I'm home. Time to sort through my mail, check my voicemail, upload photos, and the such. I'd do laundry but the pipes are broke here, so no laundry until I'm back in East Lansing on Tuesday.

I'll update this when my photos are all uploaded.

End of the line

Well, this is it. In 13 hours, I wake up to get ready to take the tube at 5AM to Paddington, where I'll switch to the Heathrow Express, getting me to Heathrow airport at about 5:30-5:45 AM (hopefully). Other than the Euro 2008 final tonight (soccer, Spain-Germany), and packing, I've got nothing left to do but wait for my flight to leave tomorrow morning. Even though it's a 9 hour flight, I get into Detroit around noon, which means I'll be ready to pass out around dinner time back home. After a day of rest, it's off to East Lansing, where I have to deal with the realities of taking 9 credits this summer, working, and getting ready for what's sure to be a busy year as President of Phi Sigma Pi, a third year history major, and starting classes in the College of Education.

This trip has been truly amazing. The crazy part is, it all seems so normal to me. I'm thinking I'll recognize how much it's changed me when I get home. But that's for then. Now, I'm just enjoying my last few hours in London. I'll start with the packing shortly, then I'll be settling into the bar to enjoy the European Cup final with the multitudes of Spainards who are staying in the hostel. I could cheer for Germany, but it just doesn't seem wise. Plus, it's Germany, and I studied Spanish for 5 years for a reason, right?

Next time I post on here it will be to announce that I finally finished uploading my pictures onto the Internet. Until then, you'll just have to wait in anticipation.

Yebo, Molo, Adios, and Cheers!

London part 2

So London is pretty cool, and I've seen just about everything I intended to see.

Sights seen so far:
Tower of London
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
River Thames
St. Paul's Cathedral
Greenwich (aka the Prime Meridian)
Westminster Abbey
Big Ben
House of Commons
Buckingham Palace
Trafalgar Square
British Museum
The Tube (about 10 times a day)
Hyde Park
Regents Park
Abbey Road
Old Bailey
Globe Theatre
No. 10 Downing St
Piccadilly Circus

Plus lots of other little things that people probably have never heard of.

Patrick actually flies in tomorrow (Friday) which makes it twice that I've been unable to tell the days of the week with the dates. I'm meeting him at Paddington Station around 1 PM tomorrow, and then we're going to check him in at his hostel, which is literally right on Piccadilly Circus.

Today I went inside St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, as both were closed to tourists when I got there yesterday. At St. Paul's you can climb way up the dome and stand on the balconies that are waaaaaaaaay up. Really cool views of London, though. Westminster was also pretty cool, but I don't have any pictures really because they don't allow it.

After that I spent the afternoon in Brighton, which is on the English Channel. It's got a Coney-Island type feel, including a giant pier with rides and even slot machines. It was nice to get out of the city for awhile, and the train ticket was pretty cheap, too. I might look into going to Dover to see the White Cliffs or to Windsor to see the Queen this weekend. In all probability, I'll probably be hitting the pubs this weekend with Pat, so I'm glad I got most of my sightseeing done already.

On Monday morning I get to wake up around 4 so I can get on the first train on the Tube at 5:02 from King's Cross to Paddington so I can hop on the Heathrow Express to make it to Terminal 4 by 6 AM to check in for my flight back home to Detroit. I get an extra 5 hours or so, as my flight leaves London at about 9 AM and gets in to Detroit at about 12 Noon. The flight's around 9, 10 hours, I think (but I'm too lazy to do the math on that one).

This blog is severely lacking...

In recent news, I'm in London. I got in at 6 AM local time on Saturday morning (1 AM Detroit time). I sort of checked out the city this weekend, and ended up spending a lot of time in Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. Speaker's Corner is a place where you can get up on a box and say just about anything you'd like, so there were plenty of interesting people there.

Monday I took my day trip to Paris, getting in at 9 AM Paris time, and leaving at 9 PM. I saw just about everything I wanted to, including the Louvre, which I thought I would miss because I mistakenly thought my tickets were for Tuesday. The only thing I missed that I wanted to see was the Catacombs, but they're closed on Mondays anyways.

Today is my personal day of rest, mostly because it hurts to stand. I literally hobbled back to the train station in Paris, and the ten minute walk from St. Pancras International in London to my hostel took me a good 25 minutes.

Internet time is expensive, so I'll leave it there. Patrick flies in on Thursday, so I'm working on finishing all my homework from South Africa before then.

Cheers!

Cape Town

Good morning from Cape Town!

We arrived here last night after an 8 hour drive from Tsitsikama National Park, and from Port Elizabeth the day before that. The road we took is known as the Garden Route, and it was a pretty beautiful drive.

Tsitisikama literally means "place of many wonders" and it's a pretty apt name. It's nestled between the Tsitsikama Mountains and the Indian Ocean. When we got there, a bunch of us spent an hour or two climbing over the giant rocks that are on the coast. A few people got sprayed by waves that crashed against the rock, but it was pretty fun. At night I built a campfire right next to the ocean, which was pretty cool. In the morning we took a two hour hike along the coast, climbing up and down the boulders to get to a really cool waterfall on the coast.

Cape Town has been pretty rainy, but I'm excited to explore the city today. It's actually a National Holiday here (Youth Day, commemorating the events that the Hector Pieterson Museum talked about), and we were going to meet up with someone, but those plans got changed and we're exploring the cape instead.


Port Elizabeth was pretty cool, and I tried to make a post but the Internet froze up and I lost it. Not to mention I left my mp3 player there.... But we got to tour a battery factory, which was pretty neat.

Before Port Elizabeth we were in King William's Town, where we stayed the night at Hogsback Mountain. The hotel we stayed at had a tree fall through the dining room the day before, so I played Dad and took some pictures of the damage.

While in King William's Town we did our Steve Biko day, which was cool. We visited a clinic he set up to help the blacks in the area, his boyhood home, and his grave site. It was pretty interesting to eat lunch in the house that Steve Biko lived in.

The day before that was in Mthatha, the area in which Nelson Mandela grew up in. We did a Nelson Mandela day which was okay. The Museum was a bunch of quotes from his book Long Walk To Freedom, and all the gifts he received when he was released from prison. We drove out to his birthplace, where we met his grandson, who everyone thought was a jerk because he was pretty misogynistic.

Mthatha was amazing because we got to stay for two nights with a family. I stayed with the cousin of one of our contacts here (Somo - he got his PhD at MSU). Her name was Tobo and the house was awesome.

I need to stop so I can make sandwiches for lunch, but we have Internet access here in the hostel so I can get on pretty much anytime this week.

Just a few days until I fly out to London!

Not much time to post. We're using the computers at the office of the guy who owns the B&B with his wife. Everybody's done, so I'm rushing to finish.

We're in Kokstad, which is very rural and basically very much abject poverty. Tomorrow I'm going to climb one of the mountains nearby. We've done a lot of painting. I'll post some pictures when I have time.

Dad: MSU sent me a bill. Did you get a new email? Let me know.

Yebo!

Hello again from Durban! Real quick again today. We took a "Toxic Tour" aka a tour of the refineries and the pollution in Durban and how it affects the neighborhoods nearby. There's a bunch of new pictures on Flickr.

We also spent some time at the Victoria Street Market, and so I got some gifts for people. Still no Nelson Mandela bust, Paul. Sorry.

Tomorrow we leave for Kokstad, where we're staying in the farmlands. I might not have access to Internet for a week or so, so this will be the last post for awhile.

Hope everyone's well. Just under a month until I'm home.

Short post

Just a quick blurb today, time's short. Dunno when I'll have Internet access again, as later this week we're headed to the really rural parts of South Africa.

Since my last post, we visited three schools: Westville Boys High, Paul Sykes Primary, and Newlands West High. Each is at a differing level of resources. South Africans pay school fees to go to public school. Westville's fee is R20,000 (20,000 Rand a year, or just under $3000). Paul Sykes is R200 (just under $30) and Newlands West is a no-fee school. It's pretty obvious when you see the schools. I tried to post more pictures, but only put up about 15 of the 50 I had to put up, but you can still see the differences.

Saturday we spent in Hluhlwe game park. My camera died when we got there, so I have no pictures of the elephants, rhinos, zebras, monkeys, antelope, buffalo, and giraffes we saw. It was nice to take a day off and relax. Sunday was the St. Lucia Estuary. An estuary is an area where half the time the water is flowing from the lake to the ocean, and half the time it's the other way around. So the water is a mix of fresh and salt water. It's a great place to see hippos, which I did get a few pictures of. On the way back to Durban, we stopped at Dan's (our tour guide) sister's house on the Indian Ocean. (Hey dad, look up John Dunn, the white king of Zululand. That's who he (Dan, that is) is related to, apparently.) The house was amazing, and filled with books, art, and all kinds of odds and ends.

Today we had some lectures on HIV/AIDS. Tomorrow is a few more lectures, and then Wednesday we head to the rural areas of the Eastern Cape province. We're staying in a B&B that's on a farm, so I told Cheryl (who grew up on a farm) that we should go cow tipping. She laughed, and said we'd have to talk later. I'm not really hopeful, but it is funny to know that she's been cow tipping before.

We're in the Eastern Cape for a few days, and then we start travelling down towards Cape Town, with about 5 or 6 stops along the way, which means it'll take us about a week and a half. Dunno when I'll have Internet access next, but if I can, I'm going to try to get back here tomorrow and finish uploading some pictures.

Durban!

So it's been nearly a week since my last post... been a little difficult to get to the Internet cafe... Anyways, let me sum up the last few days we had in Pretoria.

Wednesday: Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. One's an Afrikaner monument to the Great Trek, and one's a monument to the diversity of the new South Africa.

Thursday: We visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, which commemorates the June 16th uprising by students in Soweto, a township southwest of Jo'burg. We also visited the Apartheid Museum, though our visit was cut short because it closes at 5 PM! Both were very moving museums, though I thought the Hector Pieterson Museum was much better.

Friday: Visited US Embassy in Pretoria (looked like a prison), and stopped at the Union Buildings.

Saturday: Drove the 7 hours from Pretoria to Durban

Sunday: Walked the beach of the Indian Ocean - our flats are two blocks from the beach!

This week we've been visiting schools. Monday was the Clarewood Primary School for Boys. I got to sit in a 6th grade classroom and listen to a lesson on raw materials, finished products, imports & exports, and trade balance. The second class held a discussion about the xenophobia in South Africa. The teacher kept saying that South Africa needed to be good neighbors to the other Africans, but the kids responded that they were taking jobs, committing crimes, and needed to go home. However, I found out that they love the Chinese... I'm still trying to figure that one out. I signed some autographs and tried to explain where Michigan was using my hand.

Today we went to Summerfield Primary School - a former Indian school that is still primarily Indian, though there are a number of Africans, mostly Zulus. The teacher spent most of her time talking to Ed and I, so we didn't see much in the first class. The second class was in isiZulu, so it went over my head. But the lunch they made us was amazing. South African hospitality is incredible. For a school that considers itself impoverished, it's amazing how much they are willing to spend on a bunch of American kids. No way would an American school return the favor.

South African schools are interesting in that they receive little funding from the government. Instead, parents pay school fees. Schools such as Summerfield charge 200 Rand a year (just under $30), yet they are lucky if they have 20% of the families paying the school fee at all. Richer schools charge up to 16,000 Rand a year. School fees makes it so that education split on racial lines during apartheid has transformed into education split on socio-economic lines in the new South Africa. We're traveling to a former Model C School (white privileged school during apartheid) tomorrow, and the difference in resources should be ridiculous.

I added a bunch of new pictures today, just about everything mentioned in this post is covered, so check them out.

Hopefully I'll post again before another week passes. Saturday is the game park, so I should have some great pictures then, too.

Day 3 in Pretoria

Today was our second day of class at the University of Pretoria. A group of us decided to walk there, which meant a 40 minute walk, including walking up a fairly significant hill for 20 minutes.

We had a lecture on the issues facing schools in post-apartheid America, and one on the economic and political geography of South Africa. The second lecture was a little brutal. Basically we went over a number of studies of where the main economic/industrial areas of the country have been over the past 40 years. Interesting, but the professor was using highly technical terms that often went right over our heads.

Our museum in the afternoon was the National Cultural Museum, on the other side of Pretoria City Hall. Pretty interesting exhibits. And Paul, I found a bust of Nelson Mandela.... but it was a pretty important work of art, and the museum wouldn't let me take it. Sorry dude. Dann Dunn, our South African tour guide/driver says I should just buy you a T-shirt. He told me he owns a few and he actually wears them instead of suits when he needs to dress up, though I'm going to put that in the same category as when he told us he is half Scottish - by which he meant his lower half is Scottish.

Tomorrow is more class and I think the Voertrekker Monument in the afternoon, which should be really interesting. It's a monument to the Afrikaaner victory over the Zulu, I think. It's another interesting aspect of a country that still deals with the effects of apartheid on a daily basis.

To anybody who's been keeping an eye on the news, you might have heard about violence and riots in Johannesburg. This is actually part of a new xenophobic aspect of South Africa. They're facing a similar situation to the US in which large numbers of people are immigrating to this country. Unemployment is estimated as high as 50% here, and many South Africans blame the newcomers for taking good jobs which has resulted in violence towards anyone seen as a foreigner. However, we're safe from the violence as we aren't taking jobs and are actually contributing to the economy.

The trip has been very interesting so far. All of the people who we've heard speak grew up in apartheid, so it provides a unique perspective on the history we're studying. We've encountered a number of people from each of the racial categories set up by the apartheid government, and each has a very different perspective and view of the new and old South Africa. Especially interesting was the Afrikaan professor who taught us the history of South Africa until 1900. Talking about how colonial times has influenced a number of the problems facing South Africa today, she told us that everyone would be better off if they just let the past go. So basically, after spending two hours chronicling the history of her country, she told us it didn't matter. She also said a few other things people found fairly offensive, which was eye-opening as well.

I'm uploading photos right now, so you should be able to see them on the Flickr site shortly. Be sure to check out the picture of my shark bite wound.