day to day

This is a group of my classmates studying/relaxing in our almost two hour break between classes. You can't tell here, but it is just a big terraced hill in the middle of campus. It is a very common gathering spot. It's good for people watching. My main observation so far is that white students sit with white students, black with black, Indian with Indian. I have never seen a mixed group sitting together.


Every day we take taxis (a lot of the Americans call them kombis, but I am trying to fit in as much as possible. Therefore, taxi=van, cab=what we think of as a taxi) to get to the university. (Formerly UPE - University of Port Elizabeth - it is officially Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University - NMMU - these days. Naming things after our dear friend Nelson is practically an epidemic in SA.) Taxis are not public transportation. They started as an alternative to overly expensive public transport. It costs 5 rand (less than a dollar) to get to UPE from Langerry, where we live. There are something like 300,000 taxis in PE.

As you can see from the second picture below (I hope), they really load us into these things. Four people squeeze into the back seat, then there is a two-and-a-half person seat plus a single fold-out in the two middle rows, so in each of those rows some unlucky person has to straddle the crack to fit in four. Since it is so squished, maintaining this seat is not too difficult. In the second-to-front row, three generally sit, plus the money-collector. Often, like in this picture, the money-collector awkwardly leans over the people in that seat instead of taking a seat himself. And in the front is the driver and two passengers.

If the taxi is not utterly filled to capacity, the driver honks anytime he sees pedestrians and the money-collector leans his upper body out the window and yells "town town town" as we drive. [note: I am not being gender-insensitive by using masculine pronouns. I have yet to see a female in a taxi doing anything except getting a ride. Gender roles are pretty carefully observed here.]To indicate a stop, we yell "bus stop", often more than once. I have also seen people bang on the roof.

A lot of taxis have pretty intense bass systems. One guy on our trip brings earplugs with him every time, just in case. And they vary in maintenance levels. Some taxis are fairly nice and new, and some are old and decrepit. The door won't close all the way, the sides are dented, the seats are scuffed and torn... these are probably more common.

One of my most interesting taxi experiences happened on the way to choir. It was towards evening, so business was slower, and it was only three of us St Ben's girls riding. There was a driver, his little sister, and the money-collector. We pulled into a gas station and the driver turned around and started talking to us in Xhosa. He did what people always seem to do when someone can't understand their language: he slowed down and enunciated, but of course that didn't bring us any closer to comprehension. Eventually we decided he must be asking if it was okay to make a stop, and we were early so we didn't care, but by then he had given up on us. It was cool to be on that side of things: a foreigner with no hope of understanding the native tongue.



Beach Road, where we live. This picture is taken looking right; if you looked straight ahead you would see trees, the beach and the Indian Ocean.

Feb 23-24

This weekend we went to Tsitsikamma National Forest. The first day was sweet, the second day was not. I don't have any pictures of Monkeyland or Birds of Eden (the places we went to on Sunday) that are worth putting up. I kind of feel self-centered for having so many pictures of me on here, but then I figured, it's my blog, right? And this time, all of my pictures are my own.

This dude is kind of my cousin - my aunt married his uncle. I think this was us demontstrating how much we like being related, or sitting together on the tour bus, or something like that.

We stayed at a Backpackers (aka hostel) for the night, and this was part of the view. We could have been in Montana.

Taking a walk on the trails - there was a picture where we were all looking at the camera but I like this one better.

We found a climbing wall! For kids... and we weren't really allowed to be on it without supervision. But let's be honest: I really put this picture up to show off my tan.

You can see the zipline in this picture, and another view, in the opposite direction of the first one. A zipline is where they put you in a really heavy harness and helmet and you are hooked onto a cable. You have a brake that you can pull down on, but mostly you just shoot across the line. Unfortunately I can't show what that looks like. Use your imagination.

After the zipline we swam in a deep rock pool, which was sweet, because not only could we jump in from a fairly tall board, but we could climb up on the rocks around it and jump in again. A combo of climbing and swimming - perfect. It was the most fun event, and the only part we didn't have to pay extra for.

WHAT ARE THESE THINGS?

After wandering through Monkeyland and Birds of Eden, we arrived at Tsitsikamma National Park to eat lunch and wander. I could have spent a whole day here.

Jo and I bought these cups that are made to fit together. They have faces on them.

Safari

So we went to some places with big animals. There was a sign as we drove into Addo Elephant park saying that dung beetles have the right of way (they're endangered). We drove around the parks in Land Rovers. The second place we went was called Schotia - they have more kinds of animals because they are a private park (or "farm" as our guide Niekie called it) and so they can have non-indigenous animals. Of course, I was given all the good pictures by Sonja.

To clarify: these places aren't zoos. They are big open places with fences around such-and-such number of acres, so that the animals have tons of space to roam and eat and everything, and we drove out in the LRs (with the guides)to find them. The first picture is from inside the Rover - there were worn driving paths, but the guides weren't shy about off-roading. On the sides there are big, open windows that we looked/took pictures out of.




The animals:

He trampled Mufasa

"The McDonald's of the safari"

Dung beetle

Pumbaas

Township tour

These pictures are from our township tour. They are mostly from Sonja, a Bosnian woman on our trip who I met in class last semester. I told her that I am throwing away my camera because my pictures just can't compare to hers.

If you want to know why the townships exist, you should probably research it. What I've pieced together from reading and listening, probably full of inaccuracies and assumptions: during apartheid, the white government, ostensibly to prevent crime, made it legal for people of various races to live only in certain areas. The non-white areas were far too small for the size of the population (SA is 80% black) and there was unsufficient housing, leading to people building these shacks. The government promised houses, which took a long time to receive, and the shacks were supposed to be interim housing. Now the post-apartheid government is still supposed to be providing housing, but it's going slowly. The last picture is of "Mandela houses", two room government built houses that people have waited years to get into.

What the townships are like (to look at): The shacks are small and crowded together. There were a lot of kids running around when we were there because school had just let out. There are cows, goats, and dogs (and all the ones we saw were emaciated) wandering the streets. Generally the parents (if both are there) will share a bed smaller than our twin beds. The kids sleep on the floor. It all sounds so earthy and indigenous, but that's not because they want it to be that way and they are living off the land or something. Sometimes we could see inside the shacks, and they would have TV's inside.

One of the cool things our tour guide showed us is the Red Location Museum. (In the midst of the Red Location, so called because the iron of the shacks rusted and eventually most of the shacks were red.) This is a museum about apartheid, there are pictures of various famous events and people, different ways of telling stories - an interactive museum, in the middle of a very poor place. An example of a well-intentioned, well done project to both commemorate something South Africans went through and give the people in the area a way of getting some money. Bradley (the tour guide) is very involved in trying to make the right connections for the township people to take advantage of the tourist industry. Because after all that, we saw this through bus windows. We were tourists, and we clearly didn't belong there, as evidenced by the kids waving excitedly at us and dancing and chasing our bus.

Mandela houses:

This last is a woman making "smileys": it's a sheep's head; when grilled, since the lips have a lot of fat, they shrivel up and show the teeth. Our tour guide, Bradley, said you have a concrete mixer for a stomach to eat one. So I'm considering it.

Pendla, the school we volunteer at on Mondays and Tuesdays, is in this kind of area, serving these kinds of kids, so maybe if I read this again in May it will seem all wrong. But speaking of kids, here are some cute ones we saw hanging around the museum: