We are currently in India and it may be a little while before I post anything about India. There's so much to take in about this country and it'll take a little while to process, plus after India there are only 3 days until Malaysia!! and I have a ton of work that I need to do for school (or that I should do anyways). But in short India is Awesome (with a capital A). The homestay that I did in Erode was everything I wanted to be plus tons more. The city is busy, insane, and the rickshaw rides are possibly the funnest thing ever (and the scariest thing ever). I also went to the Mother Teresa (spelling?) orphanage today and volunteered for a few hours, which was....................... good. More to come on all that plus more at a later day (after I've processed and realized what I've actually done in this country).
MAURITIUS:
There were a few things that I was waiting to post on about Mauritius until I found out the legality of the situations. During out stay in Mauritius there were some incidents involving some students the most severe were the destruction of villa property and one girl also got raped. All of which result in poor representation of the program and it only adds to the stereotype of Americans that other countries have of us. The destruction of villas makes it a lot harder for future SAS students to actually rent out the villas. AS I UNDERSTAND IT, the raping of the girl was due to being obscenely drunk which resulted in being taken advantage of by one or two of the locals. Whether that is what happened or not I do not know. But she had to stay in Mauritius for a court hearing and what happens after that no one knows. As a result of this behavior the faculty has implemented more STRICT alcohol requirements for behavior on the ship as well as in the port. The consequences of even being a little drunk and making a scene (on the ship or in port) can now result in immediate explusion from the program. And that's my daily rant for now. On a lighter note.............INDIAS AWESOME. If someone is reading this that is thinking about doing SAS in the future don't let these little incidents result in you not going on this program. There are some risks in going on this, but if your just make smart decisions you won't have any problems. This is an AWESOME program.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
Maritius and Sea Olympics
Mauritius, well there’s not a lot to say about Mauritius. We arrived at noon instead of 8 a.m. because we had to dodge a cyclone that had just hit Mauritius the day before we arrived and the seas were a little rough the night before we arrived. I have a funny story about that actually, I woke up in the morning and reached for my alarm clock to see what time it was, I was searching for my clock with my hand (because our room is pitch black) but it wasn’t on the table next to my bed, in fact nothing was. After searching for a little bit I found all of my stuff inside the top drawer of the table. I guess what happened was in the middle of the night our drawers opened, our stuff slid into the top drawer and the drawers closed. That’s my funny story for this post, and it’s not really that funny!! Hahahahaha.
I’ve been asked a lot where exactly Mauritius is, so I’ll help you guys out with that one. Pull out a map, find Africa (the big mass of land right under Spain and France). When you’ve found Africa, look off the eastern coast of Africa and find Madagascar. Then look east of Madagascar and there’s Mauritius!!
For those of you who haven’t ever heard of Mauritius, I bet you’ve heard of it but you just don’t remember it. It’s the only place where the Dodo bird was found. Until it became extinct in the 1600’s from people eating them non-stop.
Mauritius was basically our spring break, now as to what it’s a break from; well I’ll let you figure that one out cause I’m having a hard time figuring it out. For the duration of our stay here I really didn’t do a whole lot, I pretty much just relaxed. I hung out in Downtown Mauritius with my roommate on the first day and the last day in Mauritius, we just walked around and attempted to find the Natural History Museum but no one knew where it was and the locals who had actually heard of it, highly advised that we don’t go there because it’s not good at all. One of our taxi drivers insisted that we go to the postal museum instead because “they have stamps from all over the world there!!” So we ended up not going to the history museum because we couldn’t find it. The funny thing about Mauritius is that no one knows where anything is. In one day we probably asked 10 different locals where the exact same thing is and their responses are something like this, they look very confident in what they’re talking about and say, “go down this street, take a left by that building down there, go down that street and you’ll see it.” Then you go there and it ends up being a dead end so you ask someone else and they tell you to go back to exactly the place where you just came from. It’s madness!! What makes it even better is 95% of the people we asked for directions were local cops!
On the second day here, my roommate (Ben), Chad and I went hiking. We took a taxi to this little town called Mocca which is on the other side of the mountains. Our taxi driver dropped us off at the very beginning of this dirt road that took you down some fields of sugar cane. We had no idea where we were, except for the mountains were right there. We just went down the road and after a while of going on the wrong trail we found the right one to go up this mountain on. So we hiked up this mountain which overlooks the city, and from the top of it you can see the whole island. We hung out up there for a good while then we decided to hike back into the city and then back to the ship. The trail to the city was great fun!! It was just like jungle trekking, the path was pretty much just bent brush and we had these tall plants on both sides of us the majority of the time, and we all got tons of mosquito bites. It was fun. All together from the time we started hiking until the time we reached the city it took us about 3.5 hours or so. That’s about all I did in Mauritius. We were going to go to a beach but we didn’t want to pay for the cab ride out to one and back so we didn’t, plus it was an overcast day. And that’s all I have for Mauritius.
For the Photos:
One is the view from the top of the mountain, that’s the city of Port Louis below.
One is of the French warship that we were docked next to, but also the mountain that we climbed is in the background and I labeled it, and you can see the Port Louis skyline.
One is of me in front of the mountain (or mini-mountain?) we’re about to climb.
There’s also one of the trail we followed to take down to the city from the top of the mountain, cool trail eh?? Standing there is Ben pondering what we’ll find up ahead. Chad is also in that picture, so let’s all play a game called find Chad. The object is to find Chad in that picture. Ready……….Set……….GO!
We also had the Sea Olympics this week, the day after we got back on the ship from Mauritius. This is just a competition between all the seas (we’re split up depending on where our room is) there’s about 8 or 9 seas total. They have a bunch of activities such as tug of war, a relay race, slippery twister (those are the events that I competed in). The prize if your sea wins is that you get to get off the ship first in San Diego. My sea did not win, we tied for last place!! But it was tons of fun anyways. Plus we didn’t have classes on this day!! That’s all I’m going to say about this for now because I just woke up and I have classes to go to!
I’ve been asked a lot where exactly Mauritius is, so I’ll help you guys out with that one. Pull out a map, find Africa (the big mass of land right under Spain and France). When you’ve found Africa, look off the eastern coast of Africa and find Madagascar. Then look east of Madagascar and there’s Mauritius!!
For those of you who haven’t ever heard of Mauritius, I bet you’ve heard of it but you just don’t remember it. It’s the only place where the Dodo bird was found. Until it became extinct in the 1600’s from people eating them non-stop.
Mauritius was basically our spring break, now as to what it’s a break from; well I’ll let you figure that one out cause I’m having a hard time figuring it out. For the duration of our stay here I really didn’t do a whole lot, I pretty much just relaxed. I hung out in Downtown Mauritius with my roommate on the first day and the last day in Mauritius, we just walked around and attempted to find the Natural History Museum but no one knew where it was and the locals who had actually heard of it, highly advised that we don’t go there because it’s not good at all. One of our taxi drivers insisted that we go to the postal museum instead because “they have stamps from all over the world there!!” So we ended up not going to the history museum because we couldn’t find it. The funny thing about Mauritius is that no one knows where anything is. In one day we probably asked 10 different locals where the exact same thing is and their responses are something like this, they look very confident in what they’re talking about and say, “go down this street, take a left by that building down there, go down that street and you’ll see it.” Then you go there and it ends up being a dead end so you ask someone else and they tell you to go back to exactly the place where you just came from. It’s madness!! What makes it even better is 95% of the people we asked for directions were local cops!
On the second day here, my roommate (Ben), Chad and I went hiking. We took a taxi to this little town called Mocca which is on the other side of the mountains. Our taxi driver dropped us off at the very beginning of this dirt road that took you down some fields of sugar cane. We had no idea where we were, except for the mountains were right there. We just went down the road and after a while of going on the wrong trail we found the right one to go up this mountain on. So we hiked up this mountain which overlooks the city, and from the top of it you can see the whole island. We hung out up there for a good while then we decided to hike back into the city and then back to the ship. The trail to the city was great fun!! It was just like jungle trekking, the path was pretty much just bent brush and we had these tall plants on both sides of us the majority of the time, and we all got tons of mosquito bites. It was fun. All together from the time we started hiking until the time we reached the city it took us about 3.5 hours or so. That’s about all I did in Mauritius. We were going to go to a beach but we didn’t want to pay for the cab ride out to one and back so we didn’t, plus it was an overcast day. And that’s all I have for Mauritius.
For the Photos:
One is the view from the top of the mountain, that’s the city of Port Louis below.
One is of the French warship that we were docked next to, but also the mountain that we climbed is in the background and I labeled it, and you can see the Port Louis skyline.
One is of me in front of the mountain (or mini-mountain?) we’re about to climb.
There’s also one of the trail we followed to take down to the city from the top of the mountain, cool trail eh?? Standing there is Ben pondering what we’ll find up ahead. Chad is also in that picture, so let’s all play a game called find Chad. The object is to find Chad in that picture. Ready……….Set……….GO!
We also had the Sea Olympics this week, the day after we got back on the ship from Mauritius. This is just a competition between all the seas (we’re split up depending on where our room is) there’s about 8 or 9 seas total. They have a bunch of activities such as tug of war, a relay race, slippery twister (those are the events that I competed in). The prize if your sea wins is that you get to get off the ship first in San Diego. My sea did not win, we tied for last place!! But it was tons of fun anyways. Plus we didn’t have classes on this day!! That’s all I’m going to say about this for now because I just woke up and I have classes to go to!
Monday, March 12, 2007
South Africa, Part II
I have a quiz for everyone, where in the world do you go if you want to visit winelands, go wine tasting, cage diving with great white sharks, see first hand a township and in them the cutest kids in the world, hike up a mountain, see one of the best views of a city, go to night clubs and jazz clubs, visit an old prison that’s on an island, go to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point, see wild zebras, ostriches, springbok, kudu, baboons, penguins, and tons of various birds, hang out on the roof of a restaurant downtown with some friends, eat crocodile, springbok, and ostrich?? The answer is Cape Town, South Africa of course!! And I did do all of those things! On top of that my goal for this port was accomplished, that was to see penguins, and I saw penguins!!! Cape Town is a very amazing city, it has almost everything you could ever want, the only thing it doesn’t have is snowboarding, if it had that I’d probably be moving to this city very soon. Just the way the city is situated is amazing, there’s the water, then the city, then Table Mountain and other mountains in the background. It’s simply a stunning view. What’s even better is hiking to the top of Table Mountain (roughly 3000 ft. tall) and standing on the edge of the rocks just looking down on the city, the ocean, robben island, and if you turn around you can see the Cape of Good Hope and other mountains. If I had the time to I could just stand in that spot for hours looking out on the city. I could spend a month in this port and never have a day where I’m bored. I’ll list off some of the activities you can do: cage diving with greak white sharks, skydiving, paragliding, abseiling, kloofing, sand boarding, scuba diving, rock climbing, hiking, wineland tours and wine tasting, safaris, futbol games, rugby games, spend a night in a township etc. Plus there are malls and tons of shops. It’s impossible to get bored!
Cage diving with great white sharks was awesome, we saw seven different sharks, I was in the cage for two of them. Some of them swam right next to the cage. It’s amazing having a great white shark within a foot of you with only small pieces of steel separating you from it. These creatures are extremely powerful. One of them even jumped out of the water to grab the chum and it was just amazing; we had lost sight of the shark (the visibility in the water is only 2 meters) and a few seconds later the shark was half way out of the water with the chum in it’s mouth. I would not want to be stuck in the ocean with one of these (on the surface of the ocean anyways, if you’re not on the surface they won’t attack you).
The winelands were great fun, me and three other people from SAS went on a wine tasting tour, and at the end of the day we had tried twenty different wines and one brandy from four different vineyards. We were suppose to go the a fifth vineyard but we ran out of time. We had our first wine at 9:30 in the morning!
On the second to last day in Cape Town, this girl (Jessica) and me really wanted to go to Cape Point (where the Cape of Good Hope is) and on the way back stop at Boulders Beach to see the Penguins! We couldn’t find anyone else to go with us so we rented a cab for the afternoon for 800 rand for the whole cab ($115) and he would drive us to anywhere we wanted to go. So we went to Cape Point, which was cool. We saw some baboons there; we hiked around on some of the trails and almost got blown off the cliffs a few times from the wind. If I post a picture where my hair is standing straight up and my mouth is open that’s where this picture was taken. When we had spent a few hours here we headed over to Boulders Beach. After a few minutes of walking around here we found penguins! They were hanging out on the rocks so we went on the rocks and walked around with them, took pictures of them/with them. These are the coolest animals ever, they don’t smell, they’re not annoying, they’re not mean, and the babies look extremely soft and they sound squeaky (not even kidding, they squeak). All they do is lay around and every once in a while they waddle around. Now I have over 200 pictures of just penguins!!!
On the last day a few people from SAS and me went to Robben Island and then we hiked Table Mountain in the afternoon. Robben Island used to be where a political prison was situated. They stopped using this prison in the early 90’s, so not that long ago. Its biggest prisoner was Nelson Mandela, who was released in 1990 and then became the president of South Africa in 1994. 1994 was also the first year that blacks and colored South Africans could vote. The prison was cool to see but the tour got old fast and was kind of boring. Although our tour guide was an ex-prisoner, so it was cool to hear his stories. Hiking Table Mountain is pretty self-explanatory. We hiked up it under the intense, hot African sun with a cloudless sky. The trails up this are pretty funny, I was expecting it to be all these dirt trails since that’s mostly what’s in Colorado. But all the trails were basically just stairs up the mountain. So it was like being on a Stairmaster for 2 hours. It brought me back to the days of working for Observ. But once you get to the top, the view is definitely worth it, I won’t even attempt to describe this view again, just look at the pictures I post.
I saved the best experience for last. Which was visiting the Khayelitsha Township. We got to see first hand one of the poorest towns in South Africa (it’s also the biggest township). Khayelitsha is home to 2 million people. This population is growing rapidly too. The majority of these people/families live on less than $1 a day. Their houses are no more than poorly built, one room shacks. The material that they’re built out of is scrap metal and scrap wood. Very few of these houses are made out of a solid material that wouldn’t be blown to the ground in harsh winds. These houses are one right next to each other for miles upon miles. On average a family of seven lives in these one-room houses. The room is no bigger than my bedroom back in the states. To see this with my own eyes was very eye opening. To be driving down the street in our bus looking out the window and all you see for miles on all sides of you are these shacks, one right after the other. The people who live in these houses walking the streets starring at you as you drive by. The kids frantically waving at you. These houses do have electricity. The government gives them a very limited amount of electricity per month and if they want more electricity they have to buy more. By now you’re probably wondering why I liked this so much if this township is like this. It’s not that this was a “fun” experience it was just…amazing. When we got off the bus in this township we visited two bed and breakfasts and a local craft market; where the women of the township make everything in the market. Then we were allowed to walk around a little and talk to the locals. It was hard to talk to the locals because they usually didn’t speak English they usually spoke Afrikaans, Zulu, or Xhosa (usually the adults could speak a little English, but the kids generally couldn’t). But the best thing to do was to play with the kids. These kids are the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. Even just driving by them in the bus they’d wave frantically at you and try to run along side of the bus. But when they would come up to us on the streets, they’d run up to us with the biggest smiles on their faces, they’d hug us, grab onto our legs and arms and not want to let go, then they would want us to take their picture. After we’d take their picture they’d run back to us so they could see what they look like on our camera. They absolutely loved it. Some of them would try and teach us some games and how to make sounds with our hands. There’s this one kid that I distinctly remember, we had just visited a bed and breakfast and me and this girl really wanted to go play with the kids instead of looking around the bed and breakfast, so we went outside and this one kid saw us, he was probably five or six years old, he just booked it towards us at full speed then he jumped up on me, wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and just held onto me for probably thirty seconds or so then he jumped down and went over to the girl that I had gone outside with and did the same thing except he gave her a kiss on the cheek. What makes this worse is when you look at these kids, all you want to do is help them, to make their lives better for them, to instantly make AIDS not a problem for them but there’s no possible way to help all of them at once. What’s remarkable to me is just by looking at the houses that these people live in and the way that they live, you’d never expect them to act as happy as they do. One out of nine of them have AIDS. Ten years ago they couldn’t even talk to us white people, they were forced to live in these townships they had no choice, politically they had no voice, but yet it doesn’t matter to them at all now. They’ve all moved on.
On top of that one out of nine people in South Africa has AIDS (in all of South Africa, not just in the townships) which is a huge problem. In the smaller townships they bury about 50 people every week (kids and adults) due to AIDS. And the amount of people that have AIDS in South Africa is growing rapidly every year along with the poverty level. Here are a few facts from my global studies class: Last year in the U.S. there were 43,000 people newly infected with AIDS, in Sub-Saharan Africa there were 2.8 million. Africa currently has 35% of the worlds poverty, it’s projected that by 2015 that will be at 68% unless something is changed.
I did take some pencils and stickers and other things of that nature to hand out to the kids, but we were asked by our tour guide to not give them directly to the kids as in a few other tours the kids started punching each other for the gifts and they don’t want the kids to turn into beggars and to expect these kinds of gifts whenever people visit the township. Instead I gave them to the owner of one of the bed and breakfasts, she runs an after school type program for the kdis and said that she would distribute them to the kids.
One other thing I must mention about South Africa is the food. They have really good seafood and a few really good random restaurants. If you’re ever in Cape Town go to the restaurant called “Royale” on Long Street. This is a gourmet burger restaurant. The building it’s in consists of about 3 floors, all of which belong to this restaurant. On the bottom floor is the restaurant then the other 2 floors are waiting rooms for the restaurant complete with bars. One night we had a group of 18 people to go out to dinner, since it was someone’s birthday. We showed up at this restaurant and asked if we could be seated, they said that they were all booked up for the night since you’re suppose to make reservations for this restaurant 2 weeks in advance and we hadn’t done that. But they said that despite this they could probably get us a table in an hour if we go upstairs and wait in their waiting rooms. So we went upstairs to the waiting rooms which were pretty crowded with people, but then we discovered that we could go up onto the roof of this restaurant and on the roof there were tables, chairs and benches and there was no one up there. We went up there and hung out there until our table in the restaurant was ready. There’s not a better way to wait for a table than hanging out with 17 friends on the roof of a long street building which overlooks long street, the city and table mountain in the background.
This is probably long enough for now. This is a really compressed version of what I did in South Africa and I could ramble on and on about South Africa for many more pages but I won’t cause I have a bunch of essays that I have to go write, and tests to study for. But basically in the end what I’m saying is CAPE TOWN ROCKS!! I will definitely be coming back as soon as I can. Hopefully I’ll be back by the 2010 World Cup in South Africa!!
As far as the pictures go, for the group picture on a rock, in order from left to right is: Mark (red shirt), Matt (yellow shirt), Jessica, Me (brown shirt), and Rick on the right end. I lied in a previous post, Rick isn’t in the Archbishop picture, but it’s the same people as in the other one except for Rick. There’s one of a township doctors office (I put that one up here for you Brooke). The other pictures are pretty self-explanatory, a shark coming at the shark cage, the view of Cape Town from Table Mountain, the township kids. I think that covers all of the pictures. There are some pictures of me with some kids on someones computer, I just need to get it from them sometime. After I get those I may post one or two of them. ALSO, the group pictures are courtesy of Matt!!
Until Next Time, Ciao.
Cage diving with great white sharks was awesome, we saw seven different sharks, I was in the cage for two of them. Some of them swam right next to the cage. It’s amazing having a great white shark within a foot of you with only small pieces of steel separating you from it. These creatures are extremely powerful. One of them even jumped out of the water to grab the chum and it was just amazing; we had lost sight of the shark (the visibility in the water is only 2 meters) and a few seconds later the shark was half way out of the water with the chum in it’s mouth. I would not want to be stuck in the ocean with one of these (on the surface of the ocean anyways, if you’re not on the surface they won’t attack you).
The winelands were great fun, me and three other people from SAS went on a wine tasting tour, and at the end of the day we had tried twenty different wines and one brandy from four different vineyards. We were suppose to go the a fifth vineyard but we ran out of time. We had our first wine at 9:30 in the morning!
On the second to last day in Cape Town, this girl (Jessica) and me really wanted to go to Cape Point (where the Cape of Good Hope is) and on the way back stop at Boulders Beach to see the Penguins! We couldn’t find anyone else to go with us so we rented a cab for the afternoon for 800 rand for the whole cab ($115) and he would drive us to anywhere we wanted to go. So we went to Cape Point, which was cool. We saw some baboons there; we hiked around on some of the trails and almost got blown off the cliffs a few times from the wind. If I post a picture where my hair is standing straight up and my mouth is open that’s where this picture was taken. When we had spent a few hours here we headed over to Boulders Beach. After a few minutes of walking around here we found penguins! They were hanging out on the rocks so we went on the rocks and walked around with them, took pictures of them/with them. These are the coolest animals ever, they don’t smell, they’re not annoying, they’re not mean, and the babies look extremely soft and they sound squeaky (not even kidding, they squeak). All they do is lay around and every once in a while they waddle around. Now I have over 200 pictures of just penguins!!!
On the last day a few people from SAS and me went to Robben Island and then we hiked Table Mountain in the afternoon. Robben Island used to be where a political prison was situated. They stopped using this prison in the early 90’s, so not that long ago. Its biggest prisoner was Nelson Mandela, who was released in 1990 and then became the president of South Africa in 1994. 1994 was also the first year that blacks and colored South Africans could vote. The prison was cool to see but the tour got old fast and was kind of boring. Although our tour guide was an ex-prisoner, so it was cool to hear his stories. Hiking Table Mountain is pretty self-explanatory. We hiked up it under the intense, hot African sun with a cloudless sky. The trails up this are pretty funny, I was expecting it to be all these dirt trails since that’s mostly what’s in Colorado. But all the trails were basically just stairs up the mountain. So it was like being on a Stairmaster for 2 hours. It brought me back to the days of working for Observ. But once you get to the top, the view is definitely worth it, I won’t even attempt to describe this view again, just look at the pictures I post.
I saved the best experience for last. Which was visiting the Khayelitsha Township. We got to see first hand one of the poorest towns in South Africa (it’s also the biggest township). Khayelitsha is home to 2 million people. This population is growing rapidly too. The majority of these people/families live on less than $1 a day. Their houses are no more than poorly built, one room shacks. The material that they’re built out of is scrap metal and scrap wood. Very few of these houses are made out of a solid material that wouldn’t be blown to the ground in harsh winds. These houses are one right next to each other for miles upon miles. On average a family of seven lives in these one-room houses. The room is no bigger than my bedroom back in the states. To see this with my own eyes was very eye opening. To be driving down the street in our bus looking out the window and all you see for miles on all sides of you are these shacks, one right after the other. The people who live in these houses walking the streets starring at you as you drive by. The kids frantically waving at you. These houses do have electricity. The government gives them a very limited amount of electricity per month and if they want more electricity they have to buy more. By now you’re probably wondering why I liked this so much if this township is like this. It’s not that this was a “fun” experience it was just…amazing. When we got off the bus in this township we visited two bed and breakfasts and a local craft market; where the women of the township make everything in the market. Then we were allowed to walk around a little and talk to the locals. It was hard to talk to the locals because they usually didn’t speak English they usually spoke Afrikaans, Zulu, or Xhosa (usually the adults could speak a little English, but the kids generally couldn’t). But the best thing to do was to play with the kids. These kids are the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. Even just driving by them in the bus they’d wave frantically at you and try to run along side of the bus. But when they would come up to us on the streets, they’d run up to us with the biggest smiles on their faces, they’d hug us, grab onto our legs and arms and not want to let go, then they would want us to take their picture. After we’d take their picture they’d run back to us so they could see what they look like on our camera. They absolutely loved it. Some of them would try and teach us some games and how to make sounds with our hands. There’s this one kid that I distinctly remember, we had just visited a bed and breakfast and me and this girl really wanted to go play with the kids instead of looking around the bed and breakfast, so we went outside and this one kid saw us, he was probably five or six years old, he just booked it towards us at full speed then he jumped up on me, wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and just held onto me for probably thirty seconds or so then he jumped down and went over to the girl that I had gone outside with and did the same thing except he gave her a kiss on the cheek. What makes this worse is when you look at these kids, all you want to do is help them, to make their lives better for them, to instantly make AIDS not a problem for them but there’s no possible way to help all of them at once. What’s remarkable to me is just by looking at the houses that these people live in and the way that they live, you’d never expect them to act as happy as they do. One out of nine of them have AIDS. Ten years ago they couldn’t even talk to us white people, they were forced to live in these townships they had no choice, politically they had no voice, but yet it doesn’t matter to them at all now. They’ve all moved on.
On top of that one out of nine people in South Africa has AIDS (in all of South Africa, not just in the townships) which is a huge problem. In the smaller townships they bury about 50 people every week (kids and adults) due to AIDS. And the amount of people that have AIDS in South Africa is growing rapidly every year along with the poverty level. Here are a few facts from my global studies class: Last year in the U.S. there were 43,000 people newly infected with AIDS, in Sub-Saharan Africa there were 2.8 million. Africa currently has 35% of the worlds poverty, it’s projected that by 2015 that will be at 68% unless something is changed.
I did take some pencils and stickers and other things of that nature to hand out to the kids, but we were asked by our tour guide to not give them directly to the kids as in a few other tours the kids started punching each other for the gifts and they don’t want the kids to turn into beggars and to expect these kinds of gifts whenever people visit the township. Instead I gave them to the owner of one of the bed and breakfasts, she runs an after school type program for the kdis and said that she would distribute them to the kids.
One other thing I must mention about South Africa is the food. They have really good seafood and a few really good random restaurants. If you’re ever in Cape Town go to the restaurant called “Royale” on Long Street. This is a gourmet burger restaurant. The building it’s in consists of about 3 floors, all of which belong to this restaurant. On the bottom floor is the restaurant then the other 2 floors are waiting rooms for the restaurant complete with bars. One night we had a group of 18 people to go out to dinner, since it was someone’s birthday. We showed up at this restaurant and asked if we could be seated, they said that they were all booked up for the night since you’re suppose to make reservations for this restaurant 2 weeks in advance and we hadn’t done that. But they said that despite this they could probably get us a table in an hour if we go upstairs and wait in their waiting rooms. So we went upstairs to the waiting rooms which were pretty crowded with people, but then we discovered that we could go up onto the roof of this restaurant and on the roof there were tables, chairs and benches and there was no one up there. We went up there and hung out there until our table in the restaurant was ready. There’s not a better way to wait for a table than hanging out with 17 friends on the roof of a long street building which overlooks long street, the city and table mountain in the background.
This is probably long enough for now. This is a really compressed version of what I did in South Africa and I could ramble on and on about South Africa for many more pages but I won’t cause I have a bunch of essays that I have to go write, and tests to study for. But basically in the end what I’m saying is CAPE TOWN ROCKS!! I will definitely be coming back as soon as I can. Hopefully I’ll be back by the 2010 World Cup in South Africa!!
As far as the pictures go, for the group picture on a rock, in order from left to right is: Mark (red shirt), Matt (yellow shirt), Jessica, Me (brown shirt), and Rick on the right end. I lied in a previous post, Rick isn’t in the Archbishop picture, but it’s the same people as in the other one except for Rick. There’s one of a township doctors office (I put that one up here for you Brooke). The other pictures are pretty self-explanatory, a shark coming at the shark cage, the view of Cape Town from Table Mountain, the township kids. I think that covers all of the pictures. There are some pictures of me with some kids on someones computer, I just need to get it from them sometime. After I get those I may post one or two of them. ALSO, the group pictures are courtesy of Matt!!
Until Next Time, Ciao.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Early Cape Town Pictures
If anyone really wanted to see pictures from Cape Town very soon then you’re lucky, because I’m posting them right now because it’s raining outside and so I figure it’s a good day to go to the internet café. Here are some EARLY pictures of Cape Town and Neptune Day. The Cape Town pictures should explain themselves, if not then you should double check what website you’re at. There were some Sea Lions right next to the boat and so that’s where those were. Neptune Day was on the 24th, I think. You’re suppose to do it when the ship crosses the equator, which would’ve been before Brazil, but because they scheduled it wrong or who-knows-what we did it after Brazil and way after we had passed the equator. What happens is that you’re suppose to pay omage to King Neptune for crossing the equator the first time by shaving your head or having “fish guts” poured on you and then jumping in the pool, climbing out, kissing a fish, and finally kissing king neptune’s ring. I guess it’s an old sea tradition or maybe it’s just a Semester At Sea tradition, I have no idea, I do know that they do it every year though (or every semester rather). The best part about it by far is that we got the day off from classes!!! So far Cape Town is awesome. We just got here yesterday so it’s kinda hard to tell, but so far it’s great! If I get a hold of the picture in time, it’s a picture of me, matt, and rick with Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Cape Town in the background (if I don’t get it in time then I’ll post it later). I just remembered that there’s a picture of a baby on there, that’s little baby Ryder. He’s the youngest person on the voyage. He was 7 months old at the beginning of the voyage and my math skills are horrible so I don’t know how old he is now, but around there. His dad is one of the professors onboard.
The pictures are probably scattered about, sorry about that but I messed up when I attempted to organize them (the constant time zone change from brazil to cape town really messed me up!). But I just explained a lot of them sssooo yeah, enjoy!
That is Captain Jeremy painted green and dressed up as King Neptune (personally I think he looks like the hulk, I was hoping he’d get really mad and then just become huge and start throwing stuff off of the ship!). Some of my pictures have a spot right in the middle of them because I had a piece of dust on my lens that I didn’t notice til afterwards and I’m too lazy right now to take it out.
The pictures are probably scattered about, sorry about that but I messed up when I attempted to organize them (the constant time zone change from brazil to cape town really messed me up!). But I just explained a lot of them sssooo yeah, enjoy!
That is Captain Jeremy painted green and dressed up as King Neptune (personally I think he looks like the hulk, I was hoping he’d get really mad and then just become huge and start throwing stuff off of the ship!). Some of my pictures have a spot right in the middle of them because I had a piece of dust on my lens that I didn’t notice til afterwards and I’m too lazy right now to take it out.
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