The Daily [South African] Grind

So I haven’t updated my blog in a bit because it seems like not much has happened recently—homework is picking up, I’m getting into a daily rhythm of life, and it’s only now and then that my breath catches and I realize I’m living in an entirely different country. We go to Jo-burg next weekend, but until then it’s just going to be school, homework, & routine.

Which looks something like this.

I wake up at 7:25 every morning (earlier than I have woken up since high school), eat breakfast (also a break from the American routine) and walk to school at about 8:00.

Ways We Entertain Ourselves While Walking

-naming the dogs (watch out for Brutus)

-guessing whether the people we see are going to greet us

-trying to make it the whole walk without noticing anything new (so far: fail)

-memorizing the order of landmarks (the house with the blue front yard comes before the foot-deep hole in the sidewalk, but only when going north)

-taking inventory of the trash in the alley by the railway line- you’d be surprised how fast different items come and go

We then have class from 8:30 to 11:30 Monday through Thursday. So far my favorite has been our study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For the first two weeks we were taught by one of the seventeen original commissioners, but we have a regular lecturer now because Glenda has left for the Sudan to do peace work there. The class is, understandably, extremely thought-provoking and the material is sometimes pretty difficult to get through, emotionally. I’m also taking African Traditional Religions & Worldview, Pauline Writings, and Perspectives on Transformation. And I have quite a bit of homework for all of them, which I should be doing now instead of writing this.

After class we usually eat lunch in the Sugarbowl, which is Cornerstone’s student lounge. On most days I pack a sandwich to save money, but there’s a restaurant attached to the school where they sell really good chicken pitas for only R13 (just under $2). I’m making friends with the woman behind the counter, who pretty much knows what I want to order every time I come in. On some days we walk down to Azraa’s for samosas and curry, or to the bakery in the other direction where you can get doughnuts dirt cheap. On Thursday Lindsey got them for everybody in our Perspectives class and only spent R18. Needless to say I might gain a little bit of weight by the time I get home.

After lunch I spend the afternoon in the library checking email and doing homework- unless we’re feeling irresponsible and choose to go to the beach at Muizenburg instead (have you ever thought about how hard it would be to go to school in the summer? Especially when the water is such a pretty tropical color and there are amateur surfers to amuse you?) Then it’s the walk back home and a few more hours of homework/lazing around until dinner, usually made by Ode and always delicious (last night was tacos, although the winner of the week was Fat Tuesday’s pancakes).

If I’ve already finished up all my work for the day or am just flat-out feeling irresponsible, my end-of-the-day reward is a slab of Cadbury’s chocolate while curled up with my Spanish Harry Potter book. I’m beginning to wonder how I’ll ever eat chocolate in the States again—Cadbury’s is absolutely divine. I have a few friends at school that make sure I only buy one bar a week, because otherwise I would probably get a bar a day and then be embarrassed every time I’d have to explain why, exactly, I ran out of money so fast while on my semester abroad. But since I’ve got so much homework to do this weekend, I think I might just deserve two this week. We’ll see.

Cross-Cross-Cultural Experiences

It was my host sister Ode's birthday this weekend, so on Sunday night we went out with friends to celebrate. The restaurant she chose was Cubaña, authentic Cuban food in the heart of South Africa.

Right.

You know how you always hear that Chinese food in the States really bears absolutely no resemblance at all to Chinese food in China? I wonder if that same principle applies to all foreign food places around the globe. What does Indian food taste like in Argentina? Thai in Sweden? American in Australia? (McDonald's here, sadly, is pretty much the same, although I haven't tried the KFC, which is a significantly bigger deal.) Anyways, I can now tell you from experience that Cuban food in Cape Town is just bizarre.

When the waiter came around I steeled up all five years of Spanish classes to perfectly pronounce 'quesadilla.' (I know. I must be fluent or something.) He gave me a really strange look before his face cleared up in understanding and he nodded patiently at me. "Oh, you mean a kwe-se-day-a."

...No, I mean a kay-se-dee-a. He was on to the next person before I had a chance to decide whether the integrity of the Spanish language was worthy of me looking like a know-it-all American in front of all Ode's friends. Not worth it. Maybe I just heard him wrong.

Apparently not. When he came back with the food he decided to use it as another teachable moment for me. Setting the plate in front of me, he looked straight at it, straight at me, and said pointedly, "Your kwe-se-day-a, ma'am."

Okay, so let's be fair: I've never actually had Cuban cuisine before. I'm basing all my judgment off of Nicaraguan and Mexican-American food, which is probably not a good idea. But between that and common sense, I think I could safely tell you that feta cheese, spinach, and a Halaal bacon-substitute are not exactly typical Caribbean fare. Relatively tasty, but probably not authentic.

But hey. Maybe kay-se-dee-as and kwe-se-day-as are two entirely different food, and I have once again proven my American ignorance. You never know for sure.

A Monthly Review

So I completely stole the idea for this blog from my dear friend Chrissy who’s in Lithuania for the semester. But seeing as today marks one full month in Cape Town, I figured that this list would be appropriate.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED
-Bitterness is one of the most destructive forces in the world
-God can work political miracles
-South Africans are not as thrilled about the World Cup as the tourists are
-Structural sin definitely exists
-There is no chocolate in the world as good as Cadbury’s
-God still thinks the world is good (isn’t that wonderful?!?)
-Bad American television is everywhere
-ubuntu is beautiful, but it’s not a cure-all
-It’s generally unwise to have doughnuts on a daily basis, even if you can get three for a US quarter
-“Ameriqua” is not part of the authentic South African accent; it’s just something Jill says to mess with your mind
-Being white is tricky
-Being American is tricky
-Minnesotans are used to swimming in cold water, too
-Afrikaans and Dutch are way different languages (read: don’t ask someone who’s coloured to translate a sign written in Dutch for you)
-If you hang shirts to dry upside down, they won’t get clothespin wrinkles on the shoulders
-Forgiving the church is hard.
-“Tarhu bawo, yiba nofefe kuthli” means “Mercy Father; have grace on us”
-Baboons are dangerous and attracted by food
-White people pretty much just can’t speak Xhosa (the clicks are harder than you think)
-It’s pretty unpleasant to have the flu when you’re 17,000 miles from home
-American academia is much more cynical about poverty than people who actually interact with it on a regular basis
-Bethel food > Gordon food
-The church is capable of enormous sin
-The church is capable of enormous good
-It would be incredibly difficult to be a vegetarian in South Africa.
-Taking a taxi isn’t as big a deal as everyone says it is
-Desmond Tutu is the man.
-Beyers Naudé was the man before Desmond Tutu
-It’s best to avoid the beach on windy days
-God works in creative ways
-People really can be capable of grace, forgiveness and healing
-If you live with Minnesotans long enough—even if you’re halfway around the world—you WILL pick up their accent


THINGS I HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT BUT SPEND ALL MY TIME CONTEMPLATING ANYWAY
-how to deal with white guilt without developing a white savior complex
-how to balance remembrance and forgiveness
-how the church and the state should interact
-if it’s worse to endorse something as awful as apartheid, or to be complicit to it
-how to say my host sister’s full name (the kh sound is even harder than the clicks)
-how the US would react if their president fathered a love child
-how you address something as urgent and overwhelming as land reform
-how I’m going to fit everything into a 44-lb suitcase in May

On Wildlife

On Saturday I went with a group of friends down to Simon’s Town, which is on the coast on the Indian Ocean side of things. The thing about swimming here is that you have to be careful about great white sharks—during our first week in Cape Town a man was actually killed by one at a beach we had been to only two days before. Apparently there’s a flag system that will tell you if there’s been shark sightings or if the water is too murky to tell, but since we couldn’t find any flags at Long Beach on Saturday, we decided to test our luck and wade in anyway. One of the girls we went with was absolutely convinced she had seen a fin in the water, but we told ourselves it was a duck and got in, got out with zero shark attacks.

It was when we were packing up to leave a few hours later that rest of the people on the beach got visibly riled up and were chattering and pointing at the water. Right where we had been there were two fins dipping in and out of the waves—not sharks, but dolphins! They must have been only four feet into the surf, right in front of where we had been camped out. It was incredible.

So, in honor of my first wild dolphin citing, this post is dedicated to all those animals that we’ve encountered up close and personal. Come April, when we head to the Eastern Cape, this list will probably be a bit more exciting. But humor me anyway.

-Squirrels. You laugh, but squirrels are a big deal here. We were walking through a park in downtown Cape Town and all of our South African friends were extremely proud to showcase the imported gray squirrels they have there. And I suppose that if I had to be a squirrel anywhere in the world, it would be Cape Town, where they’re extremely well-fed, fawned over, and greatly admired by the local populace. But I still don’t quite see the appeal.

-Seals. We came across three or four of these guys when we were in Kalk Bay the first weekend, hanging around the fish sellers and hoping for whatever scrumptious gutty bits might get thrown their way. These are actually the reason that there are great white sharks lurking off the Cape. And I mean no personal disrespect, but they’re also probably the nastiest-smelling creatures on God’s green earth.

-Baboons. When we went to Cape Point for the day a few weeks ago, our lecturer gave us the run-down of human-baboon interaction. Unlike city pigeons, baboons get more aggressive whenever they’re fed by tourists, to the point where they’ve started posting signs advising people to drive with their windows rolled up and their doors locked to keep baboons out of cars. Apparently if a baboon comes at you while you’re eating, you’re supposed to chuck your lunch at it and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Incidentally, we met a couple (read: nine or ten) while we were finishing up lunch. They circled up around us pretty fast and edged us off our picnic site so they could go around picking up bits of cheese and lettuce that we had dropped. We were all scrambling to take pictures and to hide the rest of our food and stay out of the way, and it was all pretty much fun and games until the alpha male arrived (have you ever seen a full-grown baboon? They’re not small. By any means.) That was the point at which our director, cognizant of the twelve naïve American lives she had in her hands, shepherded us back onto the bus and out of there.

-Penguins. There’s a colony of them below Simon’s Town and the sheer number of them there, just sunning in the sand and nesting in the grasses, is absolutely insane. We probably spent a good forty-five minutes just watching them waddle back and forth across the rocks. The best penguin moment of the trip thus far, though, was when we were at Robben Island. We were crowded onto a huge tour bus with about fifty other tourists, and the tour guide was in the middle of a pretty serious explanation about the island’s first political prisoners when he suddenly stopped. All seventy-five of us watched a penguin wander out of the brush on one side of the road, hobble across the blacktop in front of us, and meander slowly into the grasses on the other side. Then we all snapped out of it and the tour guide picked up right where he left off.

-Dassies. I really have no idea what this thing is. Our director told us it’s closely related to the elephant but my host sister Ode keeps on poking fun at my extreme gullibility so I’m trying my hardest not to believe it. All I really know about them is that they look like cat-sized hamsters, they make a lot of noise, and I nearly squashed one at Cape of Good Hope when it chased its buddy right in front of my feet.

-Lizards. We saw a handful of these guys at Cape Point and then scads more on top of Table Mountain the next week. There’s also an inch-long, less scaly household variety that’s been popping up recently. I spent about five minutes trying to coax one out of the window above my bed last night when it made a nose-dive straight into my bedcovers. I haven’t seen it since, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

-Ferocious Man-Eating Poodles. Piwi sleeps on the foot of my bed sometimes.

Honorable Mentions and Far-Off Sightings

-Ostrich

-Springbok

-Dolphin

-Egyptian Ibis