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Post Tagged with: Cape Town

Updates from Africa 12

Updates from Africa 12

So we’ve been consistently on the road for the last couple days and we’re now settled in Cape Town.  I’ll give a brief account of what happened in the past two days.

On the morning of the second we caught our shuttle with Michael to Windhoek. It was the typical 5-hour drive, nothing very eventful.  We stopped at the same rest stop for biltong (basically jerky) on the way.  We rode back with the Second Girls.  We arrived early enough to do some shopping, especially for luggage, and Codrin wanted to look at some masks at a mall we had been to.  The shopping mall, where our favorite Mugg & Bean is, turned out to be where we saw the strangest sight we’ve seen so far: A group of native Namiba women, bare breasted, lathered in orange makeup, replete with traditional jewelry and with their babies wrapped around the nape of their backs, walking through the shopping mall with plastic shopping bags.  We ate at Mugg & Bean, and then Ioana went off back to the hostel and Codrin and I went to the casino to play some more blackjack.

That night the plan was to go to dinner at a Cameroon restaurant but we ended up lounging around the hostel until everything was closed so we just drank a bit and went to bed.  In the morning Michael picked us up to go to the airport.  The Windhoek airport is a charming airport in the middle of the shrublands.  There is nothing in sight of the airport, and it takes 30 minutes to get there from Windhoek.  We had some trouble with our bags; we were 30kg overweight between the three of us and had to pay a lot to get our bags onboard.  The bureaucracy was terrible, which was surprising considering we haven’t really had any problems yet in that department.  We had to check our bags first, then go to a separate office and pay, get a receipt and go back to make sure our bags got on the plane, but the receipt printing took forever because the woman didn’t know the computer, and long story short we went through security 10 minutes before boarding.  But as it turns out, we ended up being the first people through the gate because we were rushing so much we didn’t realize we were slightly ahead of schedule.  As we were taking off, it occurred to me that I had never given Namibia a second thought, and Windhoek (let alone Swakopmund) was a place I had never heard about until we started planning this trip.  It makes me wonder how many other unknown, untapped jewels there are in the world for the interested traveller.

The flight to Joburg was uneventful.  We got back to Doris Street around 4 and the VIP Guesthouse was closed.  We called the number, and the cell phone, and no one picked up.  So we had a cab, three suitcases, three backpacks, three smaller backpacks and various other bags and we really couldn’t afford to wait there.  For whatever reason, even though we told Sarah we were coming that day, no one was there.  So we were again homeless in Johannesburg with our bags; more than we had the first time we knocked on the gate of the VIP Guesthouse three weeks ago.  We remembered there was another guesthouse down the street, so Codrin and Ioana watched the bags and I took the cab to Diamond Diggers Backpackers, where we found a room. One cab ride (and an extra 100 rand) later we got our bags into our new guesthouse, which was an enormous compound with a swimming pool, bar, jacuzzi and internet cafe.  They didn’t have a three-person room, but they had an empty suite for 8 which they gave for just the three of us.  Codrin went off to play poker at the casino, which is the only one we had found that had poker, and he had been itching to play all week.  Ioana and I called Renata, our waitress at Rodizzo’s three weeks ago, who had offered to take us out for drinks when we were back in town.  While we were waiting to be picked up, a woman approached us on the street and told us to be careful because there were black people in the neighborhood.  We thanked her politely and told her our ride was just coming.  Renata is apparently part of a very typical set of 18-24 year olds who live at home and still depend on their parents for rides, despite taking classes at the university.  So Renata’s father picked us up and dropped us off on the other side of town at a bar called Cool Runnings where we met up with Renata’s friends–about 20 of them–some of which go to University of Cape Town and whom we’ll be hanging out with when they go back to school in February.  The scene reminded me of how high schoolers get together; everyone has to go home by the end of the night, and no one lives on their own.  It really disorients social life, but it also prevents the sort of partying-til-you-pass-out mentality that accompanies any college campus in the United States.  We met some interesting kids at the bar; at the end of the night Ioana and I ended up paying for a bulk of our tab, which we were completely willing to do.  I have a copy of the receipt in my pocket; it is 71 items long.  But it was a fun, fun night.  We have some friends to call up and meet when we’re back in Johannesburg.

Ioana and I got back to the hostel around 2; Codrin came in at 4 in the morning announcing that he had one 10,000 rand playing poker. Apparently his 10-hour stint at the casino had been quite profitable. In the morning, we checked out and Codrin and I went back to the casino to play poker (I ended up playing blackjack for most of the time).  Ioana wanted to do some writing so she went to Nelson Mandela Square, which apparently is lovely and it’s something we’ll have to do when we go back.  Around 6 we took a shuttle to the airport, flew to Cape Town, and I’m here now in the dorm room with Codrin and we are officially “Settled in.”  We’ve met some people on the program but not all; everyone is quite tired from their 20-hour commutes and it makes me, for one, feel very relaxed that I’m already acclimated and “Africanized.”  Go figure.

This trip has been quite expectation-shattering and interesting.  I don’t really have a “conclusion” for this pseudo-journal I’ve been writing, because this really isn’t the end of anything.  The Cape Town program starts tomorrow, and I really don’t know what to expect, aside from the fact that it will be scholarly.  Hopefully the past couple weeks will give me a heightened perspective on the issues we will be studying, but only time will tell.

January 5, 2009Comments are DisabledRead More