Day 13 - September 11, 2006

Coming off an eventful weekend, we spent the entire day at UCT today. We got up early and made the hike up to campus. The morning was spent discussing economic policy and redevelopment schemes after the transition election. We talked about the RDP and GEAR strategies, including the outcomes and failures of each. Then, we had our second and last Xhosa lesson. Our Xhosa teacher gave us a lot more vocabulary, but also went into some necessary detail on sentence structure. Nevertheless, it was good to get some more useful phrases under our belt.

At the end of the lesson, it was time for lunch. A group of us went to the student union at the Upper Campus, and I ordered a mushroom cheeseburger and fries from Steer's - a fastfood joint. Again, I must say that I love how there is so much halal food at UCT. We went and sat out on the main steps of Jameson Hall and ate our lunch. During the 1.5 hr lunch break, a group of UCT students approached us and asked us to give some comments regarding fashion and trends for a class project. Summer and I started mentioning American brands, and all we got was a couple of blank stares, until we talked about Apple and the iPod and luxury cars - then we were all on the same page.

At 1:30pm, we headed back to class. For the first part of class, we watched a documentary on race. Actually, it was a video of people reading personal statements about how they view race, so it was a little boring. Our discussion was a lot more animated and we even got into a few arguments. At the end of class, we watched In a Time of Violence - a soap opera about South Africa at the time of the transition election. We headed back to Ivydene around 5pm.

We are not having dinner at Ivydene tonight, since UCT is hosting a welcome braai for us. We went to the tennis club on campus, where they had set up a nice spread inside. UCT had also invited several students representatives from their university government council to come and have dinner with us. The best part of the night was that the food was halal! We had beef bratwurst, chicken, and lamb ribs, plus salad and cake for dessert. We chatted with the UCT students for a while, and then head back to Ivydene at 9pm.

While at Ivydene, the internet finally started working again, albeit slowly, so many of us stayed up and worked on our wikis before going to sleep. On another note, it's the 5 year anniversary of September 11th, yet there is hardly any sign or news here of the attacks, aside from mentions in the morning news and local newspapers. Just goes to show that there is a whole other world out there.