Arrival in Cape Town

Hello everyone from sunny and hot Cape Town!

So I have now been in Cape Town for two whole days after arriving here Saturday night around midnight, and I have been trying to sleep off my jetlag (with varying, mostly unsuccessful, results.) So after a long trip from San Francisco, I finally made it to Cape Town. See? (The picture is taken at the waterfront, a very upscale part of Cape Town.)

Even though today is the first day of classes, I do not have any classes on Tuesday so I get to enjoy a day off. Yesterday, to help us pick classes during out day of orientation, the Stanford Centre (yes, that is how it is spelled) brought in all professors (mostly from UCT, University of Cape Town, the best university in South Africa) to speak about the classes they were offering to us. Then, afterward, we were able to ask the professors questions about their classes before officially picking. What a great way to pick classes!

Although my study list is not final, my classes will most likely include: Western Cape Sites of Memory in which we learn about different sites around Cape Town, and have a field trip every Friday (including two to Robben Island), Adult Learning in which I will do a service-learning project in the Townships as well as learn about education in South Africa, Race, Class, and Status: Cape Town in Comparative Perspective in which the title speaks for itself (this was the class I added at the last minute as I talked to the professor about the satire he saw in District 9 and how he wanted to talk about it for a class, and he seems like a really cool guy), and finally Negotiating Home, Citizenship and the South African City which is about housing issues. This class has a community service element, but most importantly, this class will have UCT honours students in it as well.

The most dominant feature of Cape Town which one immediately sees (at least in the daytime) is Table Mountain, a 2,000 mountain just kilometers from the sea. It is a very unique feature of Cape Town, which is simply awesome. The following is of Table Mountain as seen from the Cape Town waterfront and over downtown. It is pretty amazing.

One of the first things a visitor to South Africa by plane notices is how white it seems to be. Even though the country is more than 75% black, one would not see this at all by looking at the people on the plane. There is still a huge economic and class gap between the small white population (slightly less than 10% for South Africa as a whole) and the black population.

On the 2.5 hour plane ride from Johannesburg to Cape Town (in which we received a dinner!), I sat next to a white Belgian who was born and raised in the Congo. Between discussing other things with him (like the fact he couldn’t get Congolese citizenship because he was white, and to get citizenship, one needs a ‘native’ parent, or the fact he went to a school completely paid for by the Belgian government) we also managed to speak some French. I really did not think I would be using French in South Africa!

Yesterday was our orientation (which was mostly being talked at about this and that), the day before (Sunday) I went around Cape Town, including the waterfront and the beaches, where I forgot the fact that without sun block I can get sunburned. Whoops. A former Stanford student who is in Cape Town on a Fulbright, generously drove us around, and discussed his experiences with Cape Town in the past couple of months with us, including how it is to drive on the left hand side of the road. (Sitting shotgun in South Africa is a bit strange … at least for now.)

And here is a picture of one of the beautiful beaches in the area. Although the air was very warm, the water is not, just like the very chilly Pacific Ocean.

That is it for now, more to come later!
-Andrew