Day 16 - September 14, 2006

Today we woke up at 7:15am in time for a 8:15am departure. We are spending the morning in District Six today. We first met up with Dr. Crain who is a professor at UCT. He gave us a lengthy history of District Six, as we sat in the District Six Museum. District Six was a predominantly coloured part of Cape Town, whose residents were forcibly removed after the Group Areas Act in 1966. Then, there homes were demolished. Now, the majority of District Six remains barren, grassy land with no development. Only a few mosques and churches are left in the area.

After his talk, we went on a tour of what was District Six and walked around the area with former residents showing us where they had previously lived and played. I ended up taking a lot of pictures. Finally, we walked back and had some time to look around the museum. The museum had lots of objects and photos from former residents and could be considered a living museum. A large group of us decided to head over to Long Street for lunch, and we ate again in the Long Street Cafe. I had pasta and ginger ale.

Since the day was quite clear with relatively no wind, we decided to head up to Table Mountain after lunch. Steve picked us up from Long Street and dropped us off at the cable car base. There are two ways to reach the top of Table Mountain - either by climbing or taking the cable car. We decided to take the cable car, which was open because of no wind. Also, since we had our student IDs with us, we got a student discount at R84 a piece for a return trip. The cable car ride was amazing, since the platform revolved 360 degrees as we reached the top. From the top, the view was absolutely amazing, and I took lots of videos and pictures. Since Table Mountain is flat on top, we were able to walk around for a while and get different views of the city. We could even see down the Cape Peninsula to Cape Point.

Around 4pm, we decided to head back down on the cable car. There were many taxis waiting at the base, so a group of 10 of us boarded one mini-bus taxi, which took us all the way to Rondebosch. We took the inner roads to get back to Ivydene and got back around 5pm. We had a little time to rest before dinner at 6pm. Katherine made a more traditional South African dinner with snoek pate, ostrich sausage, lentils and potatoes, and some more African dishes. We had an Afrikaner koeksister for dessert.

After dinner we had a lengthy discussion about our visits to both Robben Island and District Six and our perceptions about how there is a sense of pride and hope among many South Africans for the future of the young democracy. Then, a group went out to Claremont, a mostly white area of Cape Town, which turned out to be a bust, so everyone went to Long Street instead and chilled at Marvel and Baghdad Cafe. Steve took us all home to sleep, as we had to wake up quite early the next morning.