I finally got Internet access! I've posted the rest of the pictures from my trip from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth on Picasa. I've added a bunch of captions so that you can follow my trip from start to finish--a blog entry in pictures.
http://picasaweb.google.com/mollyhales/Wanderlust#
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Wanderlust
Cape Town to Port Elizabeth, February 2009
(This counts as research, right?)
(This counts as research, right?)
I took a MILLION pictures but the South African Internet has so far been too slow to upload most of them. I've created a Picasa album that's listed as public and posted the first 10. Hopefully there will be more to come...
Saturday, February 7, 2009
First week
I've now officially been in Cape Town for a week. At times it feels like I just arrived (especially when I consider what I've gotten done this past week...) and at times it feels like time has passed quite slowly.
The Sunday after I flew in, Jessica--the fellow Fulbright student--took me to my favorite Cape Town beach. It was amazing to be able to lay out on a towel in the hot sun after the brutal cold of Chicago (and the even more brutal cold of the trail). We went out to dinner in Observatory afterwards, and Jessica and I bonded over pizza and beer.
After moving off Jessica's couch, I was staying in a hostel in Observatory, near her house. But knowing that Jess would be working long hours in neighboring Stellenbosch come Monday, I decided to move to a backpackers in the middle of town, near where I lived when I was here on my study abroad program 2 yeas ago--Long Street Backpackers. I'm glad that I did; it's much nicer than the backpacker in "Obz," and it's within walking distance of tons of cafes, restaurants, and boutiques.
As I was leaving the hostel in Observatory on Monday, one of the girls that worked there asked me what I was doing. On an impulse, I (uncharacteristically) invited her to spend the day with me. We chatted over coffee in the chic Lula cafe on Long Street, and I found out that her name was Solene, that she quit her job as an event/concert planner in France to move halfway across the world to spend the winter in Cape Town, and that she'd been living in CT for the past 2 months. Solene and I ended up spending the better part of the week together, being tourists. We visited the quaint coastal town of Kalk Bay, saw the exotic birds in Hout Bay's famous aviary, went out to dinner at the hip restaurants in Cape Town, and, as a final send-off, got tattoos.
Yep, that's right, I FINALLY got my Appalachian Trail tattoo. Yesterday morning, Solene and I took a public taxi to a huge, upscale shopping mall outside the city limits, where there was a tattoo parlour that has a great reputation. I briefly considered getting a mountain goat as a stylized tribute to my trail name, but I ended up going with my original idea and got a tattoo of the AT logo (if you've never seen it before, you can see a picture of it here). But I did end up changing my mind about the placement. Michelle pointed out that I hiked with my legs, not my arms, and in the end it seemed a more fitting tribute to have the insignia on my upper thigh rather than my upper arm. It's quite small (an inch or 2 long), and a basic, solid black. I'll put up a picture of it soon--right now there's some bruising around the tattoo, so the line is a bit fuzzy.
I'm so glad that someone finally dragged me to the tattoo parlour to follow through on my months-old promise to get an AT tattoo when (and if!) I reached the southern terminus. The funny thing is, after dragging me there, Solene almost chickened out on getting her tattoo. I was the one who had to persuade HER to go through with it!
Solene left for Jo-burg last night. It was sad to see her go; it has been wonderful to have a buddy here to call up, hang out with, and grab a bite with. Still, it's time for me to start turning towards my upcoming research (and my even more upcoming move!), which will be easier now that I'm on my own again.
In the middle of the week, I started to get a bit more serious about trying to pull everything together to move to PE. On Thursday I had the unreal experience of having breakfast with my academic idol, Steven Robins, whose article on the position of biomedicine in South African AIDS activism was the inspiration for my B.A. Thesis paper. Steven (I can't believe I am on a 1st-name basis with this man!!!) gave me the contacts information for several academics here in Cape Town, but didn't have any contacts in Port Elizabeth. It was incredibly exciting to discuss my research with him, but it also made me realize the daunting task ahead of me. Whereas there's a network of academic researchers in Cape Town and the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and Port Elizabeth still feel like unknown territory. I have not found any famous academics whose footsteps I can confidently follow. Whatever research I manage to pull together in the Eastern Cape will be entirely my own.
My main reason for staying in Cape Town was to buy an inexpensive car to have for the year. I knew that I wanted a Toyota (they're reliable and cheap to repair here), and that I didn't want to spend more than about $2500 U.S. Given these constraints, I thought that buying a car would be a fairly straightforward. It's turned out to be far more difficult than I expected. There are SCORES of inexpensive Toyotas being sold out of Cape Town, and they're bought and sold at an alarming rate. But almost all of these cars are being sold out of the far-flung suburbs of Cape Town, where Cape Town's working class live, and these suburbs are almost impossible to get to without a car.
To confound matters, automatic transmissions are extremely rare in South Africa, and generally cost significantly more than their manual equivalents. I'm dead-set against buying an expensive car just because I don't know how to change gears, so I'm currently looking at manuals. I managed to persuade Jessica's roommate's boyfriend to teach me how to drive a stick shift (in his BMW!). After about an hour of driving around their quiet neighborhood with him in the car with me, I could drive the car fairly smoothly without stalling.
Confident in my new life skill, I spent an hour and a half traveling to a distant suburb to look at a manual Toyota a couple of days ago. As soon as I got behind the wheel to test-drive it, another car pulled around the corner and stopped, waiting for me to pull out. Shit! In my nervousness, I forgot to put the car in gear. The engine revved loudly, but the Toyota did not move. After a moment, the owner told me that I needed to shift into first. By then I had completely lost my confidence. I put the car into gear, pulled forward, and immediately stalled. That was the last straw for the Toyota owner. He not-so-politely asked me to please get out of his car, since I clearly did not know how to drive. Defeated, I started the long journey back to Cape Town.
After my terrible independent-buyer experience, I had pretty much decided to give up and pay the extra money to buy a car from a city dealer. But today I found two new ads for Toyotas that sound fantastic, and I think I'm going to give it another try. I have a tentative appointment to see a very cheap manual Toyota tomorrow, and an automatic(!!!) on Monday. It's scary making such a monumental investment without knowing about cars, and without being able to test-drive the manual. But I guess it's all part of this intimidating process called growing up.
Today I climbed Table Mountain with this year's U of C study abroad group, including two of my former mentors from the program. It felt fantastic to be hiking again, despite my still-painful feet. Looking out over the city nestled between steep cliffs and the turquoise ocean beyond it, I new that despite the difficulties involved in moving to the other side of the globe, I had made the right decision.
The Sunday after I flew in, Jessica--the fellow Fulbright student--took me to my favorite Cape Town beach. It was amazing to be able to lay out on a towel in the hot sun after the brutal cold of Chicago (and the even more brutal cold of the trail). We went out to dinner in Observatory afterwards, and Jessica and I bonded over pizza and beer.
After moving off Jessica's couch, I was staying in a hostel in Observatory, near her house. But knowing that Jess would be working long hours in neighboring Stellenbosch come Monday, I decided to move to a backpackers in the middle of town, near where I lived when I was here on my study abroad program 2 yeas ago--Long Street Backpackers. I'm glad that I did; it's much nicer than the backpacker in "Obz," and it's within walking distance of tons of cafes, restaurants, and boutiques.
As I was leaving the hostel in Observatory on Monday, one of the girls that worked there asked me what I was doing. On an impulse, I (uncharacteristically) invited her to spend the day with me. We chatted over coffee in the chic Lula cafe on Long Street, and I found out that her name was Solene, that she quit her job as an event/concert planner in France to move halfway across the world to spend the winter in Cape Town, and that she'd been living in CT for the past 2 months. Solene and I ended up spending the better part of the week together, being tourists. We visited the quaint coastal town of Kalk Bay, saw the exotic birds in Hout Bay's famous aviary, went out to dinner at the hip restaurants in Cape Town, and, as a final send-off, got tattoos.
Yep, that's right, I FINALLY got my Appalachian Trail tattoo. Yesterday morning, Solene and I took a public taxi to a huge, upscale shopping mall outside the city limits, where there was a tattoo parlour that has a great reputation. I briefly considered getting a mountain goat as a stylized tribute to my trail name, but I ended up going with my original idea and got a tattoo of the AT logo (if you've never seen it before, you can see a picture of it here). But I did end up changing my mind about the placement. Michelle pointed out that I hiked with my legs, not my arms, and in the end it seemed a more fitting tribute to have the insignia on my upper thigh rather than my upper arm. It's quite small (an inch or 2 long), and a basic, solid black. I'll put up a picture of it soon--right now there's some bruising around the tattoo, so the line is a bit fuzzy.
I'm so glad that someone finally dragged me to the tattoo parlour to follow through on my months-old promise to get an AT tattoo when (and if!) I reached the southern terminus. The funny thing is, after dragging me there, Solene almost chickened out on getting her tattoo. I was the one who had to persuade HER to go through with it!
Solene left for Jo-burg last night. It was sad to see her go; it has been wonderful to have a buddy here to call up, hang out with, and grab a bite with. Still, it's time for me to start turning towards my upcoming research (and my even more upcoming move!), which will be easier now that I'm on my own again.
In the middle of the week, I started to get a bit more serious about trying to pull everything together to move to PE. On Thursday I had the unreal experience of having breakfast with my academic idol, Steven Robins, whose article on the position of biomedicine in South African AIDS activism was the inspiration for my B.A. Thesis paper. Steven (I can't believe I am on a 1st-name basis with this man!!!) gave me the contacts information for several academics here in Cape Town, but didn't have any contacts in Port Elizabeth. It was incredibly exciting to discuss my research with him, but it also made me realize the daunting task ahead of me. Whereas there's a network of academic researchers in Cape Town and the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and Port Elizabeth still feel like unknown territory. I have not found any famous academics whose footsteps I can confidently follow. Whatever research I manage to pull together in the Eastern Cape will be entirely my own.
My main reason for staying in Cape Town was to buy an inexpensive car to have for the year. I knew that I wanted a Toyota (they're reliable and cheap to repair here), and that I didn't want to spend more than about $2500 U.S. Given these constraints, I thought that buying a car would be a fairly straightforward. It's turned out to be far more difficult than I expected. There are SCORES of inexpensive Toyotas being sold out of Cape Town, and they're bought and sold at an alarming rate. But almost all of these cars are being sold out of the far-flung suburbs of Cape Town, where Cape Town's working class live, and these suburbs are almost impossible to get to without a car.
To confound matters, automatic transmissions are extremely rare in South Africa, and generally cost significantly more than their manual equivalents. I'm dead-set against buying an expensive car just because I don't know how to change gears, so I'm currently looking at manuals. I managed to persuade Jessica's roommate's boyfriend to teach me how to drive a stick shift (in his BMW!). After about an hour of driving around their quiet neighborhood with him in the car with me, I could drive the car fairly smoothly without stalling.
Confident in my new life skill, I spent an hour and a half traveling to a distant suburb to look at a manual Toyota a couple of days ago. As soon as I got behind the wheel to test-drive it, another car pulled around the corner and stopped, waiting for me to pull out. Shit! In my nervousness, I forgot to put the car in gear. The engine revved loudly, but the Toyota did not move. After a moment, the owner told me that I needed to shift into first. By then I had completely lost my confidence. I put the car into gear, pulled forward, and immediately stalled. That was the last straw for the Toyota owner. He not-so-politely asked me to please get out of his car, since I clearly did not know how to drive. Defeated, I started the long journey back to Cape Town.
After my terrible independent-buyer experience, I had pretty much decided to give up and pay the extra money to buy a car from a city dealer. But today I found two new ads for Toyotas that sound fantastic, and I think I'm going to give it another try. I have a tentative appointment to see a very cheap manual Toyota tomorrow, and an automatic(!!!) on Monday. It's scary making such a monumental investment without knowing about cars, and without being able to test-drive the manual. But I guess it's all part of this intimidating process called growing up.
Today I climbed Table Mountain with this year's U of C study abroad group, including two of my former mentors from the program. It felt fantastic to be hiking again, despite my still-painful feet. Looking out over the city nestled between steep cliffs and the turquoise ocean beyond it, I new that despite the difficulties involved in moving to the other side of the globe, I had made the right decision.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Arrival
I arrived safely in Cape Town late last night, after a day and a half of flights--Detroit to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Cape Town. On my flight to Amsterdam my seatmate barfed, and I awoke to find her holding a leaking paper bag of her own vomit! The poor girl had no idea what to do, so I handed the bag off to a passing flight attendant, dribbling some disgustingness onto my pants in the process. Which I still had to wear for another 16 hours or so...
Karma was restored on my flight to Cape Town. When I gave them my boarding pass, the flight attendants told me that my seat had been changed. At first I was disgruntled--I had chosen an aisle seat!--but when I went to my new seat, I realized that I had been bumped up to first class. Wow, what a difference. They fed us gourmet food about every 2 hours for the entire flight (crab cakes in pesto sauce, braised salmon on a bed of wilted greens, caramel cake, hot couscous, veggie crudites, ice cream...). After the 5th or 6th glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and red wine, I felt a little better about the obscene amount of money I had to spend on the flight to follow Fulbright's "American Air Carriers" rule.
I found Jessica waiting at the airport without any trouble, and she drove us to her house. Jess lives in one of my favorite residential neighborhoods in Cape Town, called Observatory. Although I love her neighborhood, it's not the best place to be staying. It's a drive away from the city centre (I'm giving South African spelling a shot...), and she's living in a house with 10 other people who are constantly filtering in and out. I slept like a log on their living room couch last night, but I think that's mostly because I was so tired from my flights that I could have slept through an earthquake; several people asked me this morning if they had woken me up when they came home last night/got up this morning. I also feel a bit strange couch-surfing on what's essentially a communal couch. So I think that I'm going to try to get a room in a hostel called Daddy Long Legs on Long Street. I stayed there 2 years ago for a night or two after my study abroad program had ended, and it's a pretty nice place that's walking distance away from almost everything.
I finally dragged myself out of "bed" at about 11:30 this morning and Jess gave me a ride into the city centre to meet up with Jean and John Comaroff (my former professors from the Cape Town study abroad program). I felt about 1,000,000 times better about having emigrated halfway around the world after having lunch with the two of them. They both seemed eager to take me back under their wing and help get me started with my research, which was a huge relief. And after lunch, Jean walked me down to the big mall in CT to buy a cell phone, and she showed me where to catch the minibus back to Obs. (There's not much of a public transportation system in South Africa. Instead, non-drivers pay about a dollar to cram into a van full of people and get driven to their destination. It's sort of like splitting a taxi with 6 or 7 (or 10, or 12...) strangers).
I'm starting to put together a list of things that I want to get done in CT before I head for Port Elizabeth (in addition to sunning, going to the beach, drinking espresso, visiting my old haunts, etc.). I'm going to try to find a violin to buy or rent while I'm in CT, although Jean seemed to think that this would be difficult to do. I still need to meet with the South African Cultural Affairs Office as part of my Fulbright obligation. Most importantly, I'd like to buy a car while in CT: From what people have told me about PE, I think that I'll definitely need one to get around, and the selection in Cape Town is obviously much better than in PE. Plus, if I buy a car here, then I can road-trip along the scenic Garden Route to Port Elizabeth, saving myself the cost of the plane ticket AND squeezing in an extra vacation (how long do you think I can put off actually beginning my research?). The only hitch: every car in South Africa other than the super high-end new cars is a stick shift! God, I am really wishing that I had learned to drive stick while in the US. Jean assures me that it will only take "5 minutes" for me to figure it out. Of course, she's also never driven anything other than a stick shift...
I was terribly homesick last night, and fell asleep thinking about the people that I've left behind in Chicago. But when I walked out the door this morning, my mood immediately lifted. It's shockingly sunny and a breezy 80 degrees outside, and it was an incredibly feeling to be able to simply walk straight out of an open front door into the sunlight.
One very small hitch: I think my foot may still be broken...
Karma was restored on my flight to Cape Town. When I gave them my boarding pass, the flight attendants told me that my seat had been changed. At first I was disgruntled--I had chosen an aisle seat!--but when I went to my new seat, I realized that I had been bumped up to first class. Wow, what a difference. They fed us gourmet food about every 2 hours for the entire flight (crab cakes in pesto sauce, braised salmon on a bed of wilted greens, caramel cake, hot couscous, veggie crudites, ice cream...). After the 5th or 6th glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and red wine, I felt a little better about the obscene amount of money I had to spend on the flight to follow Fulbright's "American Air Carriers" rule.
I found Jessica waiting at the airport without any trouble, and she drove us to her house. Jess lives in one of my favorite residential neighborhoods in Cape Town, called Observatory. Although I love her neighborhood, it's not the best place to be staying. It's a drive away from the city centre (I'm giving South African spelling a shot...), and she's living in a house with 10 other people who are constantly filtering in and out. I slept like a log on their living room couch last night, but I think that's mostly because I was so tired from my flights that I could have slept through an earthquake; several people asked me this morning if they had woken me up when they came home last night/got up this morning. I also feel a bit strange couch-surfing on what's essentially a communal couch. So I think that I'm going to try to get a room in a hostel called Daddy Long Legs on Long Street. I stayed there 2 years ago for a night or two after my study abroad program had ended, and it's a pretty nice place that's walking distance away from almost everything.
I finally dragged myself out of "bed" at about 11:30 this morning and Jess gave me a ride into the city centre to meet up with Jean and John Comaroff (my former professors from the Cape Town study abroad program). I felt about 1,000,000 times better about having emigrated halfway around the world after having lunch with the two of them. They both seemed eager to take me back under their wing and help get me started with my research, which was a huge relief. And after lunch, Jean walked me down to the big mall in CT to buy a cell phone, and she showed me where to catch the minibus back to Obs. (There's not much of a public transportation system in South Africa. Instead, non-drivers pay about a dollar to cram into a van full of people and get driven to their destination. It's sort of like splitting a taxi with 6 or 7 (or 10, or 12...) strangers).
I'm starting to put together a list of things that I want to get done in CT before I head for Port Elizabeth (in addition to sunning, going to the beach, drinking espresso, visiting my old haunts, etc.). I'm going to try to find a violin to buy or rent while I'm in CT, although Jean seemed to think that this would be difficult to do. I still need to meet with the South African Cultural Affairs Office as part of my Fulbright obligation. Most importantly, I'd like to buy a car while in CT: From what people have told me about PE, I think that I'll definitely need one to get around, and the selection in Cape Town is obviously much better than in PE. Plus, if I buy a car here, then I can road-trip along the scenic Garden Route to Port Elizabeth, saving myself the cost of the plane ticket AND squeezing in an extra vacation (how long do you think I can put off actually beginning my research?). The only hitch: every car in South Africa other than the super high-end new cars is a stick shift! God, I am really wishing that I had learned to drive stick while in the US. Jean assures me that it will only take "5 minutes" for me to figure it out. Of course, she's also never driven anything other than a stick shift...
I was terribly homesick last night, and fell asleep thinking about the people that I've left behind in Chicago. But when I walked out the door this morning, my mood immediately lifted. It's shockingly sunny and a breezy 80 degrees outside, and it was an incredibly feeling to be able to simply walk straight out of an open front door into the sunlight.
One very small hitch: I think my foot may still be broken...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)