Mustaches, Bikes and Books

so what has it been two weeks?? It has been an interesting 2 weeks I guess the place to start is the mustache party, i swear i'd never even been to a theme party until i came here, no every week i seem to have to do something to my hair or dress. I can't grow a mustache, lets just put that out there to begin with, luckily neither can most in only a weeks time, so i would say there were about 100 heavily mascara clad mustaches at this party. It was a great party, they even managed to get an American Classic, a keg. unfortunately there was no yard at this house so the party just slowly poured out onto the street until it was something of a block party, that is when the five cop cars came and broke up the party, thats right in one of the most dangerous countries in the world the police have nothing better to do than break up mustache parties (i love the thought of them getting back to the station and telling the others "you would not believe the party we just broke up!!") Luckily the house was just a stones through from The Corner Bar. Now I think i might have mentioned this place once or twice, but i can only say that i might have created a monster. It was the same bar we had the birthday party at where i baked the cat cake, and yeah i've become rather close with the owner (i currently have a tab there for making his 14 year old daughter a cake for her birthday, heart shaped for chris brown, who apparently is a musician). But now I can hardly go out without someone saying "ell we've got to go to the corner bar i've never been and i hear the samoosas are incredible (true this family run bar boasts some of the best food around)" so needless to say, when the party was busted we went to the corner bar. Anyway in the morning we got up for our group trip to Robben Island. We happened to go on one of the roughest days of the year, perfect after a mustache party. The whole tour I was just walking around in a group and i could never figure out why I felt so awkward, then after taking a couple of pictures around the island I realized I still had my handlebar mascara mustache. perfect. besides this the trip to Robben Island was excellent, they have an ingenious concept of giving you two tour guides one a former Pan African Congress prisoner and then a African National Congress prisoner, it was awesome, and the island itself was beautiful, the view of cape town was spectacular.
The next day Jorn my dear Norwegian friend borrowed some bikes from another group of our south African friends (this is becoming a habit) and went on an all day bike ride through cape town to cape point. well you can't win them all, about mid way out one of the bikes broke, so we're stuck about an hour from cape town with two rather large bicycles, luckily the ticket salesmen for the trains said for a mere dollar more we could take our bikes on the train, the only problem with this was that this information was not known to anyone else working in the station, so at every new entrance we were told that we couldn't take the bikes on the train, followed by that person going back to the ticket counter to find out, this happened about 4 times before we were allowed to get on the train. The best part was when we finally get the bikes on board and one of the passengers leans over and says "are you allowed to bring bikes on board?"
Now on a sad and disturbing note, there have been many violent crimes in and around campus lately, firstly there was an armed robbery on the campus last saturday, where the end result was a shootout with the campus security, however there was no injuries. Then much more tragically on monday one of the professors here was murdered outside his house as he was backing his car out to let his wife into the garage, two men tried to take his car and apparently there was a problem. This is the second such incident at UCT this year. Also one of our study abroad students was in an altercation the other night where he wound up stabbed by a screwdriver. He was fine luckily but this is one of many robberies that I know of, I've been lucky so far though.
But I won't end on such a sad note.
The other day I was thinking that perhaps I hadn't really set the scene of what it is like here at least academically. We've all been trying to really figure out how to describe what the school here is like. It's not really like school, you go to lectures you learn nothing, we've been going to the lectures for 3 months now and none of us can even come up with what kind of questions they might ask on the finals. No one has a clue in any of my classes, then someone the other day asked whether the lectures were really based around the finals and the teacher said "no, it's all just based on the packets, lectures are just to pull things together if you're confused" makes sense, why would you have classes that taught you anything. So we've taken to calling this semester abroad as an academic decathalon, here are the ten obstacles that you must overcome to pass this semester:
1. Classes that are in no way based around your 2 hour final worth 50 percent of your grade
2. Having only 250mb per month of internet at UCT after that you're cut off and must use an internet cafe
3. Blackouts twice a week on campus during school hours
4. blackouts twice a week at your home at night (really makes procrastinating a thing of the past you've never heard so many people say "oh I can't tonight I have to write a paper due 2 days from now in case there is a blackout")
5. You can't buy the books you need on campus or at any specific store in capetown, but the library only has one copy of each on 2 hour loan, tough luck come essay time, oh and amazon won't ship or sell to South Africa
6. The campus printing facilities often go out for weeks at a time (yes for some unknown reason an entire campus of printers is connected)
7. you can't bring coffee (or for that matter anything) into the library (this one might be my least favorite)
8. They have taken the top 25 points off the grade scale so passing is 50-75 so you never really know what you are getting in a class, I mean really what is a 67??
9. Every Thursday and friday there is either a concert, dance competition, drum session or some sort of school sanctioned event right in the middle of campus so that no class room is without noise pollution
10. and my favorite this coming long weekend before most everyones big papers are due and your tests are approaching they have decided to close the library for 6 days in a row followed by a monday with a power outage, luckily they have advertised this in a small corner of the library where i happened to pass on my way to take out a book for 2 hours.
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