Welcome to Cape Town!

Howzit (hi) everyone!

I have officially arrived in Cape Town and have been here for almost a week now. It’s crazy because I feel like I have been here soo much longer. I guess I should start with the basics. I live in a house with five other people from Arcadia (the program I’m abroad with- but the funny thing is that Arcadia is also a legit university and there are a couple people on the program who go to school there). We each have our own room and then we have a shared living room/kitchen and an outdoor patio. We live pretty close to campus (but we do have to walk up a big hill to get there every morning once we start school).

So far we have been pretty busy. The first day we arrived (which was after a 7 hour flight to Frankfurt, a 10 hour layover there, and an 11 hour flight to Cape Town) we got settled in and then drove to Camps Bay, which is a beach pretty close by. The next day we did a small driving tour of Cape Town and then met up with the UWC kids here with Arcadia to head to High Africa for orientation. It was a lot of fun there, we did team building exercises (like building a raft and paddling it around the lake) and climbed the rock wall. We also stargazed at night because the stars are soo bright and you could literally see them twinkle. Also it was awesome because I met another Phi Sig who is in South Africa with Arcadia (but she is going to UWC), so we called our tent/cabin the Phi Sig hut.

The day after we got back from High Africa we started UCT orientation. The first day we did a Peninsula tour, where we stopped at some beaches, got to see penguins, and we also got to eat lunch at a local township, where locals from there performed for us. It was really interesting because the lady in charge of the community center talked about how the township was formed because during the apartheid the people were forced out of their homes because their old town was designated a whites-only area. They literally had to build a new town from scratch. After we visited the township we headed to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope (the most southwestern point in Africa). The views from the hike there were amazing! The views from pretty much anywhere in Cape Town are amazing because of the mountains that are all around the city.

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to go to the beach. A bunch of Arcadia students and I took the train down to Muzienburg. The train was definitely a cool experience. We just made it to the train on time. On the trains there are random people who go up and down the cars trying to sell candy, etc. Also we saw several people walking down the train singing and pretending (we assume since this happened several times) to be blind in order to get money. Also to get off or on the train you have to open the doors at the stop, they don’t open automatically. But anyways at the beach we just hung out and napped. Even though I reapplied sunscreen I still managed to end up looking like a lobster (my back to bright red, and that’s not an exaggeration). But despite that it was a lot of fun.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were all UCT orientation days/registration but I’ll go more into that later. However, after registration on Friday a couple of us taxied down to the V&A Waterfront to look around and shop. It was a pretty area with lots of tourist shops and also a big wall. We wandered around for a while and looked around in an indoor craft market. After that we grabbed dinner at this outdoor place that had seafood. It was pretty good and quite amusing when birds tried to steal french fries (called chips here) right off of our plates. Another random thing about Friday is that we went to Nando’s (a fast food chain) and with our kids meals we got ping pong paddles and balls, that is like the most high end toy I have ever gotten with a kid’s meal.

Some random things about South Africa:

• You have to pay for internet by the amount of megabytes you use (which means that I normally only use the internet for about 10-15 a day- which is actually quite refreshing I must say)
• Braai’s (the word for barbecue) are really popular
• They drive on the opposite side of the road
• One common method of transportation is minivans/buses, where you hop on with other random people and then they drop people off where they want to go (I haven’t ridden one but they always honk at us)
• Everything is late (being 10 minutes late is still being early)
• On the trains you have to open the doors yourself to get out (no automatic doors)
• We call taxis ahead of time because getting them off the street can be not good
• The two most common chain restaurants from the U.S. are McDonald’s and KFC