Burning Afrika and The World's Largest Bike Race

Normally I would think it would be difficult to top our last weekend, renting out a bar, having a wonderful cookout with international students, but on friday Arne (one of the germans) and I had an incident that somehow gave us a feeling that the weekend would be even more interesting. We were simply stopping to ring our friends doorbell and see if they wanted to go to the grocery store (always travel in groups), when we suddenly heard what sounded like a bird being beheaded, suddenly a man came out of an alleyway with a huge crow writhing in his hands, he simply walked by and said "how's it going fellas". Needless to say we fell into hysterics, it was a sign of things to come. Friday was just a simple friday, and so was saturday to be, I had volunteered to get up at 5am to be worker at the world's largest bike race, over 35000 people race 109 km all day long. So the good money would be on going to bed early. That would be a really smart move, so I went to a pool party at one of our friends houses. Simple enough, I was actually on my way out, heading to bed like the responsible person I am. Suddenly one of our South Africans friends came in and said "hey guys you ever heard of burning man???"
"yeah of course, i've always wanted to see that"
"oh man well SA has it's own version, a little smaller but it is tonight!!!"
"no I can't I have to get up early for The cape Argus [the bike race]"
"you riding it??"
"no just have to volunteer"
"oh you'll be fine then"
this is where i should have inserted a really assertive "no" and walked out the door. I didn't so a few hours later I found myself on the way to a eco village i.e. where hippies go to die in the middle of no where outside cape town. Afrika Burning was the name of it and they hope to have it every year. It was of course just as silly as you could imagine, costumes, fire, bands, drunk people, people who seemed to be under the influence of something quite different, perhaps TIK- South Africa's equivilant of crack. We immediately found a room that looks like where the seances would later go down, but in the corner we found huge sheet costumes, now in the US we would probably just make sheet ghosts, these however were 3 huge zebras, which we proceeded to take out to the dance-lawn, we were but another animal on the range out there though. people with giraffe hats, leopard outfits, wild dogs running about, and of course what would a crazy party out in the woods be without a man doing an interpretive dance in a speedo. They burned 2 men that evening one at 1 and one at 3 both were seperated by fire twirlers (??? I don't know what else to call them) The burning itself was quite wild (who would have thought a 20 foot bonfire would get that hot) although we all felt it got a little uncomfortable at the end when the remains of the man burning seemed to take the shape of a burning cross. I got home at about 330 (interestingly enough i would say the hardest and most frustrating aspect of Cape Town is how difficult it is to get a cab, many a trip has been foiled by this.). perfect just an hour and a half before the car comes to pick me up.
Well at least I will be doing something the whole time, I'll be so busy that i won't even feel my tiredness. that was a mistaken notion. I was very lucky I was at the end of the 100k race so i had to sit in the dark until about 7:30 with nothing to do, but unable to sleep because I was a volunteer. But it was fun, especially for a bike geek like me, watching not only the first group to go by, the real racers, where you simply saw a blur, and then interestingly enough about 200 cars- the team cars and media almost outnumber the riders. Then though came the 34,900 slower riders who were much more entertaining. some were fast, some slow, some in costumes (apparently they came right from burning man too!). My job was simple wave a flag and warn the riders about the cliff upcoming and try not to lose too many over it. I was in heaven, well except for the no sleep thing, just checking out bikes and cheering people on, for which they would always say "Thank You Marshall" which is what I was, but somehow in a south African accent it sounds very cool. Well so eventually around 2 I was brought home. Perfect now i can take that nap, I was making a goodnight sandwich (for some reason there was no food available at a bike race) when the final insult hit me. We had been planning on going to another concert in the botanical gardens, which is about the coolest thing in the world, but this week the band was a really famous cape town band and sold out in 2 hours.
"hey ell, guess what? Goldie and Perris don't want to go to Goldfish tonight!! Now we can go"
[to finish this story with "no i think I am going to go to bed", stop reading here and close the email and just think of how nice that sleep was for me] or [to finish this story with "sure I'll go, when is the next time i'll be able to see goldfish a kirstenbosch gardens" continue reading]
Boy I am glad I went, one thing about the music here is it always suprises me at fitting into no catagory i could make up, this was 2 guys with a saxaphone and a dj booth, making a mix of techno and jazz and soul, and every few minutes a new person would be added for different vocals or to add percussion. Although it sounds gross, i can't think of one person right now reading this email right now after reading that description that is thinking "oh I think i'd like that" but you probably all would- keep in mind that the crowd at the kirstenbosch gardens is an amazing mix of ages. I'll bring it home for those of you interested. oh and i finally went to bed at 8pm that evening. goodnight. ell

Mayo, Cat Cake and International Bonding

Okay I think I've finally got some interesting stories/observations for you. One of my favorite new facts i've learned about our area here is about the minibuses, the volkswagen vans that serve as public transportation. Apparently they are all run by organized crime, in fact when the University of Capetown decided to get their own shuttle service (after 5 minibus drivers were shot execution style, and they decided it might be a liability to have school kids riding the minis) they had to have a sit down with the minibus people and agree not to use the main road through town, because it would cut down on the revenue of the VW's. perfect right?? that is until one of the campus shuttles had to take a detour on the main road and one of the minibus drivers got on the bus and threatened the driver with a gun. so that's interesting. Another thing that might be reminiscent of my russia emails for you is... MORE GODDAMNED MAYO. I hate mayonaise (i can't even spell it) and it is on everything, chicken sandwich??? nope think more 2 parts mayo i part shredded chicken. But on the bright side, the school campus (apart from being covered in ivy, and therefore my first Ivy league school) is like street food heaven, everyday i have either Indian, Felafel, chinese, Mayo sandwich, fastfood or African. oh and everyone is barefoot all the time here, grocery store, classroom, restaurant, where ever whenever.
But on to my week, well it was as usual here pretty school based, lots of class, occasional moments of goofing off. It wasn't until friday that i got any real cultural experiences, when we were invited by our landlord to her house in Nyanga, the biggest township in Cape Town for a braai, it was once again just perfect, every trip out to the townships is a real eyeopener. It's not so much the poverty and the dirtyness, it is the happiness and friendliness of the people, everyone is genuine and ready to smile (as opposed to myself who as a waiter is fake and always ready to smile) We had an amazing time, my favorite occurence which keeps happening to me is that people ask me why I'm not doing shawco (a volunteer program to teach little kids) I always answer that a0 i'm doing habitat for humanity b) I'm not very good with kids and c) who would possibly want me being a role model to small children. And always without fail about 20 minutes after saying this I am in the middle of a group of kids with several of them hanging off me, or starting games of chicken with all the kids. This was no exception, and of course as the chairman of the South Africa for Barack Obama i got every kid (most of whom don't speak english) chanting "Yes we can". obviously, but to explain my blatant obnoxious american traits, I had been discussing this with some of the parents and they at least understood it and supported it, and the kids loved it- hey i figure for your first english phrase "yes we can" is pretty good.
Saturday was our big day though, we had been planning this 21st birthday party for 2 weeks, I even made another of my patented shaped cakes, actually this one might have been the best one yet, a huge cat, big enough to serve 35 people with some to spare. we rented out the corner bar (from Gary the South African Republican, who voted for the nationalists) had a huge braai (with 4 different kinds of salads all featuring my favorite condiment...MAYO) Lamb Chicken Sausage all of 3 dollars a head. it was amazing. we invited a whole bunch of kids from the orientation so it wasn't just americans, we had Tanzanians, Ugandans, South Africans, Norweigans, Germans, Denmark-ians and even a Frenchie. It was a really good mix, which is good because who wants to go 10,000 miles away and spend all their time with people from an hour down the road. Also I can now actually not walk across campus (barefoot) without wondering into about 10 people i know, who would have thought, I was popular all this time , I was just on the wrong continent. e

Security Breach or Another Window Story

Well it was bound to happen, in Florence it was a girl sleep walking her way out a third floor window, in St. Petersburg it was Jarrod having been overserved out a third story window, and nearly a month into my third semester abroad I once again have a window story. Thankfully not my own. In one of the houses
down the street full of Americans, a girl awoke during the night to find a robber trying to escape from her second floor window. Amazingly, instead of running screaming out the door as i think i would have, she actually got up and pushed the man out the window onto the ground. Needless to say it has caused quite a flustering of the Americans, nothing much was taken, just one guys camera, cellphone and some money- he had left his room unlocked and had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs. The robber apparently was fine, just landed in the grass dusted himself off and left. What i find to be the most interesting about all this is our own reaction when we went to there house a few days later, we couldn't believe how little security there was!! we kept saying things like "look how little razor wire there is" or "well of course they should never have left a window open at night that didn't have bars on it, even if it was the second floor!!" We've become like security junkies, the other day i found myself really admiring someones house for it's over the top razor-wiring, "just imagine how safe you would be in there!".

Another discovery i'm making here, quite slowly is that this country may not be quite as liberal as i believed. I have met quite a few coloured or black South Africans who a) did not vote for Nelson Mandela b) continue to not vote for the ANC c) really miss aparthied. all of which i find strange, now granted this country has become poorer since 1994, but I find it hard to believe that many black South Africans wouldn't vote for Mandela, but i guess that is just a preconcieved notion i brought here. There is also still a very big racial divide here, many of our orientation leaders talked about the fact that for the most part the only whites that hang out with the black Africans are international students. "everyone else, yes we go to class with them and go to discussions with them, maybe even the sports clubs, but besides that we don't hang out together, that's why we love the international students, they don't care, they want to meet everyone." I thought that was nice.

Saturday I tried to climb table mountain again (I like to hike, and boy is this a hike) however although the forecast was for 80 calm and clear in cape town, that in no way means that table mountain will follow those guidelines. The mountain was angry that day!! We got about 3/4 of the way up in approximately 110 km/hour winds and stinging rain before it became clear that the girl who i was climbing with was likely to be blown right off the mountain, or at least into the barbed wire guard rails (it was blowing me around pretty badly as well, we had to get shelter behind rocks). so we turned back vowing to go again this saturday.

Besides that not too much has been going on, I go to school, friday we are hoping to go to a rugby match and watch the Cape Town team play, the Stormers, then saturday we are renting out our local bar (and by renting out i mean he's just letting us have a room to our selves) for one of our roomates 21st birthday party, and we are going to braai- which is the SA version of barbequeing, except with all sorts of meats i've never heard of, but the salads are exactly the same, Gary the bartender was very pleased to offer us a variety of them "okay my wife will make 3 salads, a spaghetti salad, a bean salad and a green salad" something i took for being so American turns out is also very popular here.
Here's another food highlight for you, we've been introduced to the Chip Roll, what could that possibly be you ask?? how about french fies in a bun... nope thats it, just fries in a bun, sometimes if you're lucky they'll put some sort of sauce on it, but mostly it is just a chip sandwich. It's certainly not very atkins friendly, but it is rather popular. e