The Hordes Arrive

How's it brues (South African for "what's up bros"). This week has been quite hectic. All of the Americans arrived into my neighborhood, and it was instantly overrun. This past Saturday at least 30 stopped by our house to say hi, and to ask if they could use our pool/ braai. It was a good time, meeting people and hanging out in the sun all day. On Sunday, six new people moved into our house, which I thought was pretty full already. They all turned out to be girls, which is not the end of the world, but our house instantly got a little crazier. Starting Monday this week we have had orientation activities and class sign up stuff. I am going to be taking a class called African Vertebrate Zoology, and a class called Medical Anthropology, which both look pretty interesting. On Tuesday of this week we had the international student welcome dinner, and we got a  drum lesson from an African drumming group. It was awesome to have about 600 kids all playing the same rhythm on the Jembays that they passed out. Today was the "Freshers' Braai," which we got to participate in even though we are not really "Freshers" (freshmen), which had live music and good food. All in all it has been a crazy week full of crowds of people, new friends, music, eating, and hanging out. This school seems pretty vibrant, I'm happy to be here. I've decided to keep it short and sweet today... Nate, over and out from Cape Town

Into the Wild

                 Hello party people. Sorry about the long intermission between blogs; I’ve been struggling, I admit it. Since I last posted I had a week of invigorating class (maybe a slight exaggeration) along with a few good nights of hanging out at my house and going out to restaurants around town. They have an interesting habit of putting French fries on all of their sandwiches here, which I don’t mind at all.

Over the past weekend we went on a long hike Saturday, which was very fun.

We were led by a native fynbos expert, so he showed us some cool plants.

  I finally fully submerged myself in the ocean, which felt great. The other main event of the hike was our encounters with the baboons. We ate lunch on the beach and there was one other group of people down the beach a ways from us. While eating we saw a baboon come down a hill toward the other group of people. We were suspicious, and got up to go warn them. All of a sudden the baboons charged the rest of the way to the beach, kind of grunting along the way. The people freaked out and ran. The baboon then proceeded to stuff as much of their food as it could in its mouth, grabbed an ice cream container, and ran off. A “park ranger,” of sorts, armed with a sling shot (for scaring off baboons) gave chase, but had no chance. We laughed at the incident, and continued on our hike. When we got back to the parking lot, at the end of the hike, there was a baboon and her baby just sitting on a wall, very close to a bunch of tourists, who were gathering around taking pictures (Yes, we were among them.) The baboon sat, as if contemplating, for a long time, probably 20 minutes.

Eventually the people got bored and left the animal alone. That’s when the baboon acted. With her baby on her stomach, clinging on, she charged at a member of our group named Elliott (also my roommate) who was eating from a bag of peanuts. Since we had seen this behavior before, Elliott didn’t freak out, he stood his ground and held onto the peanuts. The baboon grabbed at the bag, but couldn’t wrench it from Elliott’s grasp, and a park ranger came over making loud sounds and brandishing a stick. The baboon ran off in the bush. Eventually the baboon returned and sat again on a different wall. She chose another tourist, with a bag of food, and charged at him. The man, hilariously, was very scared, and proceeded to drop his bag of food and his cell phone. The baboon grabbed the bag and was off into the bush again. These incidents might sound scarier than they actually were, because Cape baboons are a very small variety of baboon (probably about three feet tall) and throughout, none of the baboons actually touched the humans, they always just used scare tactics and grabbed for food. Basically, the baboons were outsmarting humans, not harming them. It was a cool experience to see these wild animals up-close, interacting with humans in such a confrontational way.

On Sunday of that weekend we went to a cricket match, which was an experience. It was a charity match between the Cape Town cricket team and the Cape Town rugby team, so everyone was having a fun, relaxed time.

My overall feeling after the game was that cricket is pretty much an excuse for South Africans to dress up, get together with friends, drink a lot of beer, and hang out in the sun. The cricket grounds are actually located directly across the street from the Castle Brewery, the largest beer brand in South Africa, so it’s pretty convenient. Needless to say, it was a very fun Sunday, and I can say I definitely understand cricket on a whole new level.

On Monday we left for a trip to the Cederberg, a remote area of South Africa directly north of Cape Town. We drove most of the day Monday, stopping at a few spots to see ancient cave paintings and scrawlings.

We stayed at a town called Lambert’s Bay on Monday night, which was a tiny fishing town with about 1,500 people. We didn’t do much, but I had a delicious fresh yellow tailed tuna filet for dinner, which I was happy about. The next day we made a quick stop at a place called “Bird Island.” It was a colony of thousands of gannets along with a bunch of other kind of seabirds. It was quite a spectacle.

Next we drove for a little while and arrived in the Cederberg in the afternoon. We stayed in small cabins near a cool, clear river, with a white sandy bottom, so needless to say we went swimming right away. We had a huge braai (bbq) the first night, and then went and looked at the stars on the beach until the wee hours of the morning (we also had a bongo and guitar, so we had plenty to keep us occupied.) The next day we went bright and early to a sustainable winery on the edge of the Cederberg, which had a really cool owner. He talked to u about his practices, which all centered around protecting the environment and such, and then we had a long wine tasting session. I had never done one of those, and I actually think I learned a good amount about wine, even in just the one wine tasting. The owner was also a good business man, because all the American students bought wine in his shop after the tasting… We spent most of the rest of the day hiking through the Cederberg, seeing the amazing scenery. We ended the night with another braai/ stargazing session (In the southern hemisphere the stars are very different, and way out in the African wilderness they were brighter than I had ever seen them before, so I was content just looking at them for a while.) 

The next day we woke up early to drive to Namaqualand. It was farther north, towards Namibia, and the land became more arid as we went. We took a very bumpy dirt road through the mountains, with some perilous drop-offs right next to us, so it was a stressful ride. But we made it to our destination unscathed, and in time for a lecture about the people in the area, as well as an opportunity to meet a few of them. We had a cold dinner buffet (because it was pushing 40 degrees Celsius, or about 105 degrees Fahrenheit) of delectable chicken, meatballs, and kooskoos, followed by fruit and ice cream for dessert. The next day (today actually) we woke up early and went to a small town (the name is escaping me now) with about 25 people living in it. It was way off into the arid, almost desert-like landscape, over an even bumpier dirt road. The people there “farm” Rooibos tea, a wild type a fynbos bush that they harvest to make tea. They collect a lot of the rooibos from the wild rooibos plants, as well as cultivate small patches of it, but it is very hard to farm it due to its essential interactions with the other plants around it, and due to its delicate ecosystem (they also say the wild tea tastes much better than the cultivated stuff... also, I got to hold the sickle they use to harvest it...)

They also have a small flock of sheep, and a few chickens. They also have a one room, thatched roof hut that they rent to tourists who wish to get a real African experience (it only costs about $15 a night for dinner, a bed for sleeping, breakfast in the morning, and a tour of the place...) The people there were all very friendly, and extremely knowledgeable of the surrounding plant life, which they used for medicine, starting fires, moisturizers, flavoring food, food itself, thatching the roofs of their huts, and probably other things that they forgot to mention. They lived a very simple, labor intensive existence, but they all seemed pretty happy, and relatively healthy. They fed us a breakfast of homemade bread (which we helped them make), jam, eggs, and sausage. All of the cooking was done in their cooking hut, over a wood fire. After we visited the town we went to the “tea court,” where they, and other villages which harvest the rooibos tea, chop up and spread out their raw tea bushes, which dry out and oxidize in the sun, to give the tea its red color and unique flavor. We helped them spread the tea with long bamboo rods, and got to talk to the workers there as well.

It was a very cool experience, talking to these people who live off the land, and have managed to survive happily in this rapidly modernizing world. We went to see these people because they have formed this rooibos tea cooperative, where they all process, package and market their tea together, so that they can compete with the larger tea producers. They are still struggling to keep up, and it is still very small scale in the grand scheme of things, but they are making a living on their own, which is very cool. I learned a lot from these hard-working people, who have no electricity, running water, or really free-time, but they still have high spirits, a sense of humor, and it seemed a smile on their faces.

It was more hard evidence that happiness is not necessarily linked to money. We drove home after a huge meal in a nearby town of lamb stew with rice (again, delicious) and made it to our house in Cape Town at about 7 PM my time. 

In the future I’ll try to blog shorter and more often, but once again, no promises, I like to keep you guys on your toes… much love from Cape Town, take it easy. Nate, over and out…

            

The First Week

Blog #2… where to begin. The first blog only dealt with the one day plus of mainly sitting on airplanes, and I still had a ton to write about, so I’m struggling with how to cram my first week of activities into one blog entry. But I need to please the masses, so here goes anyway. On Monday we took a daylong tour of the Cape Peninsula and Table Mountain National Park. We started off by stopping at a beach to see the only native penguins in Africa, which was awesome. They were very cute, although our tour guide told us they were very efficient predators when they were in the water. 

        On the beach front there were tons of handmade African trinkets and artwork for sale (Masks, wood carvings, bongos, plates, shields, skins, etc.) which were all very cool, but I figured I would have ample time to purchase such things, and decided to pass for the day at least.

         Next we traveled to Table Mountain National Park, which had ridiculous scenery, and it was especially awe-inspiring because it was all so new to me (obviously).

         We hiked through the native fynbos plants, small shrubs endemic only to the area around Cape Town. It is considered one of the six worldwide plant kingdoms, but it is by far the smallest and most densely concentrated with differing species. It is a biodiversity hotspot, and I could certainly tell as I walked around; one could barely even spot a patch of dirt or grass between the crowded foliage, and although they were all a similar height and similar shrubs, there was clearly a ridiculous number of species just near the path we walked on. I also was first introduced to the cape winds while walking through the fynbos.

            It was very windy, and has been the whole time we have been here. Cape Town is apparently the third windiest city in the world (after Chicago and one other which I’m blanking on right now), and in the national park right on the ocean that was magnified even further. 

         We eventually made our way down to this isolated beach, surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs and hills. There was a huge, steep hill of sand we bounded down, which was a lot of fun (we did it multiple times) and there were huge waves crashing on the shore. We went about knee deep in the water, but the water was very cold and we didn’t have swimsuits, so we refrained from going in all the way. The water is so cold (even though the air is so hot) because on the western side of South Africa, currents bring chilled water up from Antarctica (the eastern side of South Africa has currents bringing warm water from the Indian Ocean). Wandering down the beach, I found a spot with my new friend/housemate Gage Slaughter Newman (a cool Bostonian who goes to Swarthmore) where we could sit on this flat, short cliff over the ocean (it wasn’t very high, don’t worry) and as the waves crashed on the rock face down below they would shoot up in front of us. It created this effect of a white wall of water about two feet in front of us, every time there was a wave. It was a great, memorable spot, but you probably had to be there to really understand.

           We made our way back up into the hills from the beach, to the highest spot around, and looked out at the ocean for a while, before making our way to the end point, which was the actual Cape of Good Hope. We took a group picture at the sign, and drove home. On the way home we saw a family of baboons wandering on the side of the road, which was awesome. 

            There are signs all around Cape Town (and probably South Africa in general) saying that baboons are wild animals, that you should not feed them, and that they have been known to attack humans. I’m not too worried, but our professor was also telling us that they come onto the UCT campus sometimes and can break into cars and steal food from people, which makes me slightly nervous, but more like intrigued.

            That night we had our first Braai (a South African BBQ) at our house, and it was delicious. Our student lei sons, two awesome, friendly women named Kate and Lynne (24 and 26 respectively) did the cooking and hung out with us for the night. So that was Monday…

         The plan for Tuesday was to go on a tour of the city of Cape Town. Cape Town is an especially interesting city because hills and mountains surround it, so it is easy to find a place to view the whole city.

                                  

            We started the tour off by driving to the top of an outlook and viewing the whole city as we hiked our way back down into the city. Our tour guide told us much of the history of the place, from the early Dutch settlers, to apartheid, to the modern city (I won’t go into it; this is a blog about my trip not a history lecture). We made our way through some middle-lower class neighborhoods (not the worst neighborhoods by any means, at least these people had wooden houses) and into downtown. On the way through the neighborhood we spotted a guy with a fire in his backyard. It was pretty small, just burning some dry grass. But by the time we had walked by, we looked back and it was clearly getting larger and out of hand. As we walked down the same street, away from the fire, maybe 10 minutes later we saw fire trucks and police driving by, in the direction of the house. I’m not sure what happened in the end, and I hope everyone was alright, but it showed how hot, windy, and dry of a place Cape Town is. (I won’t go into it too much, but the native plant species have adapted to this climate by having seeds that germinate when they receive a certain chemical that is in smoke. So all the fynbos burn every 15-20 years on the hills surrounding the city, and they are replaced by new plants, coming from the seeds they had been laying for the 15-20 years, kind of a cool adaptation.)

            We meandered our way into the central business district and into Queens Market Square, which was a bustling outdoor market place with all kind of stands and things for sale. The city itself looked very nice; it was clean, crowded with an eclectic mix of people, and seemed very alive. We went to the museum district of town, with a bunch of museums on apartheid, history, art, etc. We didn’t actually go in any museums because we didn’t have time, but I’m sure I will later.

            Tuesday night was definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip so far. We went to a really nice restaurant called Arnold’s, for the official opening program dinner. It was a cool restaurant because it specialized in exotic African meats. I started the dinner off simple enough, with a caprese salad. But this caprese had avocados, bacon, and sweet/hot peppers, to go along with the basil, tomatoes and mozzarella. It was amazing (mother, take note…), but nothing compared to the main course. I got the Wild Game Platter, which consisted of a large bed of koos-koos topped with an ostrich steak, an antelope (Gemsbok to be exact) steak, warthog ribs, and crocodile ribs. The each had their own sauce, which complimented their flavors very nicely. The ostrich was the best; it was so succulent and tender, and it tasted like a mixture of filet mignon and duck, or dark meat from a turkey. It was incredible, and probably up there in terms of my favorite meats (bacon still takes the cake, due to its deliciousness and versatility.) The antelope was very much like a beef steak, but a bit more venison like; it was also delicious. The warthog ribs were some of the best ribs I’ve had, falling off the bone in a simple, but flavorful BBQ sauce. They were very much like pork ribs, but again, there was something a bit different than anything I had tasted before. They were also massive, much bigger than most ribs I’ve had in the states. And finally, the crocodile ribs were really interesting. The bones were very soft and pliable, like a fish, and the meat was like a mix of a white fish and chicken. It was also good, but hard to eat, due to a lot of small bones, and some cartilagey, fatty areas. They also had a small portion of vegetables to go with it all (maybe 1/20^th of the total caloric intake on the plate… my kind of restaurant). It was one of the better, and more exotic dinners I’ve ever eaten, and I certainly want to try some of those meats again, especially ostrich.

            Wednesday we had our first lecture, which was interesting. It was about the geology of South Africa, and how that has affected the development of the city and its people. We also toured the UCT campus (which is beautiful and well kept). For dinner, the girls in the house made a huge pot of vegetable apricot curry (there are two vegetarians and a gluten-free person, so there are some hurdles to overcome when cooking house meals.) It was delish, and all I had to do was help clean up, which I was happy to do (although that may surprise some of you reading this.)

            Thursday we had two more lectures, wrapped around chilling at our house by the pool. One of the girl’s (Fumiko, an Asian-Californian bio-major who goes to Swarthmore) dads is here until this weekend, exploring South Africa by himself and helping her get settled in. He took the whole house out to a nice dinner Thursday night, which was very generous of him (seeing as who there are 12 of us, including seven boys, not to mention the three varsity soccer players in the group. I actually forgot to mention that earlier; there is one starting center-back from each of the three schools: Me from Mac, Gage from “Swat”, and Eben from Pomona (who is at least 6’ 5” and looks like he would be a force to be reckoned with). I think we are going to clean up in the UCT intramural league). For dinner I got a great chicken, chili, prawn (aka shrimp) pasta. It was my first taste of South African seafood, and I was impressed.

            Yesterday, Friday, we had another lecture and took a quiz where we had to fill-in all of the countries in Africa on a blank map, as well as fill-in all of the provinces, major cities, and rivers in South Africa (I think I aced it.) We then hiked up the side of Table Mountain, for yet another amazing view of the cities, from a different angle. We were going to take a cable car and actually go onto the top of Table Mountain (like the name implies, it is a mountain with a large, almost perfectly flat, top) but it was too windy to safely take the cable cars, so we settled for hiking almost to the top. There was a fortress near the top, built around the time of Napoleon, with canons and thick stonewalls. It was built to be able to see out across the bay into the ocean, in case of any invaders (the British were clearly a little worried the French might be powerful enough to attempt such a thing).                                                                                   

       For dinner, I spearheaded having another braai. We got a bunch of vegetables, corn, regular sausage (called Braai vors), and also some ostrich sausage (because we were all so enamored with the animal after our first encounter with it on Tuesday). It was a great braai, and a good time. After the braai we went out on the town with Kate and Lynne (the student lei-sons of sorts). They took us to a bar/pool hall, and then to a dance club, which was a lot of fun. Most of the people were a bit older than us, but we had more than 12 of us rolling around together, so we brought our own party every where we went.

            That brings us to today; we have been relaxing and recovering from a busy, blur of a week. I have a lot of reading to catch up on before Monday, so I’ve been doing some of that, as well as writing this novel-blog (a new genre completely). The trip has exceeded all of my wildest expectations so far, and I expected it to be really, really awesome, so you can imagine how great it has been so far. It feels like I’ve been here months already, although I arrived a week ago today. I couldn’t ask for a more interesting, nice group of students to live with, and the whole program has been very well organized and well-run overall. I’ll try to start ratcheting down the length of these blogs as I continue, but it is hard to fit everything that has gone on into a couple pages. I’ll write again soon, but it may be next weekend again before I get a chance. Nate, over-and-out, from Cape Town.

The Day of Travel

Blog #1

I have arrived! After an full day of travel (leaving at 1 PM on Friday and arriving at 3:45 PM (St. Paul Time (lotta parenthesis)) Saturday) I am finally here in my house in Cape Town. The day did not go as smoothly as planned though; there were a few minor hiccups. After breezing through my first flight to Atlanta, I took a 16 hour flight from there to Johannesburg. I watched four movies total on the flight: Michael Jackson’s “This Is It”, “9”, “Paranormal Activity,” and “The Informant,” so it was a good eclectic mix of entertainment.

I got to Johannesburg easily enough, but when I landed I only had about an hour to connect to my flight to Cape Town. Apparently in South Africa this is not long enough, because there was literally one woman working at the desk for re-checking in my baggage. I waited in line for a while, completely oblivious to the time, because apparently they haven’t discovered wall clocks here either. Finally, I asked a worker there what time it was and what I should do to speed through and catch my flight. He told me I had about 9 minutes to make the flight, which was clearly not enough time (with my luggage still unchecked) but he tried anyway. He took my bag and brought me to the front of the line, budging a bunch of people. When we got up there they pretty much just said, “Look, your flight hasn’t taken off, but you aren’t going to catch it, we will put you on the next one.” So really, this “nice” worker guy was unable to help me at all. But he still asked for “20.” I took this to mean 20 Rand (about $3) so I didn’t mind and gave him the money. But then he insisted, “No, $20!” He had literally helped me for maybe five total minutes, and I missed my flight anyway, so I would have been in the same position with or without him. But he insisted on his $20 anyway, so I gave him some more Rand, totaling about $15. I felt a little swindled, but I was in decent spirits anyway, as I had just had my first real South African experience. They got me on a flight leaving for Cape Town at 8:45, so I had a couple hours to wait at the gate (enough time to test my new found freedom at an airport pub…)

            On the flight to Cape Town I sat next to a very nice German man named Chris, who has lived in Cape Town for five years with his African wife. He explained how he was a born again Christian, and how Christ has helped him to live an enlightened life free of his old habits of smoking and drinking. I talked to him at length about my views as a biology major/ somewhat agnostic, half-Jewish boy from St. Paul. I tried to explain evolution and carbon-dating and other scientific jibberijoo to him, while he tried to explain how all of that can be disproven by the Bible and by Christianity. It was a very cordial talk, with no hostility or coercion, but we had very different views to say the least. I think I ended up on the winning side of the argument, but he might disagree. 

            Once in Cape Town I was happy to see that Lynne and Kate, the women who were sent to pick me up, were still waiting there for me, about three hours after the  expected arrival time of my first flight (which if you remember from earlier, I had missed…) While that was good news, the bad news is my baggage somehow did not quite make it from Johannesburg to Cape Town, which was pretty annoying, oh well. Lynne and Kate brought me to my house, arriving last night at about 11:30 Cape Town time. I had very little expectations for my housing before arriving, but when I got here I was shocked, and very impressed to find a colonial-English-magistrate-type mansion… There was a large iron gate, with a guard posted in a little guard hut type thing, a portcullis of sorts that we had to open to get to the main wooden door, a swimming pool, a veranda (whatever that is), satellite TV (little known fact: a lot of English magistrates were ahead of there time, and in fact had satellite TV), a bathroom in my bedroom, yadda yadda yadda, it is awesome and I’m living the good life. I feel like this house could definitely be used for “Real World: Cape Town,” and that is kind of what I expect for the upcoming semester (I’m going to win every challenge, these clowns don’t stand a chance.)

            This morning at about 5:30 some tropical sounding birds started chirping extremely loudly outside my window, and my internal clock is still all messed up from yesterday’s travels, so I couldn’t go back to sleep, and that is where I’m at right now, typing at my desk at about 7:30 local time. It was an eventful first day, I’m glad the travel is over; now the adventure actually starts. I’ll try and blog again soon, but I may be on a week long trip somewhere at some point in the next two weeks, so don’t necessarily wait by your computer tapping your foot for the next one. Over and out from Cape Town