Surviving I suppose

So yesterday I got lost in Cape Town. Scary stuff! After we went to the mall (which we drove like halfway or something in the back of some guy’s truck, AND that mall is way better than the one in Lexington by the way AND they have Aldo, Claire’s, Timberlands, and Guess. WOW.), my roommate and I decided to the grocery nearby, which seemed easy enough. Well… apparently not for us! We got lost for maybe an hour or so, I don’t really know… and it was getting dark and windy. Also, neither of us had cell phones because hers wasn’t working and I still don’t have one because I didn’t have my credit card when the cell phone guy came (which was needed)! Even better… none of us can even pronounce our street name, Welgelegen! Yeah it’s pronounced Vehl-hel-hier-hen. Or at least that’s what it sounds like to me…

Today I went to my agency that I will be doing work with for one of my classes. It’s called the Medical Knowledge Institute and it seems like it’s going to be a really interesting class/volunteering thing. The first thing we have to do is rewrite a brochure so that the people in Khayelitsha can understand it better because not all of them understand English or are even necessarily literate. It’s really apparent here that there is a huge gap between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It’s not uncommon to see nice, gated houses with expensive cars parked in front right next to townships, and the townships aren’t even that bad compared to other places, such as Khayelitsha. The ‘houses’ there are made of cardboard, plastic, or assorted pieces of metal and wood. You can see these shacks from the road and they seem to go on forever. It’s very different from the area in which we live and around the school. They keep telling us that UCT and Cape Town in general is a different Africa, and I can definitely see it. Cape Town has sort of a European feel sometimes because the British intended it to essentially be a little Britain where you could just kind of observe Africa from a distance or something to that effect…

Also they had us try sheep's head and homemade alcohol in the township... how did I forget about that? I honestly don't know...

And I went to the grocery and I incorrectly tried to weigh an avocado, and then I made the cashier angry because I didn't weigh the grapes, even though it had some kind of tag on it and the avocado didn't... go figure. Just have to recognize and appreciate the differences I guess...