Day 17

Other than classes starting, not a very exciting week.

The sore throat I had been dealing with for a while has turned into a cold and fever so lucky for me I get to be that kid in class who is sneezing and sniffling the whole time. Unfortunate when it's a class of 300.

School is pretty good. UCT is the number one university in all of Africa, so it will undoubtedly be challenging. I got really lucky with my schedule, tutorials and all, so hopefully it won't be too painful. Everything with academics here is really unclear. One of my classes says it meets every MTWTHF, so today I went to class only to discover that it's only on occasional Fridays the class meets. How was I supposed to know? Same with the university's academic calendar as a whole. We're supposed to have two holidays, one in August and one in September, but do I have class that day? No way of knowing. The university's academic calendars don't provide any information of the sort. It doesn't even list when final exams are.

With scheduling on the mind, I'm successfully slowing down the house internet browsing through various travel websites. Ideally, I'd like to do a trip to Botswana and Victoria falls for "Spring" break, and then a few other 2-4 day trips including wine weekends in Stellenbosch, Garden Route tour (which sounds SICK but waiting until the weather gets nicer), and a potential adventure to Kruger National Park. If I'm able to fit it all in, desperation for financing might lead to starvation, but let's hope not.

My cooking skills are still quite minimal, though I was very satisfied with my homemade sandwich today. Toasted bread with a little oil on it, avocado, turkey, and cheese. Yes, I'm aware that doesn't deserve me the title of Iron Chef, but I was pleased I made something that used more than 2 ingredients and it actually tasted good. Goal for the end of the trip: perfecting the art of cooking meat. So far my skills end at cooking hotdogs.

Yesterday I joined a gym. Ambitious right? Well fortunately a campus shuttle stops about a block away and it's a cheap ride home. Makes it hard to avoid. After I signed up, I asked if someone could show me around, since they neglected to do that in the sales pitch, and I wound up with a personal trainer, Juan Pierre, who literally wanted me to crumble. Forty five minutes later, another plank was entirely out of the question and I was set free. Any kind of physical movement this morning was quite difficult. I think tomorrow my work out will consist of sitting in the steam room to de-clog my face of congestion. Juan Pierre will have to find someone else to make suffer.