, my internet is struggling at the moment!

Lauren

Greetings from way across the pond…nearly 10,000 miles of flights away. After a week in London and a 12 hour overnight flight i am safely in Cape Town, and I love it!

It’s certainly very different. I’ve met some really great people so far and we’re all loving it but still can’t help but stop to think about how crazy this whole experience is. It’s easy to get used to this and think of it as any other study abroad experience until something happens to snap you out of it. Like going out to a bar and realizing a beer is $1.50 or hearing Xhosa (the “click language” on the bus) or seeing your RA’s break out into a singing clapping rendition of Shakira’s “this one for Africa”….circa 9 am in the morning. Other shocks included realizing that when I wake up here, my friends in America are still awake from the day before, trying to understand the complex social history of Cape Town, figuring out Africa is much bigger than I thought (Madagascar a five hour flight away?!) or seeing a huge AIDS awareness ad on the side of the house I’ll be living in for the next four months. I’ve found out that “Africa Time” is a concept I’ll need to adjust to, I’ve been shocked to learn what no indoor heating feels like (sleeping in fleece jackets and ski socks) and struggled to find gluten free foods.

I’ve been exasperated, thrilled, exhausted and overwhelmed in equal measure since I’ve gotten here but I can say already that I know I made the right decision to spend the next semester in Cape Town. South Africa is amazing, and such a different experience than anywhere else! I’m excited to travel, my bucket list of places and things to see is growing by the minute, and I can’t wait to start classes and see what the University of Cape Town is like. It’s so beautiful and Table Mountain is an insane backdrop to the whole city, I’m excited to start exploring.

I don’t have any pictures from Cape Town yet but here are a few from my week in London, where I had a last dose of “normal” before South Africa. It was great to spend time with my mom and catch up with old friends, and now that I’m here enjoying mid-winter weather, I’m glad a got an extra week of summer!

-Lauren

Hello all,

Hope everyone had a lovely 4th of July! Here in sunny NJ we celebrated with a power outage on a 95 degree day. Not quite the festivities we all had planned for, but certainly interesting. I spent the morning decorating bicycles with toddlers as they prepared for the ultra-serious bike parade, complete with awards and blue ribbons, that marks every 4th of July here in Summit. It was a great weekend all-round, complete with a healthy dose of Americana before I ship off to South Africa (the official countdown has begun…49 hours until takeoff).

The last couple of days have been busy here as I try to wrap up loose ends and check off all the things on my to-do list before I leave. My time in South Africa will be neatly bookended by two of my favorite American holidays, the 4th of July and Thanksgiving, so before I get too teary-eyed about missing my sister’s birthday or her start at NYU, I remind myself that I will be back stateside just in time to see the Macy’s parade, eat tons of turkey, and enjoy the end of fall.

one of the many things I’ll miss, the beautiful fall weather.

I couldn’t be more excited about finally getting the chance to travel to South Africa, but it will certainly be strange to suddenly be 7000 miles, a six hour time difference, and a two day flight away from my family, my friends, and almost everyone I know. I can’t imagine not seeing my family, and especially my sister, Suzanne, for four and a half months. I don’t know what food I’m going to eat, what stamps I’ll have on my passport when I return, who my friends will be, or even where I’ll be living in Cape Town!

The uncertainty really is insane, and to be honest if I start to think about it too much my brain hurts a little. It feels a bit like starting Hopkins again, only on a different planet. And according to some frantic googling, that planet is precisely 12566 kilometers, or 7809 miles, or 6785 nautical miles away from my home (and this is the direct route).

google maps laughed at my attempt to get directions between Summit and Cape Town.

I will really miss my friends, my roommates, my family, my nice cozy bed at home, the ability to pick up the phone if I’m having a bad day and talk to my parents…or if it’s a really bad one, buy a Bolt Bus ticket back to New York for the weekend. I’ll miss Whole Foods, I’ll miss my car, and gluten free food, and the hammock in my backyard at home. I’ll miss family dinners, and seeing my sister move into college. I’ll miss American television, though I barely watch it while I’m here. I’ll miss birthdays and celebrations and the start of school at Hopkins. And watching the fireworks last night and all those patriotic commercials afterward, I realized there’s one last thing. I’ll miss that indefinable “American-ness” that was out in full force this weekend.

pictures like this, from the white house official flickr, have been making me weirdly emotional.

I’ll miss you, America!

The list of things I’ll miss is long, and what I’ll gain by going to South Africa is still hugely unclear, but though I may not have a list of things I’ll love in Cape Town yet, I know that by the time I return in November, I definitely will.

My blogging over the next few months will become a little more sparse, but I’ll try to post pictures from my travels as often as possible! I can’t wait to see what adventures I’ll have.

Happy summer everyone,

-Lauren B.

p.s. for those not fluent in Afrikaans (and who isn’t, really?) the title of this blog means “goodbye, America.” South Africa actually has 11 official languages including SiSwati, isiXhosa and Xitsonga but strangely enough none of those have online translation services.