My Durban/German Day

Sawubona!

Although it has only been a few short days, there have been many exciting things happening. This time, I am planning to add more pictures to my post.

This Saturday, ISA Interstudy took me and the 5 other Americans to Durban for the day! Durban is the KwaZulu-Natal region's largest city and known for its beautiful beaches that outline the Indian Ocean

These both are from our weekend here in Durban. These beaches are along a very extensive and beautiful boardwalk. 

But before we got to the beaches, we went to UKZN Howard Campus to pick up the 6 international students who are studying there (That will be the campus I will be staying at next semester).

When we met those students, we took a bus to our first stop: Gandhi's Durban house.

There, we read about Gandhi's history with South Africa and his importance to the country. 

After Gandhi's house, we traveled to Dr. John Dube's house. Dube was the first president of the South African Native National Congress. In 1994, Nelson Mandela came to Dube's grave (Situated outside of his house) and said, "I have come to report, Mr. President, that South Africa is now free."
Here we could pose with the Dube statue and the Mandela statue and sign a well-wish to Mandela.

After John Dube's house, we drove further along to a sort of village that is nestled into the side of a gorge. It is home to some Rastas. The Rastafari movement originated in Jamaica, but is also has roots in Africa. Although smoking weed is against the law, the government allows them to be secluded from society's law here since it is a part of their religion. 

After visiting the Rastas here, we traveled to a small township store where we all got a nice, cold drink. 

From there, we went to our lunch. The location was beautiful with a nice view of the surrounding city. The meal consisted of meat, meat, maize, and more meat. We were to have one of the guys cut and distribute the meat and we were to eat it without any utensils. To say the least, it was my favorite meal here so far and my favorite restaurant experience. If I could name the exact meat I would, but I did not catch the African name for it. It was a sort of steak, sausage, and liver. On the side, you could dip your meat in salt, hot sauce, and two other sauces that were tomato based. All equally delicious. 

After that meal, we rolled ourselves down the steps and waddled back onto our bus. We headed back to Howard Campus.

Now, the reason this post is also entitled "German Day" is because before we left for Durban, we knew that our German friends, Catherine and Lena, were also going to be visiting a friend there in Durban. So when our tour was over, we arranged to meet the three of them where ever they happened to be. 

Getting off the bus at Howard, we called our friends and they arranged a meter cab to pick us up and take us to the beach where they were at (pictures above). 

The Indian Ocean felt so warm and the sand and weather was perfect. After frolicking in the waves for a while, we walked up the boardwalk and took in all the sights. As the sunset, we decided to head to our hostel to drop off our stuff. Robin, Catherine and Lena's friend from their university back home in Germany, has been here for a semester already and showed us the ropes around Durban.

If you are ever in South Africa, I highly recommend this hostel: Nomads http://www.nomadsbp.com. The atmosphere was so welcoming and the people were wonderful. And it only cost 130R per person (which equals to about $13). 

After dropping our stuff at our room in the hostel, we headed to the famous Florida Road. Here, there are many restaurants, pubs, and clubs.

For dinner we went to a place called Spiga. We spent maybe 2 1/2 hours here laughing and having a great time. 

After that we checked out a place called Keys and then headed back to the hostel.

The next morning I woke up early, had some tea, and, of course, socialized with the fellow travelers. Fortunate for me, I ended up talking to some very nice people who were very helpful in organizing a list of the best things to do in my area and around South Africa in general. I also met a nice young man who happens to own a hostel in Mozambique who gave me his contact information if I were to be near the area. His hostel is called Mango Beach: http://www.mangobeach.co.za/

The journey back to Pietermaritzburg was an adventure within itself because we were introduced to the South African taxi. A taxi is different from a meter cab. A taxi is like a mini bus and holds many people, it is much cheaper, but not as reliable. It is the main transportation for most South Africans. Despite the newness of the transportation means, we arrived safely back to the university in time to take a nice nap before cooking dinner.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend filled with lots of laughter and good company.

Best part (Well, maybe not the BEST part, but definitely a selling point): The whole weekend easily cost less than $50, and this included: transportation fare, lodgings, 2 meals, and drinks. 

Hopefully more weekends can be like this one.

Hope everyone is doing well!
Cheers!

Sawubona!

Sawubona!! (Hello!! or literally, I see you!)

Well, here I am! Today is the first day that I have been able to obtain wifi on campus, which makes communicating a whole lot easier. Now, I can access Skype (Hopefully), Facebook, my blog and other internet functions. The university blocks certain programs during the day, but the texting app I have makes it easy to text when I have internet connection. Whenever I am without wifi, I have received an international phone from my study abroad program. It is a simple, dinosaur-aged phone that can text and make calls domestically and, for a steep price, internationally. I have to keep uploading it with Rand, but it’s a good emergency way to contact people and won’t attract the wrong person’s attention. We were told to avoid texting and walking at the same time off of campus with our phones because Iphones are very popular to be stolen and then resold.

My apologies in advance, for this blog post may be a little lengthier than I wish it to be; however, it covers many days of continuous novelties. So, please bear with me.

The flight and transitions to here went fairly smoothly. From O’Hare, I took about an 8 hour flight to London. On that flight I talked with my “seat mate” who happened to be a professional opera singer, to my left, across the aisle was a friendly girl my age from Denmark and to the front of me was a man who used to live in Cape Town; this company lead to a very nice flight with very interesting conversation.

In London, I had a 10 hour layover from when I landed to when I departed. With Scott’s help, I planned to take a cab to Windsor Castle. When I went to call for a cab, it ended up being much more than I anticipated and more than the Windsor website predicted; however, it ended up being worth the extra cost. My cab driver gave me a tour of the city before he dropped me off so I would not get lost walking around. He let me off at a restaurant that he was familiar with, Browns, and we arranged to have him pick me up with enough time to get me to my gate. Windsor Castle was beautiful and worth the audio tour.

 After spending about 2 hours in the castle, I was able to walk around the town of Windsor. There, I ate at Browns (venison and coleslaw with a chocolate chili sauce) and walked along the Thames while eating some ice cream.

I stopped in a Cornish pasty shop to call my cab and there a nice worker gave me a chicken and mushroom pasty for the plane.

My flight from London to Johannesburg was my longest yet best flight (roughly 10 ½ hours). My dad and I picked out a perfect seat for me: aisle and in the middle of the plane where there is extra foot room because they have the flight attendant divider there. I had better seat mates than my friend Jackie did though. While I sat next to a French couple and a man from Cape Town, Jackie sat with a mother and a sick baby who kept getting handed off to her. Jackie’s lap was also used occasionally as a changing table.

Landing in Johannesburg went smoothly and so did the transition from the international terminal to the domestic terminal. The flight from Joburg to Durban was maybe one hour or a little less. On that flight I met two women from Durban and the younger one wrote me a list of activities to do both in Durban and Pietermaritzburg (where my university is located). Both gave very helpful advice that I have heard before (don’t travel alone, pay attention to your surroundings, etc.), but advice from a true South African who obviously knows their country is easier to receive.  Exiting the airport, we were greeted by two women, one from Durban and one from my study abroad program. We then rode 45 minutes to our campus. There, we met Thula, our Interstudy Advisor who will be on site to help us. I believe he will also be my adviser when I move to Durban my second semester.

To put it plainly, the university campus is beautiful. I am very fortunate to be living here. The weather is about 70-75 degrees here in the winter (I still have not gotten the hang of Celsius) and the everyday flora and fauna is very pretty. The campus is much larger than Saint Mary’s, so that is going to take some getting used to. The nights get pretty cold, colder than you would think Africa could get, but it turns to the perfect temperature during the day. It’s hard to think that in a few short months we will barely be able to stand the heat.

(The Old Main Building on Campus)

The first few days here we (the other Interstudy students and I) went through a leisurely orientation put together by Inter Study. We discussed house rules, getting around safely, crime awareness, HIV/AIDS Awareness and Prevention, toured two local malls, campus tours, insurance, transport, and then an official school orientation. We also spent a lot of time talking about South African boys.

Tomorrow I officially start classes. I will be taking Ethics, Anthropology, French, and a South African History course and I’m really looking forward to meeting new people.

So far, everyone I have met has been so nice and enthusiastic to talk with us. We have already met so many nice locals.

 If anyone has any questions at all about South African culture or my experience here so far or anything I may have skipped, I would be more than happy to answer them in my next post.

So for now,

(As many here say) Cheers!

Today is the Day! (Sort of...)

Today marks the beginning of the 10 day countdown to my departure date. It all still seems so surreal to me and I don't think it will feel real until the plane touches down in Africa.  I will be in South Africa for approximately 11 months and will spend half of the time in Pietermaritzburg and the other half in Durban, both of which are on the eastern coast of South Africa. I will also have a nice, few month summer break in between destinations for various travels.   

My preparation for departure has included a faux-packing session to keep me from becoming too stressed the night before, loading up my new pre-birthday Nook from my mom for all of my reading essentials, brushing up on some South African culture via the book Culture Shock, working in my mom's office to help nurse my bank account, a family farewell party put on by my dad and Kris, visiting those restaurants and places I will miss, and making sure that I maximize my time with my family and close friends. 

I was told that keeping a blog would help me adjust to all the changes travel may bring and help aid with culture shock. It could also be a means of communication to a broader scope of people and family who may be interested in keeping up with my time abroad. 

A website called BootsNAll.com, introduced to me by my stepdad Scott, suggested that if a traveler was to keep a blog, he or she should write at least one post before they depart to help get comfortable with the format and the idea of putting something out there to share. I discussed with my mom that this may be a difficult task for me because I am such a perfectionist writer and it may take me a very long time to come up with a finished post. I'm sure that it will become easier as soon as I have something more interesting to write about. I also hope to follow my sister Candace's advice about maintaining regular posts at regular intervals.

When I created this blog during a lunch hour at work, I was stumped to come up with a creative name because I am just not good at that sort of thing. So I turned to a couple of people who I thought would be able to help me out. Chad from work and Scott both submitted 4 titles a piece and my mom's office voted on which title they thought was best. Though Scott won by a small landslide, it was deemed that, although very clever, it was not 100% suitable. So, Sunscreen for Hippos came to be, courtesy of Chad. So, congratulations Chad!

I can't believe that I am 10 days away from the adventure of a lifetime.
So for now,
Signing off!

-E