This part of my life is called Hibiscus

This is my lovely not so little home, Villa Hibiscus. We have a nice front patio and lawn with enough space to entertain, which we most certainly will do more than once. We have a large living room with comfy couches, a TV, an unused fireplace and an overused DVD player.  We have an almost fully stalked kitchen with no drawers (it doesn’t sound weird, but it’s weird). Kayla, Ryan (our presumably fictional third housemate), and I all have our own room and bathroom and space heaters to boot.

I might be biased, but I think my room has the best feng shue. I have a mosquito net that makes me feel like a princess and I hung up my elephants, giving the place just enough personal touch to make it feel like a home.

This part of my life is called Lemurs.

It’s only fitting that my second blog post addresses the second most widely known aspect of Madagascar (the first obviously being the singing giraffes and pescadarian lions). There are 101 species of lemurs in Madagascar, all of which are endemic to this island alone. They are smart animals with delightful, subtle personalities- my favorite fact about them is that they absolutely, instinctively refuse to live in captivity. If captured and put in a zoo, a lemur will simply stop eating until released back in to the wild- an evolutionary hunger strike- as if they somehow know that this tactic will beat the humans who detain them. They’re also incredibly photogenic animals, so I’ll let the following pictures speak for themselves:

There are some pretty cool other animals here, too.

This Part of My Life is Called Madagascar

This blog has been hibernating since I returned from studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa in 2011, but now that I’ve decided to fly south for the summer it is slowly but surely waking from it’s slumber.

I’m too lazy to change the name of the blog even though it’s no longer entirely applicable (although I did have the foresight to add and beyond to the description). That part of my life was called Emily in the Cape…

This part of my life is called Madagascar.

It took 38 hours, four airports, three planes, two cars, and a lot of patience, but I made it to the island of singing lemurs without losing anything but sleep. I’m now going on day 17 in this country and I already feel like my first impressions have been tainted by my second, but I’ll do my best to give an honest account of the blur that was my first week. I apologize in advance for my long-windedness.

Day 0: A Malagasy man named Joseph picked me up from the airport. He spoke great English, but only seemed to use it to ask me about the prices of various products in the U.S. …What about the bag of chips? The mobile phone? What about the pants?  And so it went for an hour and a half into the city.

We went straight to the embassy, where I met the Public Affairs Officer, Brett, who began discussing all things Public Affairs that I would soon be a part of. He must have noticed that I was having trouble stringing sentences together because he finally offered to take me home. Not two hours after dropping me off, however, he was back to pick me up for dinner at the Chargé’s house. If you’re confused by that term, join the club; it took me half the night to figure out what a Chargé was, what he did and whether or not I should care.

Turns out I should- and I do. The Charge d’Affairs is in charge of the U.S. mission to Madagascar in the absence of an ambassador, and since the U.S. does not recognize the government of Madagascar (I’ll get to that later), we do not have an ambassador. So, I shared an amazing meal with the Chargé and ten or twelve of the highest-ranking diplomats in the embassy and it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. Needless to say I didn’t make much of an impression.

Day 1:  I spent the day settling in and getting to know my housemate and fellow intern, Kayla. We went on a short driving tour of the city with one of our neighbors, went to dinner with one of the marines (there are five or six of them at embassy), and went out to a bar with an eclectic mix of other foreign interns, some NGO workers, and some local Malagasy. It was a good day, and it was particularly reassuring to know that I would in fact have a social life outside of dinners at the Chargé’s over the next three months.

Day 2: The hash. To be continued at a later date.

Day 3-4: My first two days of work at the embassy were mostly filled with various security briefings, introductions and meetings that I may or may not have been invited to. The whole Public Affairs section and much of the embassy was busy preparing for the Fourth of July festivities later that week, so I helped out when I could and took advantage of the free Internet when I couldn’t.

Day 5-6: The Fourth of July was formally celebrated at the embassy on the third of July. Roughly 500 members of the diplomatic community, the embassy and Malagasy civil society came together to celebrate with food, drinks, and music. It was quite the social event and was the first chance I really had to mingle with a wide variety of embassy employees.

The actual Fourth of July was more properly celebrated with the day off of work and a barbeque at the Chargé’s. It was about as all-American as it gets in Madagascar- full of hot dogs, country music and American expats, including peace corps volunteers, Mormon missionaries and Exxon oil business reps (the usual crowd). Despite the enjoyable day, I felt the first pangs of homesickness as I thought of my family barbequing together or my friends romping around the streets of IV. I think I’ll try to make it home before the next Fourth of July.

Day 7: Fridays are half-days at work (best decision ever) and I spent mine in a very long and very French meeting. I’m slowly recovering some of my beginning French language skills from school, but for the time being it’s a pretty legitimate excuse to zone out. Friday night Kayla and the marines and I went out to a ritzy bar by Malagasy standards where I had a $3 mojito and a $1.50 beer (gotta love that conversion rate) and then went out dancing. It was a blast. I’m very lucky to have inherited the group of people that Kayla pulled together throughout the month before I arrived- good people, good times.

There you have it- week one. There is so much more to be said than I would ever make anyone read, but I think I hit all the major points. And to those of you who made it through this whole post, I miss you, and I’m excited to continue sharing this adventure with you! 

Just your average day in Africa.

Well, that’s it. Friday was officially my last day of classes, I turned in the last (of way too many) term papers yesterday, and I am done! The ‘studying’ part of studying abroad is over. And if I do say so myself, that part was way overrated.

I have been thinking a lot about how fast the time has gone, how much has happened and how comfortable I have become with my life here. And since the next six weeks are going to look pretty different for me, I thought I would take this time to reflect on the last four months. You know, clue you all in as to what exactly I do here on a daily basis.

Let’s start with Monday.

I wake up around 8:30, make myself coffee and breakfast and head to school. The walk hike takes about 20 minutes, crosses two freeway off ramps, and includes roughly seven flights of stairs. I get to campus about 15 minutes before my first class so that I can sit on the Jammie steps and cool off. This is one of my favorite times of day. It is usually nice out, a brisk 18°C (as if I know what that means), and the people watching is fantastic. I have never seen a campus as busy as UCT- and I go to a school with over 20 thousand people. Its not that there are necessarily more students, there is just less space, and they all have to walk right by the Jammie steps no matter where they are going. Now might also be a good time to mention that the people here are confoundingly beautiful. I don’t know if it’s the old Dutch bone structure, or the style, or the sunshine, but like I said, it makes the people watching very entertaining.

The Jammie Steps, surprisingly uncrowded. 

Just another picture of our beautiful campus.

After cooling off enough that I can breath without panting, I go to class.  My classes, and this school in general have plenty of noteworthy oddities in themselves, but I’ll have to write some other time about that.

I have a break from 12-2 when I eat lunch, sit out on the lawn and catch up on some reading (not really). After my last class I get out at 3 and head home.

If it is a Tuesday or a Thursday, then I go to Shawco. Shawco stands for Student Health and Welfare Something Something, and it is the Non Profit group that I volunteer with. I go twice a week to small school that services a township in Hout Bay and tutor grade six kids in Math and English. I’ve been working with the same group of five or six girls since the beginning of August, and they have really grown on me. At first it was hard to tell if they were learning anything, or if they needed my help at all, but then one day one of them asked me what the word ‘beg’ meant, and I realized that probably over half of what I had said to them over the last couple lessons had gone well beyond their grasp of English. So I toned down my language, had them underline any words they didn’t know in their workbooks and worked slowly on correcting their grammar and spelling. Even math lessons became mostly English lessons. It was not glamorous volunteer work, but its always refreshing to be around kids, and these girls in particular always had a way of making me smile.

Sinawe, learning like a champ.

Tecious, Lindlewa, Phoziso, Sinawe, Beauty, and Ncinci. Try memorizing those names. 

I get home from Shawco at about 6:30 and go home to make dinner. Dinnertime is always fun at Charlton house- its loud, the kitchen is crowded with people in a good way and the good cooks among us always make something that smells delicious. You’ll all be happy to know that I can officially cook for myself. I never thought it would happen but I have mastered quite a few staple entrees to add to my cereal/quesadilla diet at home.

Yes, that is a brisket. No, I didn't make it. But I helped! We made a serious
feast for Rosh Hashanah a couple of weeks ago and I made a peach cobbler!
It wasn't quite as photogenic as the brisket... but you get the idea.  

After dinner is usually homework time, which usually translates to sitting around the big dining room table with a book in front of me, hearing about everyone’s day and maybe playing a round or two of banana grams. If it’s a Wednesday though, then I have choir practice. I joined the UCT choir for Africa, which is an acapella group of about 16 people, roughly 10 of which show up to practice on a weekly basis. It’s a great time regardless. We sing only African composed music, and they all already know the songs so we pretty much just stand in a circle and sing for two hours. They are all incredibly talented and passionate and so much fun to sing with, its always an uplifting way to spend a Wednesday night.

Speaking of Wednesday nights, those are also the nights we go to Stones, the not-so-local (chain) bar that we’ve frequented quite literally every Wednesday since we arrived. It’s really nothing special, more often than not it’s just us, other international students there, but it’s two-for-one from 10 till 11 on Wednesday nights so it’s become something of a guilty pleasure.

My friend Jen and I at Stones (clearly). 

We fill up our weekend days exploring the beaches and new parts of town, occasionally traveling, catching up on homework and hitting up the super cool Cape Town club scene at night.

So there you have it. Every week is different and every day something notable, but for the most part, that is a glimpse in to my average day in Africa.

Muizenberg, South Africa

Cheers,

Emily

My alter ego is a vigilante.

Rocking the Daisies is Cape Town’s largest music festival. It’s somewhere between Coachella, EDC and Floatopia, only ten times cooler because let’s face it- it’s in Africa.  We left on Friday afternoon, and would have arrived before nightfall had we not taken a twenty minute detour down a dirt road through a township, gotten stuck in a sand dune of a road, and had to push the car back to paved civilization. After re-google mapping the directions, we pulled up to Cloof Wine Estate, home to the festival, just as the sun was beginning to set over rolling hills of grape vines. We set up our tent on a literal bed of wild flowers and prepared for the evening.

Friday night was a blast; after exploring the various stages and dancing until 3 in the morning we called it a night. Sleep was hard to come by considering the drum and bass in the background and the fact that we packed four people, our luggage, and a weekend’s worth of food into to our three person tent. We got up with the sun the next morning and wandered around the festival, taking in scenes of giant neon flowers, big stages, and hippie vans selling crazy hats. We skipped the musical acts that I had never heard of before (which was all but one, Jeremy Loops, look him up, he’s fantastic) and spent the rest of the day at the lake (pond). Watching people sun bathing, floating on rafts, mattresses, tubes or anything they could find, let’s just say I’ve never wanted a kiddie pool more.

That afternoon we napped, ate, recouped, and got ready for night number two. Saturday was even more fun than Friday- I could have danced all night, and was well on my way to doing so, until Jess’ wallet was stolen. She brushed it off, not wanting to ruin the mood of the night, but when Molly’s camera was stolen right out of her purse, we all got a little uneasy. That’s when my crime fighting skills kicked in. Noticing one guy that had been near us during both incidents, I kept my eyes peeled for anything suspicious. He definitely didn’t fit in- wearing a button down shirt and rain jacket (at a music festival). What’s more, there was at least three more just like him, and to my paranoid mind they were clearly all working together. When I saw him pick pocket a girl right in front of me, we told security. They took me to the makeshift police station where I had to identify the one along with two other suspects only to find out that they were members of a Nigerian gang that had robbed hundreds of people that night. Cool- that would have been nice to know before pissing them off.

Luckily I had no pockets and not so much as a rand on me, and I managed to evade trouble for the rest of the night. We stayed up till morning and briefly watched the sunrise before passing out. All in all it was an incredible weekend, although I have no pictures to prove it and I’m probably on a hit list somewhere in Nigeria. Totally worth it. 

Namaste.

            I have officially taken up yoga. This might not seem like a big deal to some of you, but those of you who know me best know that I don’t exercise. And I mean that in the most drastic of ways, I literally do not exercise, in fact I actively avoid exercise at almost all costs. I was the kid who hid behind the bleachers during laps two and three of the mile in eighth grade P.E. class. Not that I don’t like being active, I love keeping a busy schedule, walking places, and being outdoors, but if you try to stick me in a gym and tell me to do 30 minutes on the cross trainer and I will gladly run in the opposite direction (well- it may be more of a light jog). That being said, I paid R100 (about $15) for 10 days of unlimited hot yoga and I absolutely love it. I have gone every single day since because as it turns out, I have a good deal more will power than I ever gave myself credit for.

            Yoga is just one of the little details I haven’t mentioned yet that make up my daily life here in Cape Town. Transportation is another one. In a big city with no car at my disposal, my transport options are very limited. The first and by far most utilized is walking. Starting with the 20-25 minute trek up the base of the mountain and the 5 or 6 flights of stairs that it takes to get to my first class, I find myself walking for a solid portion of the day. I wish I could adequately describe just how many stairs there really are, but lets just say pre-yoga phase, I definitely considered the walk to campus exercise in itself. I not only have to budget time in my mornings for the walk, but also for a 15 minute cool down period once I get there, and even still I will inevitably go to class looking like I just ran a marathon.

            There is of course the option of the Jammie shuttle. The Jammie, nicknamed for Jamison Hall, is a free shuttle for students and runs to and from campus in almost any direction. It would be incredibly handy if it were just a little bit more predictable. There are only maybe six routes the Jammies take, but waiting for the right one can take anywhere between 30 seconds and 30 minutes and I’m pretty convinced that some days one will simply decide not to run altogether. They are always crowded and smell at least slightly if not unbearably of body odor. While I would rather walk to school any day, the Jammie is my transportation of choice to go downtown, especially since the alternative is a minibus.

            The minibus is a staple in the personality of Cape Town. Hundreds of them run daily up and down main street, from the city center to the suburbs, honking, yelling, swerving and picking up passengers off the side of the road. A minibus has about 15 seats but seats about 22. There is always room for one more; standing, squatting or sitting on a strangers lap, they will squeeze in as many people as humanly possible. Aside from the driver there is a caller who hangs out of the window or the open door yelling repeatedly at passersby on the top of his lungs in a barely discernable accent, hoping to find one that wants a ride. This makes it easy to catch one if you do need a ride, seeing as there are dozens and dozens of these shouting, stuffed people movers speeding down the street at any given moment in either direction. It costs about R5 (75c), so I really only take it when I’m carrying groceries or in a part of town that isn’t walking distance, but its an essential element of the city, if for no other reason, than to provide the background noise.

            Getting from point A to point B has definitely been a constant challenge in my day-to-day life, but I think I’ve finally got the hang of it. And while a car would really be a miracle worker in this situation, I frankly wouldn’t give up the embarrassing rock-out-dance-music seshs on the Jammie, or the awkward cultural immersion of the minibus, or the alone time of the afternoon walk home for anything. And while it’s no spring break extravaganza, it’s the little things, the details, the habits and the frustrations that make my life here real, and its all part of the experience.

Namaste.

Emily

Sprall Break

It’s been a while since I've written, and the noteworthy things that have piled up in the meantime make blogging seem more and more overwhelming by the day. So I'm going to keep this short, but with lots of pictures, which in this case really are worth much more than my words. 

By far the best thing about being in the southern hemisphere is surprisingly NOT that the toilets flush in the other direction (which I'm pretty sure is a myth), but that I get a second Spring Break 2011. You could chalk it up to stereotypes but I'm convinced that there is a significant difference between all other breaks and a SPRING break... on a fall break you're expected to catch up on sleep and hang out at home with your family, but on spring break you're expected to do nothing but have as much fun as possible. When Spring Break comes in September, however, expectations get a little blurry. Luckily, just in time to satisfy my growing desire for a good home-style fall break, my mom arrived, and together we rocked spring break part two. It was the perfect combination of home and abroad, adventure and comfort, relaxation and excitement; it was truly the best Sprall break I could have asked for. 

Madre arrived on Friday, just in time to see campus before it cleared out for the week. Walking her from my house up the hill to campus reminded me of the first time that I had made that walk. I remember it like was yesterday, but comparing what it felt like two months ago, the first impressions, the nerves, the excitement, the foreignness of it all, to what it felt like in that moment, I realized just how long I have been here. It was the first time I have really reflected on how comfortable I have become, how much campus feels like my campus and home feels like my home. It was a good feeling, but even from the best of homes, one can always use a vacation. Well, it was more of a staycation for the first three days. We roamed around Cape Town, hitting all the essential places I eat at and exploring the ones that were too expensive to eat at until mom came to visit. We shopped on Long street and Greenmarket square, went to the Waterfront, went to Old Biscuit Mill (a magical place that I will have to write about in more detail after a more boring week), rode a cable car up Table Mountain and enjoyed a panoramic view of the city, and took a Cape Penninsula Tour similar to the one I took during orientation (but with six or seven calm adults instead of four hundred college students). It was a great rapid overview of the city, even though our festivities were cut a half a day short when I picked up some sort of stomach flu and couldn't bring myself to leave my bed. Talk about perfect timing to have a mom around...

Fortunately I was feeling almost 100% by the next morning as we boarded a place to Kruger National Park for a four-day-three-night luxury safari. It was unbelievable. We were greeted with a glass of champagne, shown to our private room (complete with deck, mini pool, princess bed, and veranda) and were on our first game drive within the hour. We saw just about everything you can image, from the tiniest baby birds to the ginormous elephants. We saw rhinos digging for water in a dried up river bed, a baby elephant drinking milk from its mother, a tower of giraffe chilling at a water hole with a dazzle of zebra (yes- those are the technical terms for what normal people call a herd), and a leopard in a tree eating the kill that he had dragged up with him, not to mention herds upon herds of impala and just about every variety of "bok" (antelope).  It took a few drives and a bit of a goose-chase but we eventually came across a lion as well, completing our Big Five checklist and my Lion King Character checklist at the same time. While it was incredible to see so many animals up close and in their natural, beautiful environment, I am almost tempted to say that the people made the trip. There was Givena and Chris- a nice newlywed couple from York that pretty much bled British stereotypes, Lazarus- our trusty safari truck driver who gets equally excited over fresh rhino dung as a feasting leopard, Molly- a spiritual Iranian woman with a lot to say and James- her husband who I was pretty sure was mildly autistic and partially blind before finding out that he taught International Law at Harvard Law School, worked for the State department and USAID, and retired as the chief legal advisor for Freedom House. Wild card! In all with animals, the people, the three course meals, the first and second breakfasts, the African back massages and sunbathing on the deck, I'd say that Kruger treated us very well. I found myself immediately missing our pretty room once we left, especially considering where we went next.

We spent one night and one day in Durban, which gave us enough time to take a tour of the city sights, have an authentic (and questionable) Indian meal, and visit two craft markets to pick up souvenirs. From there, we set out on a two-hour drive towards nowhere Eshowe, Zululand.

So, Zululand is a real place, a fact I was not entirely sure about before getting there. It includes a vast and lush are of what used to be the traditional Zulu Kingdom and then became the KwaZulu Bantustan (homeland for blacks during apartheid) until 1994. Now it is a municipality governed in part by the reinstated traditional monarchy, with some remote villages, some more modern farm towns and a whole lot of huts. After driving through endless rolling green hills and sugar plantations Mom and I arrived in Eshowe, one of the more modern, bustling towns. Even though she found a nice little hotel with a restaurant, a bar, and every other tourist that was currently in Eshowe, Mom thought it was more “authentic” to stay with a perfect stranger, in his house, on the edge of town. It’s just not a Michael family vacation unless Mom books us into some awkward, slightly uncomfortable and possibly dangerous place to stay, under the pretence of “cultural experience”. Ryan, Tom- I know I don’t need bring up Hawaii again…

In her defense, despite sharing a bathroom with an elderly South African man, his thirty-year-old Thai girlfriend, and their numerous other houseguests, Zululand turned out to be the absolute highlight of the trip. Early on Saturday morning we set out with about ten other travelers and two locals on our way to the Zulu Virgin Reed Dance. It took another two hours driving further into the middle of nowhere to reach Ulundi, a village of sorts where the King lives and where the young Zulu girls would be celebrating their virginity by singing and dancing and presenting the King with a reed. Back in the day this was when girls who had hit puberty offered themselves to the King and he picked his wives, however, even the traditional Zulu king no longer finds that appropriate, so it has became a purely symbolic coming of age ceremony. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting but it definitely wasn’t what I saw- 30,000 teenage Zulu girls dressed in nothing but traditional neck beads and skirts (emphasis on the nothing) paraded up a long dirt road to the palace carrying 15 ft. reeds and singing on the top of their lungs. It was unlike ANYTHING I have ever seen before, and not just because I have never seen so many naked boobs in one place. The masses of girls walking up the road was endless, they just kept coming and coming, singing all the while and dancing with pride. We were the only spectators, not even the families come since many of the girls came from distant corners of Zululand to get there. Our local guides gave us a completely meaningless badge to wear around our neck that somehow made us look like we were supposed to be there, and that coupled with my big camera led nearly everyone to assume I was working for the press. I figured out quickly that teenage girls are the same all over the world, and they all love to have their picture taken. I was happy to oblige, and it was a nice icebreaker for some of the most interesting conversations I have had on this trip. We were surrounded by, engaged in, and truly experiencing the Zulu culture in an intimate yet extravagant way and it was wild. As if it wasn’t a once-in-lifetime-experience already, we followed the girls into the royal palace (bigger hut) compound, where the King and his entire family awaited the arrival of none other that South Africa’s President Zuma. Apparently he’s a Zulu.

The whole experience was almost too much to take in, especially in the intense heat, and I mostly just wandered around wide-eyed, laughing in awe and the situation and snapping as many pictures as I could to try and capture it. I even did some high quality (not) photography for one of the King’s sons who referred to himself only as Prince and is writing an autobiography about royal life. True story.

At the end of the day I just sat back and reflected, not only on the day but on all the ones before it- I had gone from the top of table mountain to the back of a safari truck to the King’s palace in Zululand in less than a week. I had stood on the Cape of Good Hope, driven through a herd of wild elephants, been close enough to touch President Zuma, and sipped white wine in a sandy riverbed at sunset. And all of that with my wonderful mother at my side. I think its safe to say we had had one hell of a Sprall break. 

Cable car to Table Mountain, Cape Town

Top of Table Mountain, over looking Camps Bay, Cape Town

Cape of Good Hope

Isn't she pretty?

My hat + elephant in the background= baller safari picture

Our driver Lazarus in the sunset in the river bed.

Laz and I having our morning coffee and biscuits on the road (note the fold out table on the front of the truck.. I want one).

Rhinoceros 

Nala.

Just a leopard in a tree. NBD.

I always thought that stopping to wait for a herd of elephants to cross the street was just a safari myth.. I guess not.

Indian Ocean, Durban.

Virgin Reed Dances, the King's compound, Zululand. 

Beautiful. I wasn't kidding about the boobs.

Note that pants are apparently not allowed in zululand, just as a general rule, so I am wearing a scarf held up with a hair pin. Frankly I would have probably fit in better had I not worn it at all.

So much joy, so much dancing. 

President Zuma with King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu.

Cheers friends,

Emily