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.