Saturday, April 26, 2008
Saturday, April 12, 2008
feelin Karoovy
THE KAROO:
Weekend trip to the Karoo, a desert area to the northeast of us. Highlights:
Going up into the mountains to watch the sunset
Weekend trip to the Karoo, a desert area to the northeast of us. Highlights:
Going up into the mountains to watch the sunset
Going to a “tequila” factory: they can’t call it tequila because that’s patented in Mexico, so it’s called agave, but it’s the same thing. It’s made from this plant.
After our tour, we did shots – some people went a little too far (um, eight shots), but most of us just had one of each kind. Which means three.
Went to see Bushman or San paintings somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty neat. These people have a bunch of fossils and stuff at their house as well.
The Owl house. So, sometime in the 1800s or so this woman’s husband dies and she has to move from Cape Town back to this little town and take care of her parents. She’s not thrilled about this. Her parents die and she starts changing her house, using colored glass to make light do interesting things inside. Slowly this becomes an obsession with expressing herself. She gets married again but divorces right away, she has workers come and help with her projects occasionally, but basically she is just this woman who doesn’t belong in the African interior in a small town and goes crazy and lives in her own little world to escape. That’s my theory. She committed suicide by drinking caustic soda when her arthritis and such was so bad that she couldn’t do her projects any more. This is probably the creepiest place I have been in my whole life. Anyway if you think it’s interesting you can always google “owl house south Africa” and you will probably get to some information.
Dinner at a nice restaurant with the roommates. Awww
Went to see Bushman or San paintings somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. It was pretty neat. These people have a bunch of fossils and stuff at their house as well.
The Owl house. So, sometime in the 1800s or so this woman’s husband dies and she has to move from Cape Town back to this little town and take care of her parents. She’s not thrilled about this. Her parents die and she starts changing her house, using colored glass to make light do interesting things inside. Slowly this becomes an obsession with expressing herself. She gets married again but divorces right away, she has workers come and help with her projects occasionally, but basically she is just this woman who doesn’t belong in the African interior in a small town and goes crazy and lives in her own little world to escape. That’s my theory. She committed suicide by drinking caustic soda when her arthritis and such was so bad that she couldn’t do her projects any more. This is probably the creepiest place I have been in my whole life. Anyway if you think it’s interesting you can always google “owl house south Africa” and you will probably get to some information.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
3 cool things
1. John (my cousin) set up this thing in our group: date night. Each week we are ramdomly paired with someone not in our flat and we set up a date with that person (cross-sex, same sex, whatever) and try to get to know them better one on one. It's a really cool idea and fun to do. My dates so far:
Breakfast and good conversation with Giff, a friend who I work with at the OLC back at school. Laid back but nice, not something we wouldn't have done anyway.
Date number two: Teddy and I decided to do a walking tour of PE. So we took a kombi/taxi/minibus to "town" and got out, looking very out of place with our white skin and American accents. As we walked in the subway to get to the other side of a street, Teddy said "I wouldn't caught dead here in six hours" and I said "I think you would" - as in, if he was there in six hours, something would have happened to him. It wasn't the safest part of town, at least not for people like us, but at 1:00 it was fine; there were people everywhere. We got a map and directions and did our walking tour of the historic sites of PE, and it was fun - to see things I wouldn't normally have gone to see and to talk to him, since we don't know each other very well.
Maybe an hour and a half later, we finished the tour and got in another taxi. We were the first ones in, so we had to wait for the driver to fill it up with the rest of the passengers. The first two guys to get in were these rasta dudes. They sat in front of us and started asking what we are doing in Africa, if we like it, etc. I've never heard the rasta dialect spoken, only seen it written: "I n I" or just "I", no matter what, even where it's grammatically supposed to be "me". They had a lot to say, at least one of them did, telling us about how he is from Zambia but in Africa "we are migrants" (we as in him and the other guy). He is an artist, he paints or draws or something - "I could make a picture of your beautiful faces" and he also "makes music". The other guy didn't have as much to say for himself, but he did tell us that if anyone tries to tell us that South Africa isn't a good place, we should just tell them "you suuuuck". They were also talking about how Westernized SA is in comparison to the rest of Africa, which is something I have heard elsewhere as well. Cape Town could practically be in Europe, at least some parts of it.
My date for this week hasn't happened yet, but it is with Brian - we are each picking out our 3-4 favorite youtube videos and showing them to each other. My idea - I know, I know, I'm a genius.
What I chose, in case you’re bored:
Buttmachine (thanks Chanti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHlDfejCHkc
If you're into it (thanks to Pasutti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0
Sony Bravia (thanks to Papa)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw
2. I am one of four captains of a dodgeball team on our group. We had our first games of the regular season on Monday and Tuesday (we lost one and won one). It's great - every member of our group, except for the director and the "non-traditional" (read: over age 30) students joined the teams, which gave us four teams of seven. And the assistant director of our program is the referee. I am completely awful at dodgeball, but it's fun, and I can at least organize a team name, etc. I had first pick but I don't think I did that great of a job stacking my team. Oh well.
We are Team Eskom, which is the name of the power company here. Explanation: we have been having rolling blackouts - "loadshedding" for the past few days, and are scheduled to have them every day until we leave. So each day our power goes off for two and a half hours, a different time each day. There are nine zones in PE. SO, in honor of the blackouts, we are Team Eskom, we wear all black, and our cheer is "loadshedding". It's sweet. Plus some girl band sings a song about Eskom ("Eskom, Eskom, you light up my life") so I might have to get a hold of it to pump up my team.
I don't know if this is just the nature of study abroad, but I think date night and dodgeball are signs of how our group is coalescing or a word like that. We're becoming a group. And it's nice that we mostly like each other.
I have a lot of respect for the people I'm here with. Sometimes I think they drink too much or that they are disrespectful. But in classes when we talk about our experiences here, and the dichotomy of vacation life in Humewood and volunteering in New Brighton township, I am grateful that it isn't just me having ethical dilemmas, confusion about our role and if we can even do anything useful, what the point is of us being here, or at Pendla, and why we aren't able to be involved in the local culture - I feel like we are all struggling to understand our experience together: no one is taking it lightly, just here for the tan and the cheap alcohol, the surfing and the time at places like Coffee Bay. That stuff is great, but we are all very aware of our strange position. It's a relief not to be alone in that.
3. Ahh okay originally I had a different cool thing but then we had a practical for Marine Biology today! So we went to a rocky shore about 40 minutes away from school to do some sampling. We were collecting data for to help with this guy’s research for his PhD. We drove South Africa style - rode in the back of a "bakke" (pickup truck) all the way there.
So we were collecting something – this is really embarrassing but I know I’m not alone in not knowing the name of what we were actually looking for. But I do know they were something that lives in shells and we had to dig around and pry them off the rocks to measure them, and then we threw them back in the water. Not to be critical, but in our first sampling area, my cohorts were pretty wimpy about digging around among the creepy crawly and stickery or slimy, so I was the sampling champion, but at the second spot I got some backup. It was practically euphoric when you knew you found a big one and pulled it out and got to shout out the measurement to the scribe.
AND while we were there a sea otter just showed up and started swimming 5 meters away. It swam around for a while and then climbed up on some rocks to hang out and dry off. Its behavior was kind of catlike and kind of doglike. It was a catdog sea otter.
Breakfast and good conversation with Giff, a friend who I work with at the OLC back at school. Laid back but nice, not something we wouldn't have done anyway.
Date number two: Teddy and I decided to do a walking tour of PE. So we took a kombi/taxi/minibus to "town" and got out, looking very out of place with our white skin and American accents. As we walked in the subway to get to the other side of a street, Teddy said "I wouldn't caught dead here in six hours" and I said "I think you would" - as in, if he was there in six hours, something would have happened to him. It wasn't the safest part of town, at least not for people like us, but at 1:00 it was fine; there were people everywhere. We got a map and directions and did our walking tour of the historic sites of PE, and it was fun - to see things I wouldn't normally have gone to see and to talk to him, since we don't know each other very well.
Maybe an hour and a half later, we finished the tour and got in another taxi. We were the first ones in, so we had to wait for the driver to fill it up with the rest of the passengers. The first two guys to get in were these rasta dudes. They sat in front of us and started asking what we are doing in Africa, if we like it, etc. I've never heard the rasta dialect spoken, only seen it written: "I n I" or just "I", no matter what, even where it's grammatically supposed to be "me". They had a lot to say, at least one of them did, telling us about how he is from Zambia but in Africa "we are migrants" (we as in him and the other guy). He is an artist, he paints or draws or something - "I could make a picture of your beautiful faces" and he also "makes music". The other guy didn't have as much to say for himself, but he did tell us that if anyone tries to tell us that South Africa isn't a good place, we should just tell them "you suuuuck". They were also talking about how Westernized SA is in comparison to the rest of Africa, which is something I have heard elsewhere as well. Cape Town could practically be in Europe, at least some parts of it.
My date for this week hasn't happened yet, but it is with Brian - we are each picking out our 3-4 favorite youtube videos and showing them to each other. My idea - I know, I know, I'm a genius.
What I chose, in case you’re bored:
Buttmachine (thanks Chanti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHlDfejCHkc
If you're into it (thanks to Pasutti)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0
Sony Bravia (thanks to Papa)
https://exchange.csbsju.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw
2. I am one of four captains of a dodgeball team on our group. We had our first games of the regular season on Monday and Tuesday (we lost one and won one). It's great - every member of our group, except for the director and the "non-traditional" (read: over age 30) students joined the teams, which gave us four teams of seven. And the assistant director of our program is the referee. I am completely awful at dodgeball, but it's fun, and I can at least organize a team name, etc. I had first pick but I don't think I did that great of a job stacking my team. Oh well.
We are Team Eskom, which is the name of the power company here. Explanation: we have been having rolling blackouts - "loadshedding" for the past few days, and are scheduled to have them every day until we leave. So each day our power goes off for two and a half hours, a different time each day. There are nine zones in PE. SO, in honor of the blackouts, we are Team Eskom, we wear all black, and our cheer is "loadshedding". It's sweet. Plus some girl band sings a song about Eskom ("Eskom, Eskom, you light up my life") so I might have to get a hold of it to pump up my team.
I don't know if this is just the nature of study abroad, but I think date night and dodgeball are signs of how our group is coalescing or a word like that. We're becoming a group. And it's nice that we mostly like each other.
I have a lot of respect for the people I'm here with. Sometimes I think they drink too much or that they are disrespectful. But in classes when we talk about our experiences here, and the dichotomy of vacation life in Humewood and volunteering in New Brighton township, I am grateful that it isn't just me having ethical dilemmas, confusion about our role and if we can even do anything useful, what the point is of us being here, or at Pendla, and why we aren't able to be involved in the local culture - I feel like we are all struggling to understand our experience together: no one is taking it lightly, just here for the tan and the cheap alcohol, the surfing and the time at places like Coffee Bay. That stuff is great, but we are all very aware of our strange position. It's a relief not to be alone in that.
3. Ahh okay originally I had a different cool thing but then we had a practical for Marine Biology today! So we went to a rocky shore about 40 minutes away from school to do some sampling. We were collecting data for to help with this guy’s research for his PhD. We drove South Africa style - rode in the back of a "bakke" (pickup truck) all the way there.
So we were collecting something – this is really embarrassing but I know I’m not alone in not knowing the name of what we were actually looking for. But I do know they were something that lives in shells and we had to dig around and pry them off the rocks to measure them, and then we threw them back in the water. Not to be critical, but in our first sampling area, my cohorts were pretty wimpy about digging around among the creepy crawly and stickery or slimy, so I was the sampling champion, but at the second spot I got some backup. It was practically euphoric when you knew you found a big one and pulled it out and got to shout out the measurement to the scribe.
AND while we were there a sea otter just showed up and started swimming 5 meters away. It swam around for a while and then climbed up on some rocks to hang out and dry off. Its behavior was kind of catlike and kind of doglike. It was a catdog sea otter.
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