After about 32 hours of travel, I have made it to UCT and all moved in to my new house.
The last few days have been crazy busy and I am exhausted. Here is the short version:
I finally got to my temp room in UCT dorm at about 11 Tuesday night only to shortly after witness my future roommate, Remi, stumble into the room. Turns out we get along great and are roommates in our house, Mellison. We moved into our permanent housing this morning and though others claim we have the "worst" house, it's awesome. Housing is very similar to SCU housing, except ours is mixed gender.There are 13 of us in Mellison, 8 girls and 5 boys, including the male RA. Houses are all within walking distance except at night we have a security guard and shuttle that can escort us to another house.
It's winter here, which means it's about mid 50s during the day. After coming from summer in MN, it's absolutely freezing. The houses don't have heat, in fact no place except malls I've noticed heating. My future method of drying my clothes is on a clothesline outside our balcony. Who needs bounce with Cape Town air?
Cell phones are probably the most confusing concept ever. They don't use major carriers, instead everyone buys an unlocked generic phone and a neutral simcard and purchase air-time on the sim. Seven of us girls walked to a little supermarket and spent nearly an hour finding the perfect cellular solution. Even the phone numbers are confusing. Apparently my phone number is 079.608.8064. Every text is less than 5 cents and incoming calls from the US are free. Call me maybe?!
The currency we use is the Rand, which is currently a little over 8 rand to the dollar. That being said, I bought an expensive cocktail for 35 Rand. Not a bad place to incur a lot of travel expenses.
Last night was the big CIEE dinner held in Stellenbosch, a wine town about an hour drive away. Kind of like the Sonoma of South Africa. I ate antelope and oxen tail....
Nothing scheduled for the weekend, hopefully a rugby game tomorrow with kids from the program and then a tour of the city sponsored by UCT on Sunday. Tonight we have a "family" (aka house) dinner. I've been selected as "house-mom", go figure, so I'm in charge of collecting Rand from everyone to go toward household expenses I personally purchase. This title of honor put me in a Cape Town market today trying to buy essentials for our italian dinner tonight. Considering I'm probably the worst chef and have minimal knowledge when it comes to grocery shopping, I struggled. However I got out of there with stuff for dinner for 13 and paid R450.
Clearly, life is good.
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