Camping

Helloooooo my faithful readers!

After talking to some good ole Kenyon friends, I realize two things. 1) I'm starting to miss Kenyon and all of you guys.... and 2) I need to update this here blog.

This weekend we had Friday off for National Heritage Day or National Braii Day. Just a reminder, Braii here means BBQ so basically we have a day off from school for "BBQ" day. It was great. To take advantage of this, I decided to go camping with Matt and his friends (I know... unlike me). I actually really liked it! I definitely want to camp again at some point while I'm here. We went on Friday morning and only stayed one night, so I guess it wasn't a long camping trip, but it was camping none-the-less. Here is a picture of the boys setting up the tent, and the final product:

The tent was a four-person tent, but we put 6 people in it. And not small people, for that matter, the boys there were HUGE. They all play/played rugby and/or water polo. So it wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world. Also, out of the five other people in the tent, 4 of them snored. Loudly. Which is to say, between the small amount of personal space, snoring, and discomfort of the ground, I did not sleep so well. It was fun, regardless. While we were getting settled in, some of Matt's friends went out fishing and caught a decent sized fish! It was a bass and they cooked it and ate it for dinner. Here's a pic of it.

After catching the fish, I watched them gut it which was disgusting. Here's a pic so you can see.

After dinner we played some rugby and the sky turned this unreal pink color. Here are pics of our evening activities:

And because I don't like fish (although I did try it in my homestay), there was plenty of meat for me to eat that the boys braiied. Here's a pic:

The next day we went boating out on the river near us. It was beautiful.

We even caught another fish!

Okay that's all for now. More to come later about volunteering.

Julia

More Musings about South Africa

1) A 75% on any exam, paper, or assignment is considered an A here. Awesome

2) Afrikaans people say "is it?" the way that we say "really?", which usually sounds really awkward and weird. Example:

Me: "My family lives in Los Angeles, but my aunts and uncles live in New York"

Response: "Is it?"

or....

Me: "I'm having such a good time here! I'm so happy!"

Response: "Is it?"

3) Bichi fach in Afrikaans means "very tired" but sounds like two very bad words that shall remain nameless (one rhymes with "fitchy" and the other rhymes with "duck"). Buya donke means thank you in Afrikaans, and it sounds alarmingly like Buy a Donkey.

4) It is really not a big deal to ditch lectures, as long as you go to your seminar classes. Which isn't to say that I ever ditch lectures, because I love lectures and school and studying...

5) The equivalent of Moodle here is called Vula

6) Students at UCT are currently learning to write papers, as opposed to students in the US who learn to write papers in high school. Very advantageous for me. Professors are very easy graders (in my experience), so I'm sort of bummed that my grades aren't transferring back to Kenyon.

7) Test results are posted publicly. Yikes.

8) I'm in love.... with a place called Laundry Lady. It's right up the street from my apartment and it's super cheap; they wash your clothes, dry them (we don't have dryers at our house), and fold them.

That's all I have for now. Miss you all. I hope you're still reading guys! Leave a comment or email me and let me know what you want to hear about, if you have any questions, or what you think about my experiences.

Julia

Home Stay

Okay so to make up for the fact that I haven't blogged in a million years, here's a SECOND post in one day. Amazing, right?! Anyway, I just got back today from a home stay. We were given the opportunity to spend a weekend living with a family in a township. We were at Oceanview township, a coloured township (remember, not considered derogatory over here). They all speak Africaans for their first language, but are very good at English so communication was no problem.

Oceanview is one of the nicer townships, not like the shacks made out of metal and plastic that are all over Cape Town. With that said, it's still a township so it wasn't exactly luxurious, but I had an incredible weekend. I stayed with a wonderful family with another girl that I didn't know from CIEE. My family was really big! My mom Crystal, and her husband Cedric had three of their own children: Carl (20), Brandon (16), and Bridget (12). They also had an adopted son, Jason (3), who's mother was murdered in the last couple of months. The stories they were telling me about that were incredibly heartbreaking, apparently the night after her funeral Jason said he saw his mom and asked Crystal if they all three could just lie down together. It was really touching. Carl (20) had a 1 year old child, Alex, and because his mother couldn't take care of him, he pretty much lived with us too. So in summary: Crystal and Cedric, Carl, Brandon, Bridget, Jason, and Alex all lived in the house with us. Here are some fun pictures of them all:

This is Crystal preparing for our Braii:

And here is a picture of me playing with Alex:

Here's another picture of Alex (he's too cute, I can't help myself):

Here's a picture of Cedric (my dad):

This is Bridget:

Here's Jason:

I have pictures of the older boys, but I think you get the idea. When we first arrived on Friday we had this huge dinner and performance again. Unfortunately, it was Yom Kippur and there are NO jews in all of Oceanview and I was the only one fasting. It was probably the hardest yet, everyone was eating so much food all around me. We woke up on Saturday (at 8am... cause of Alex) and went to go walk around the township. We stopped in to a lot of houses because all of my family's extended family lives there, which is actually quite nice. They couldn't understand that I had family living in New York but I lived in Los Angeles. Here are some pictures of the township itself:

We said hello to a million different friends/family and then went to Crystal's sister's home. She is the mother of five, Phoebe (8), Tazewell (5), Keenan (2), and 1 month old twins Joy and Jesse. We spent the whole day with the kids, mostly holding the two beautiful baby girls. They were premature so they are TINY. Here are some pictures of the two little girls (pictures of the other kids will come later):

After satiating some of our (my) baby-craziness, we went over to the basketball game. It was between the townships basketball team and some of the CIEE guys. We got totally creamed. Either way, it was a beautiful day so I took some pictures of the game.

After the Basketball game we went back home for a bit and then went over to the house with the twins for a Braii. I couldn't WAIT to break my fast, and my "mom" was very accommodating and made me a huge snack because we didn't eat until 9. Anyway, the braii was basically like a huge party. There were probably 30 or so people in the house (which isn't very big), which includes about 10 kids. My friend Lauren was there with me (she was staying with the other family) and we played with the kids for a long time. Here are pictures of Tazewell, Phoebe, Keenan, and lots of other kids who I forget their names.

A bunch of the boys then decided to teach all of the family how to play beer pong which was hilarious. I ended up playing with my "mom" as my partner and we won! They all thought it was the most fun/funniest game ever. Here's a picture of them all playing.

The most interesting thing I found was the relationship of the adults to the children. There wasn't really any taboo on what you do/say around children the way that they are in America which was interesting. As you can see, beer pong in front of the kids was no problem, they actually had a fun time chasing around all the ping pong balls. And in terms of bed times, there really isn't one. Whenever the kids were tired they just sort of fell asleep wherever. Here's a picture of Keenan passed out on the bed, despite the fact that everyone was screaming all around him and music was blasting.

After a long night we went to bed, and today my "mom" prepared us a huge feast. Here's a picture of her and all the food she cooked. Apparently this is normal for their Sunday's.

Okay, here's a picture of the whole family to end with. Hope everything is good back in good ole America. Miss you all.

Love,

Julia

Safari

Hello everyone!

First of all, sorry for the lag in posting. I've been busy! Lots of work the past few weeks. Second of all, happy birthday Dad! I hope you have a fantastic day!

Okay so two weeks ago my Mom came to visit me in Cape Town which was fantastic. After a day in Cape Town we went on Safari which was amazing! We went to Kruger and then to Kwaii River in Botswana. It was... amazing! Instead of telling you, I'll just show you.

Here are the monkeys:

Leopards:

Lions:

Zebras:

Elephants:

Giraffes:

Rhinos:

Hyenas:

Enough with the animals. Here's a pic of my mom and me (yes, that is correct grammar) out in the bush. Our tour guides surprised us with a beautiful bush breakfast, complete with champagne (at 8am!).

And here is an arial shot of Botswana from our teeny tiny plane, flown by some guy who was only 18

To end with, here are some views of that beautiful African sun.