Garden Route

So I know a lot of you didn't take me seriously when I said "I'm bungee jumping, seriously," but i did, in fact, bungee jump. seriously. The host of the jump is FACE Adrenaline, and the height is about 700 feet, the highest in the world (and by extension, the known universe). This was, most definitely, the scariest thing I've ever done, though you'd never be able to tell from my stoic appearance:








Though I'd love to both talk about bungee jumping all day and upload the video which shows, in vivid detail, the color drain from my face as I catapult to my death, the internet in South Africa will simply not allow it. Thus, let's move on.

Ostrich riding.

While this may sound obscure and silly, let me tell you, t'is not the case. Ostriches are the fastest animals in the world second to cheetahs, and are also wildly aggressive and have a sharp toe that they use to gut you with. The only way to get away would be to play dead, at which point they tend to sit on you with all of their 300+ pounds for anywhere from 4 hours to 4 days. Obviously, I had to ride one.






This picture is blurry because I'm moving ridiculously fast.

Throughout the garden route, we were staying at a backpacker's hostel called Fairy Knowe. I don't know what the name means, but this place is awesome. I asked them if I could work there and they said yes, so I'll be moving back in about a year's time.








The hostel was 6 hours outside of Cape Town, in the literal middle of nowhere. The name of the town was Wilderness. Sersly.

Anyhow, before you go thinking that all I'm doing is partying and playing around in Africa, make no mistake. I still get up at 7 for work everyday, I still study isiXhosa, (I can now, officially, pronounce the name of this language) and participate in several other cultural learning activities. I'm really busy.

Well, I guess that's all, folks until the next time I do something cool like, you know, play with a baby cheetah or something. Oh wait...




Get jealous.

week 2

Two words: shark diving.

Though we had to get up at 5am, and the water was freezing, this was pretty cool. And surprisingly not scary. Spielberg got it all wrong, apparently. Sharks are actually pretty cool, and way more interested in fish guts than us. One of them (there were about 4, including a baby) got a little rowdy after a long period of being teased with the fish gut bait and hit the cage full of people with his tail, but it was the good kind of scary.







This next one is for mom:






In other news, my placement has been going pretty well. My job is to market our organization to people who might want to buy the products made by the ladies there, like conference organizers who need bags and lanyards, or student groups doing interested in fair trade products, etc. PS if any of you out there in cyber space is involved with a student organization or something like that, please let me know. i got things to sell you.

Income Generation Ladies:



We had another tour of the city yesterday, and it still looks pretty good. We've also been eating a lot of local cuisine in the past few days, which includes a lot of curry, and a lot of fried things. There's this bread that's pretty much just fried dough that comes with literally everything you get here. Cape Townians call it Fat Bread. Its my favorite food.


We also toured one neighborhood with crazy houses that were all different colors. It reminded me a lot of Ireland. Have a look:





And finally we went to a museum that was really just an archway underneath a bridge where some really cool and apparently important paintings live, like this one.


This is a depiction of the first Mosque in Cape Town, which was the first mosque in South Africa. Some dude who came to Cape Town to flee persecution wrote down the whole Quran from memory and started the mosque, which was also one of the first schools in Cape Town, and also the origin of the Afrikaans language, which is a mix of many European and Malaysian languages, still widely spoken and one of the official SA languages.



This one was pretty cool too.


So, I guess that's all the interesting stuff, feel free to leave comments and let me know what y'all want to see more of, pictures, stories, some vague attempts to speak the isiXhosa language, whatev.

Sidenote, this weekend commences the Garden Route in which everything is awesome and looks like this:



The garden route is also home to some of the major attractions of South Africa, including elephant riding, ostrich racing, skydiving, zip lining, and the largest bungee jump in the world, which I will do, and afterwards will look like this.

Molo, faithful followers

While I won't bore you with the details of my egregiously long travel to Cape Town, I would like to take this opportunity to plug for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (Northwest), whose complimentary cocktails made the trip infinitely more enjoyable. Cheers, KLM.

Arrival day was mostly a blur, for a few obvious reasons, however all of the other volunteers are incredibly nice. Most of them, anyway. My room, essentially a garage that is not attached to the house proper, is known informally as the "man cave." Though daunting at first, it turned out to be a perfectly fine cave, comparable to all other bedrooms in the house, even if it does smell a little like a locker room. Observe:



Continuing right along, the following day consisted of a tour of the city. There are 11 official languages in South Africa, several of which have one of those clicks somewhere in their pronunciation. Obviously, this is an incredibly diverse place, and when you add in the mountains and coastline, well just look at pictures.


The following day commenced the Township tour. Township is loosely defined in South Africa as meaning a "non-white" community. Though not made compulsory under the law until 1948 under the Apartheid system, the separation of races began in 1902, when, because of extreme racialization, the food of black people was regularly infested with rats and their fleas, which led to the spread of the bubonic plague among black communities. Thus, the separation of the races was intended for the isolation of a potential epidemic. It, of course, resulted in racism and extreme segregation, individuals needed permits to leave their township.

Now, though all residents of South Africa are free to come and go from their communities as they please, the damage has been mostly done. Poverty, unemployment and crime are abundant in the townships, and the wealth on the other side is just as extreme.




Though township residents have been dealt a shitty deal, they are remarkably happy people. In fact, they are more creative than most people I've met when it comes to ways to get by happily. Below are a couple of pictures from the center for visual and performing arts in the township of Langa:



The kids are all really friendly




They even brew their own beer....



That is a communal bucket of beer brewed by hand by some entrepreneurial girls in one of the townships. Srsly.

And so, fearless readers, I will leave you with that for now. Blogging, as it turns out, requires significantly more bandwidth than I can comfortably come up with here in the Cape, and bringing you the pictures you see here took about 3 days. Fear not, for I will not abandon ye, but keep in mind that posts may not be prompt. I begin work at my placement at this organization doing marketing for the income generation program very soon.

Hello

For those of you who are unaware, I have recently arrived in Cape Town, South Africa with the intention of providing some relief work through this organization for the next six weeks. I'd like to begin this first post by thanking all of those of you who sponsored me to help me arrive. I hope this blog can make you feel like you're taking this trip along with me.

(I am also excited by the idea of not having to repeat each one of these stories to all those who might be interested.)

Anyway. I'll begin with some of the basic facts:
Time difference: six hours ahead
Accommodations: Organization-run residence in a nearby suburb
South Africa: population: 49,052,489, area: 1,219,090 sq km, etc.

Hope you will all follow along. more posts will follow.