Vacation from Vacation

The days of Spring Break in South Africa are almost over... Tomorrow classes resume, but I had an AWESOME break. Besides, Easter Break is on Friday and lasts through Monday... How convenient? :) Anyway, break was wonderful... I got up really early Saturday morning (5 AM) to meet up with the rest of my program that decided to go on our trip together at the Alma house (I live at Welgelegen). We went to the airport and had a not so great breakfast and flew off to Joburg. After our bus finally showed up to pick us up, we headed to Soweto (SOuth WEst TOwnship), which is about a 40 minute drive from the airport. Soweto is the largest black township with over one million people living there. It is the home of Desmund Tutu and Nelson Mandela's early home (they are actually right down the street from each other... SA is the only country that can proudly say it has two Nobel Prize winners that came from the same street), and the site of the Soweto Uprisings, in which youths and others rioted against the National Party government and the unfair education reforms. On 16 June 1976, thousands of black students protested in Orlando West in Soweto and the police used violent force against them. The youngest person to be killed by police that day was a 13 year old boy. There is now a memorial there and we got to see it as well as both Mandela and Tutu's houses. We also got to see some of the hostels where there was a lot of conflict between the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party, primarily Zulu) and the ANC (African National Congress, headed by Mandela), drank homemade beer, tried cow's head (well I didn't, but some people did!), and went to a shabeen (kind of like a bar but different). All of this we did on a four hour BIKE tour. It was actually really great and made me miss having a bike a lot... Curses, Lexington! We stayed in Soweto for two nights at a hostel right across from a park that the owner cleaned up and made for the kids in the area. They were adorable but very demanding... always wanting to play... We also went into Joburg for a day and saw some museums, including the Apartheid Museum... VERY interesting and learned a lot actually... We also went up to the 'Top of Africa,' which is the top of the highest building in Joburg. Kind of reminded me of the Radio Turm in Duesseldorf... I think that's what it was called anyway! Next we went to Nelspruit, which is right outside of the borders of Kruger National Park. We stayed in an awesome hostel type place and the owner was named Crazy Dave... not kidding! He was really nice though and they made AMAZING food. It was especially great for vegetarians because Crazy Dave is also Veg and so he always let us go first in line no matter what! Two mornings in a row, we all got up at 3.45 (before dawn!) and left to make it to Kruger when it opened. We would spend all day driving around looking for animals, which was nice! However it was extremely cold in the mornings and then by 10 or so incredibly hot. But, that was a minor sacrifice for what I got from this trip... I saw LOTS of animals, the Big 5, giraffes, elephants, bugs, lizards, hippos, zebra, impala, and tons more... Since I've come 'home,' I really haven't done hardly anything since most of my house is in Zambia, but I'm ok with that. It's nice to be lazy and take a real break for a little bit because as fun as the trip with IES was, it was exhausting.