The Sketchy Taxis of DOOOOOOM

SO I am at CCF now!!! WOOOO!!!

It was fun timez getting here since I REALLY didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving ALONE in Windhoek. However, the shuttle to Otji I wanted to take left about a half hour after my flight landed and it takes about an hour to get TO the shuttle from the airport… anywho, here is the FULL story…

The day before I left was a mad rush of TRYING to figure out where the HECK to store my stuff and returning my bedding, checking out of my room, packing the last bits of my stuff all while trying to study for a test I had to write at 5pm. And seriously, I have NO idea what I studied. I STILL don’t know what half those readings were about seeing as I was thinking about all the stuff I had to do before I left. Turns out it didn’t really matter since the teacher just COPIED questions from our last test… I didn’t even NEED to study all that stuff! GAH! Well, at least I know I’ll ace this class seeing as she wanted to keep the TWO things I wrote for that class for future generations to see examples of “good” writing… seriously.

ANYWAYS! Moral of the story is that it was hectic and I spent the last night at UB with no power in my room, sleeping on a bare mattress with no bedding at all, in a dress because it was the comfiest thing I had that could be dirty when I arrived at CCF. Sheesh.

Then I got up at 4:30 to make it down to my cab at 5am because my flight was at about 7:30 and arriving two to three hours before an international flight is sort of a knee jerk reaction… Yeah, the airport was still empty. Not even the STAFF had arrived yet when I got there shortly before 6am. But I sat at a café and waited it out. The coffee was pretty good.

The plane rides and immigration were relatively painless (for once), the REAL adventure started when I landed and needed to actually GET somewhere. I had TRIED to book a shuttle called TownHoppers the night before, but I couldn’t see anyone with that uniform, so when a man in a Spirit Shuttles polo shirt walked up to me and said “shuttle?”, I took him up on it. It took an hour and N$300 to get to the taxi rank in Windhoek, but I made it. There, my shuttle driver helped me to get a shared taxi to Otjiwarongo. (A shared taxi meaning that there were two other girls I didn’t know in there with me.) The shared taxi driver was a hip-hop loving guy with bleach blond hair, but he got me to Otji safely enough. I even dozed off once or twice on the four hour ride. Once I arrived at Otji, I once again had NO IDEA how I was going to make the last leg of my trip to CCF. So I asked my taxi driver. Again. He called some people and drove to a place where there seemed to be a lot of idling taxi men. (This is a common occurrence in Africa and they are ALWAYS eager to get people in their cars). After a bit of negotiation, one man agreed to take me the 45 minutes to CCF. Basically, the entire trip was me placing my trust in sketchy taxi drivers. But sketchy taxi drivers are something that I am becoming alarmingly used to in Africa and they’re really not all that bad.

When I arrived at CCF, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do… Santa was gone for a few days (the one I had been talking to) and I didn’t REALLY know if anyone else knew I was coming. After some confusion and introducing myself to one of the new interns and figuring out that they DID know, we hauled my stuff to my room, which I am sharing for the moment with Rachel (One of the BEST people I knew last time) and Suzie (a new girl in the ecology department).

Moral of the story is, the trip was an adventure, but I was NOT alone for Thanksgiving dinner.

Which was delicious, by the way, and included PIE.

SO THAT’S TH EPIC TALE!!!! One day poets will make it rhyme and sing it for kings and queens and all that rot. Go me.

Leina Lame Ke Setunya

I am very sorry for not getting around to Blogging about the Delta trip since I explained everything to lots of people on Skype… If you want to know more about that, just ask! For now, ON WITH THE PLOT!

So last weekend I went on a weekend camping trip with the choir… well… camping in that we drove an hour away and slept on the floor of a class room. I figured it would be a painful and grueling experience as I don’t really have friends that were going… but it wasn’t AS horrible as I thought it would be. I mean, I started out with feeling sorry for myself and trying to ignore the fact that I couldn’t understand a darn word anyone was saying around me because no one was speaking English to me, but it seems that they made a pact or SOMETHING to ensure that I didn’t feel left out or get lonely.. so LOTS of people made efforts to make me feel included whenever I sat by myself... they also offered to share bedding (I was told to bring bedding in Setswana... NOT helpful) and gave me a Setswana nickname! (it's Setunya, btw, which means rose/flower) There was NO transition to the name and I was confused for a bit because suddenly everyone was saying Setunya all the time and I kept forgetting that was supposed to be me... but they all seemed more comfortable around me after giving me a name they could pronounce correctly. Haha! The actual singing part was kinda arduous as we sang from 8am to 11pm with only about 4 hours break in between, though I was very excited when we learned a song in Italian that had NORMAL sheet music... Basically, I was glad to not be the ONLY one who didn’t understand the lyrics for once. After the singing, we played Setswana games outside... at first I hung back, mostly out of fatigue and confusion, but by the third game, I was in it (someone was all like "Setunya! COME JOIN!" and I felt so warm and fuzzy at the nickname that I hopped right in). It was really cool when we played the Setswana version of telephone and they added the rule "No Setswana" in there because I was in the circle... actually, during those games they were REALLY making sure that I understood everything. :D The only REAL complaint I have about the weekend (besides eating bread with butter and polony 3 times, YUCK) was the sleeping. While I was physically pretty comfortable because a girl offered to share her air mattress with me, the games went on until 5 IN THE MORNING with the florescent lights on and everyone yelling in Setswana... and Setswana is VERY loud... thus when I tried to go to bed at 1:30 after having only 3 hours of sleep the night before due to the SAME lights and loudness, let’s just say it wasn't very RESTFUL and I woke up on Sunday with a migraine. All and all though, it was nicer than I expected.


ps- Title translates to "My name is Flower"

My First Choir Concert Was a Zoo! (Or Maybe a Circus?)

Okay, so my choir concert was both the most hilarious and most traumatic thing I have EVER done. First off, it started an HOUR LATE, and it was held in the cafeteria during dinner hour. That’s one way to draw a crowd I guess, but it was very loud. However, there was a wooden, impromptu stage-ish thing (VERY unstable, I think it cracked at the end), and we set up audience style seating, so it was legit. So, most traumatically, I was FRONT and CENTER of the choir. Like, my terrible dancing right in the middle. Then the director starts the opening remarks and is all like “you can see we have some NEW people”… and points to the token white girl standing front and center. Yeah, I was all like “hello audience type nod”. Yeah, there is another international girl in the choir (her name is Martha!) but she stands in the back off to the side. So yeah, that bit of awkwardness. Then we sang our songs and I did my best to not look TOO much like a fool doing the step dancing thing. (I even sang a solo-ish thing in a group of eight!) but then… we were done with the songs we had rehearsed… and then kept on singing songs. ONES I HAD NEVER HEARD BEFORE. So I got to learn songs IN SETSWANA on stage! D: And one of them, the conductor was all like “hey, if you don’t know the dance, please move to the back” but no one behind me would switch with me! ;_; so I spent the whole song desperately trying to mouth the words and watching a girl out of the corner of my eye trying to copy the dance moves… IT WAS SO HARD AND I DEFINITELY MADE A FOOL OUT OF MYSELF! But… surprisingly it was somehow really fun. One of the songs I didn’t know was like a mad choir jam session where this guy would call out words and we’d sing after him and copy crazy dance moves. I was having a tough time singing because I was laughing so hard! It was one of those WEIRD moments where I lost all self-consciousness and just HAD FUN with it. LOL!

The other thing that was weird was the amount of SCREAMING coming from the girls in the audience. Half the time, you could barely hear the choir apparently.

OTHER COOL THING THAT HAPPENED RECENTLY! I went to a circus! There was a South African circus that came to Gaborone for the VERY first time. If I am not mistaken, this is the first South African circus in Bots ever. It was… surprisingly normal, and since it was pretty small ALL the seats were good ones. There was really NORMAL circus stuff. For example, there were jugglers, clowns, trapeze artists, horse and miniature pony tricks, tigers, ELEPHANTS, etc. The clowns were actually REALLY funny. In one of their “in-between acts” acts, they got four audience members to stand in a square and strung caution tape stuff around them until they were a make-shift boxing ring and then proceeded to have a slow-motion boxing match to Chariots of Fire (think Olympics theme song, I think). The acts were all small scale, but VERY impressive. One thing I appreciated was whenever the other acts were doing something high up; they wore safety wires just in case. This seems like it would make it less daring, but I USUALLY spend circuses stressed about the performer’s safety, so it helped. (My GOD I really am a mother hen/ Sam Eagle from the Muppets type) My only complaint was that the tigers… didn’t look so good. They were OBVIOUSLY afraid of their handlers and really over-weight which implies lack of proper exercise. Also, the handler was using this stick with a freakin NAIL in it to get the tigers to do simple tricks. It was very sad. The other animals weren’t as bad, but what are they doing with FIVE tigers when they OBVIOUSLY can’t afford to care for them properly? Sheesh! But I had TONS of fun and hey! It’s a freakin CIRCUS in AFRICA! What!?

Next week I’m off to the Delta! Wish me luck and await the next post with anticipation!

DO RE MI FA SO LA TI DOOOO!!!!

So let’s talk about choir. I am having A LOT of fun with it when I’m not sick (I went when I was feverish because if you miss too many, you get kicked out… they’re REALLY strict!) We sing in Setswana all the time which is really hard but is actually helping me in Setswana class a bit! :D And the conductor’s assistant is going to start writing out the songs for me and Martha (the other international student in the choir) that don’t include music), so that will make things a lot easier!

On the other hand, choir here is MUCH more intense than in the states! At least once a week, we spend the entire time doing intense workouts and running because they believe being fit makes you a better chorister. It actually may be true for things like breath support and stamina, but that doesn’t actually MEAN that I WANT to do intense work outs! LOL! I even had to go buy work out pants at this little Asian store (cheapest place to buy clothes!) because I didn’t have any proper clothes for choir… work outs. They say “Chelsea Football Club” down the side, but they were only 30 Pula and they fit well enough. Though I think they are guys’ pants. However, during the workout the coach let the girls do “girly” push-ups… which was interesting and nothing I have ever been allowed to do in practice due to all girls’ schools not believing in “girly” exercises. The others were very amused by my partial indignation at the slight to my… well… womanliness?

Also, choir is OFFICIALLY Tues, Thurs, Sun from 6-7 (5-7 on Sundays)… however, last week we had choir Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, AND Thursday! Apparently choir is practically every day instead of just three times a week. ALTHOUGH, that may be due more to the fact that we have a CONCERT coming up on Friday! Wish me luck! I will try to put up a video of it this weekend. :D

My Not-So-Awesome Joburg Adventure

So… my trip to Johannesburg, South Africa did not go exactly as I envisioned it. In fact, it was a bi tof a disaster all round.

So on Friday after classes, four friends and I hopped onto a combie looking forward to our great adventure. By the way, a combie is like a minibus/ van and they don’t leave until they are all the way full. Basically, I spent the six hours to Joburg sitting on the edge of my seat as the two ladies next to m managed to take up 2 ½ seats instead of their allotted one. And the girls and I kinda got lost for ten mins at the South African boarder, but besides that the ride wasn’t too bad.

The trouble started when we arrived.

Our combie driver was very sweet and found us a taxi to take us to our hostel right away. He even took down the guy’s license number and warned him that we were American girls and that he expected the taxi driver to take really good care of us. And he did take care of us, but it took us over half an hour to find the hostel since NO ONE knew where it was. I mean we had the address (which turned out to be wrong) but no one the taxi driver asked had even heard of the place. We eventually found it (we were worried for a bit that the place was a fake) and ran into our next big road bump.

The manager had booked us rooms but then given them to other people…

So we were in the middle of Joburg at ten at night with no place to stay. Our taxi driver sat with us for an entire HOUR while we waited for the lady to either give us rooms or get us another place to stay. While this was nice of him, his original fare of R250 went up to R430 (around 60USD). Eventually the manager got us a dorm style room at another hostel called the Rosebed Backpackers (or something like that) We were so tired, we went to bed right away.

The next morning we got up and went to the Diamond Diggers Backpackers. It was MUCH better than the one the night before. It was quiet (unlike the last one), had a GREAT view of the Joburg city, and had a pool. (Though we didn’t make use of it) We spent the first half of the day settling in and going to a mall for lunch. Seriously, a mall. In the afternoon, we went to the Apartheid Museum, which is what one of the girls wanted to do most while in Joburg. It cost another R80 each to get there and R40 to get in, but the museum WAS fascinating. I really didn’t know much about what had happened before I went, but the museum was really nice.

After the museum closed, it was dark and so we headed back to our backpackers to eat and chill. (Joburg is not really a safe city for a group of girls to hang around in at night)

The next morning, we had wanted to go see the caves at the Cradle of Humankind Heritage Site, but the other girls decided it was too expensive and so we didn’t go. Instead, we headed to another mall and went to a sushi buffet (who ever said there was no sushi in Africa!) That was pretty much the highlight of the trip: the all you can eat sushi… which is kind of sad if you ask me!

Then we took the combie back to Gabarone… At least I was MUCH more comfortable this time as this combie had bigger seats and I sat with my friends instead of two old ladies. Basically, all we did this trip was go to a museum and I spent over P1000 (about 200USD) on transportation and lodging…sigh.

Ah well, you win some, you lose some. Better luck next time, ne?

Belated Blog Posts Are Like Belated Birthday Cards: Appreciated But Late

Sorry I have not blogged in a while. It would just skip my mind and then I would remember I had to blog at really inconvenient times: like at night when I was trying to sleep or during class. Anyways, so here is a VERY belated blog about the trips I have taken in the last few weeks! This weekend was quite boring and I mostly just stayed in. So how about hearing about the trips I’ve taken so far!

Trips I have taken so far! We went on a cultural excursion weekend to Mokolodie game reserve, which is only a couple hours from Gabarone. We ate three different “cultural” meals in different villages. When I say village, I really mean tourist type lodges and villages. It was pretty much the same meal over and over again, which I suppose goes to show that it WAS really traditional. It was also the same TYPES of food as in the cafeteria, however it ACTAULLY TASTED GOOD! AMAZING! Apparently, the cafeteria just cooks horrible food that could be good but isn’t. That’s disappointing, right? Anyways, the meals were delicious! We also stayed overnight in a traditional cultural village called… I forget. It was a Setswanan name. But they had a baboon as a totem and told us that we were all officially baboon totem people for the night! They did traditional dances for us and then made us get up and taught us a few dances. One was just a celebration dance, but the other was a “coming of age presentation dance”… which basically consists of us hopping around and then presenting our chests and butts to the watching guys by thrusting them out… yeah. They also taught us some “traditional” women’s work like grinding sorgum for dinner. Yeah, women’s traditional work in Africa is all chores. We stayed in a cabin on the floor, which wasn’t all bad. However, out of all the tents and cabins that we stayed in (our group had, like, 50 people in it), ours was the only one with REALLY warm fleece blankets. Everyone else FROZE… so I can’t complain too much. The next day, we actually went to the Mokolodie reserve and did a GAME DRIVE! Now, I was excited, but not as excited as my compatriots because I have been on LOTS of game drive type things at CCF. (Though we were counting the animals, not just looking) I SHOULD have been more excited because I saw a TON of new animals! I saw wildebeest, impala, kudu, ostrich, giraffe, and… get this… A WHITE RHINO WITH HER BABY. O.O I SAW A BABY RHINO AND IT WAS THE CUTEST THING EVER! It was just standing there about 10 meters from the road! It was so amazing! That was the ONLY thing I really wanted to see on the trip to Mokolodie and I saw it! Our safari car driver was a tad worried at first that the mother would be aggressive and charge the car, but she was really unworried and just kept grazing. Her baby was really curious, though and kept wandering towards the car before getting scared and running back to mom… but he kept doing it over and over! It was so cute! After the drive was over, we ate a barbeque (brai) out in the bush by a huge lake and saw hippos! (From very far away…) They served the best apple crumble with custard for dessert! SO GOOD!

The other trip I took was just last weekend. We went to a horse safari place about a half hour outside Gabarone for… camping… yeah, not really. We stayed in this house/ cabin thing, so it wasn’t REALLY camping. But we did have a GREAT view from the cabin and we had a REALLY good barbeque and fire. (Though we did have some mishaps with getting the charcoal to ACTUALLY light) We even made bread by wrapping dough around a stick and roasting it over the fire! A definite first for me! Although it came out a little doughy. Also, marshmallows were a given. :D Sunday morning, I took a half hour horse ride! (It wasn’t REALLY a safari, since this was a really small operation out in the bush, but I had fun anyways!) My horse was black and white… actually; its coat looked like cow print! But he was very good. I thought that since he was used to this route with tourists, he would just follow the horse in front of me and ignore commands… but he actually paid attention to what I was doing with the reigns and such so I avoided the akasha trees that the horse in front of me dragged my friend through! He was awesome! Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of me riding a horse in AFRICA because I forgot my camera that weekend! I am such a fail!

Anyways, we are planning a trip to South Africa next weekend. We plan to visit the Apartheid museum and (hopefully) Krueger National Park. It’s still in the works, but wish me luck!

Dumela Bomma le Borra!

So… classes. They are so far pretty interesting, ESPECIALLY Setswana class (I love languages!), the only problem is that the professors keep CANCELING THEM. Seriously, except for the Setswana class, I have only had one of each other class. And one keeps cutting them short and the professors are ALWAYS a few minutes late to class… oh Africa time! And hey, usually a canceled class wouldn’t bother me much except that this is RECURRING and I really want something to learn or DO here on campus! I think it’s just how years start out here, but hey, hopefully it’ll pick up soon. Oh! But here are some phrases that I can say in Setswana now!

Dumela mma/rra- hello madam/sir
Bomma/Borra- plural sirs/madames
Leina la gago ke mang?- what is your name ?
Leina lame ke Heather- my name is heather
O tswa kae?- Where are you from?
Ke tswa kwa Oregon- I am from Oregon
Ke itumela la gogo itse- it was nice to meet you
Go siame- goodbye

This is a VERY difficult language to pronounce! The “G”s are like “H” in the back of the throat, and the “K”s are VERY hard. Also, I am having SO MUCH trouble with the sound that “tlh” and some “th”s make. However, there is no verb conjugation and no masculine/feminine articles! YAY! There goes my least favorite parts of learning languages! SO happy! The problem with learning the language is that EVERYONE here speaks English along with Setswana! Thus, it’s hard to practice. However, my roommate seems to really like that I’m trying to learn, so she has helped me with pronunciation and asked her friends to speak simple Setswana to me whenever possible! She’s REALLY nice. And she has good taste in music.

Another interesting thing that I have learned since being here is that the campus is pretty quiet at night (my roomie goes to bed around 10pm normally) and everyone wakes up REALLY early. There is music blasting on my floor at 7am or earlier and sometimes my roommate’s friends even come over at 7:30 AM. I don’t have class until 11am each day SO I AM STILL SLEEPING. It is very annoying and anyone who has tried to wake me up will tell you that I HATE being woken up! (Unless you are holding a cup of coffee and it’s like non-instant coffee doesn’t EXIST on this campus!) SO I usually just grumble and turn over and try to ignore the early morning ruckus. Jeez! But at least it’s relatively quiet at night.

On a happy note, my favorite kind of cheese— Gouda— and my favorite tea— rooibos— are really common and cheap here! It’s so exciting! XD

That’s all for now folks! PS- If you wanna skype I would love to! The time difference is 6 hours for the East Coast and 9 hours for the West Coast! Set up a time with me on Facebook and I’ll be there!