wow. this week flew by.

Hey hey hey! I figured I should give a weekly recap, especially since I won’t be here this weekend. We’re doing a homestay but I’ll get into that later.

Last Thursday night I went to a comedy club with a group of people. One of the guy who had told us about the place knew the comedian which made the show even more entertaining. He was really funny and had lots of jokes about him as well as some American jokes. My two favorites were when he talked about how excited Americans are about Obama becoming the first black president, meanwhile, South Africans are like, black? He could barely pass for colored he's so white. If he was from the Cape Flats, his nickname would be “whitey”. His other joke was that he’s only excited for Obama being president because he can’t wait to see the headline “Obama catches Osama”. We all laughed a lot although I think that was the turning point for my voice going hoarse although it’s finally been going back to normal after a week. After the show, some people went out but I went back to one of the CIEE houses with some of my friends. It was someone’s 21st birthday so there were a lot of people hanging out, singing and dancing and just being silly.

Even though I woke up on Friday with almost no voice, I hung around most of the day and went that night to one of the houses, different one from the night before, for a birthday. We didn’t stay out too late though before Saturday we were going to Stellenbosch for wine tasting with CIEE.

The winery we went to was Neethlingshof, a beautiful place only about half an hour away. We got to try five different wines, two whites and three reds. One of the reds, the pinotage, was my favorite so I got a bottle. I think they said something about the grapes being unique to South Africa which is so cool. I guess it would be bad to say that we began the wine tasting at 10:30 in the morning but we only got a taste of each. We got a short tour of the barrels inside but not a full out tour of the winery because they were doing a lot of work. As we drove away, some people might have fun out to the fields and grabbed some grapes…

We went to Spier, another winery, for lunch where some people have been already. It was a really fancy place with lots to do but we picnicked on the lawn where it was shaded. After eating we walked around a bit and ended up finding a woman who was doing a lot of cool face painting. It wasn’t face painting like drawing a unicorn or spiderman on your cheek. It was a cool white paint which she put in rows of dots around our foreheads, cheeks, and noses. She would glance at our face and then just pick up the paint so each person had a slightly different design. It was really neat and I’ve seen some girls around campus with designs like that so it was definitely not just some sort of touristy thing.

We had another CIEE sponsored event going to Kirstenbosch Gardens on Sunday for a concert leaving a little early so we would have time to look around. The gardens were beautiful with so many different sections for different kinds of flowers. I ended up just wandering around taking tons of pictures. One area I thought was so interesting was the garden of extinction; all the plants there are endangered and on the verge of extinction. The signs explained why they were going extinct and so many of them simply had to do with their natural habitats being destroyed which frustrated me.

Then we headed up to the lawn where there was plenty of space to spread out on the grass for the concert. Malaika was the name of the group and they performed along with a guest performer named Wendy Oldfield. The music was fantastic and the guest performer was selling her CD so I got it. All the people I was with got really into it and were dancing around on the grass. It was funny, most of the Americans from our trip were sitting behind us and they were just watching the concert. Meanwhile, the people I was with and most of the South Africans there were up and dancing. We’re so cultured haha.

For the most part this week has been about going to class and being a student which I guess is the purpose of study abroad. Highlights include my first time having dinner and sangria at Café Sophia on Tuesday night with Allie, chilling with Mel Wednesday afternoon after I got mail from berg including a copy of the Weekly with a page of campus safety notes making me everyone back home a ton, a bed bug scare that turned out to not be a bed bug but our house was fumigated anyway just in case, our house meeting Thursday night where we worked out many of the craziness of sticking nine strangers in a house together for six months, and afterwards going to an absolutely phenomenal one woman play called “Red Winter in Gugs” about a woman living in apartheid South Africa in the late 80’s. Hmmm, maybe this week was fairly uneventful because I lost my voice and felt not so great but now since yesterday I’ve been feeling a lot better so this weekend will be enjoyable. And then since I’m not sickly anymore, I can start my volunteering next week!

As for this weekend, CIEE is taking us to a township called Oceanview for a short homestay experience. Most of us will be living in pairs of students from the program with families in the community. On Wednesday we heard a bit about the area and what the weekend will be like. Here’s what I think I understood from the talk. The residents of Oceanview used to be from Simonstown which is just past Muizenburg and Boulder Beach (where the penguins are). They were kicked out of the area so that whites could move in during apartheid. The community is mostly colored (as opposed to black) and very well developed for a township, it’s like middle class. Understand that this kind of middle class is not how we define it in the states, but this is not to say that these families aren’t doing extremely well for themselves considering where we are. I’m trying not to make any assumptions about what it will be like so I’d rather just come back Sunday and write about it.

Last night I also caved and signed up for Muhlenberg's Relay For Life. I'm trying to put together a study abroad team so even though we won't be there, we'll be represented somehow showing that we're still fighting cancer from half way around the world (http://main.acsevents.org/goto/irelayforhope). Sorry about that, but you know I had to include that for my own personal agenda's sake. Anyway, we’re leaving in less than 2 hours for Oceanview so I’m going to finish packing and then go pick up some flowers or something for my homestay family. Have a great weekend and I’ll be back Sunday hopefully with some fun stories.

Much love,
Sarah