Into Africa!

So, after 4.5 days of hellish air travel, I finally touched down in Cape Town, at dawn, at 7:55am on July 2nd.

After the past weeks crash course in half-conscious airport navigation, I breezed through customs and collections, and walked into arrivals to find a man holding a sign with my name on it, and a package for me including a cell phone, an orientation guide, an address and taxi card, and the keys to my apartment and room.

I'm in a loft!

I didn't have much time to look around initially, as we arrived at my loft(!) at 9:15 in the morning, and I was to be picked up for my first day of orientation (recall the day of rest I was supposed to have until my delay?... Yes, exactly.) and by 10:00 I was showered, met a couple of roommates, and was collected by a coordinator and went on a city-wide hop-on hop-off tour. Seven other new interns who had arrived between last Thursday to Sunday night were present as well. There is another Canadian, five from the United states, and one German. We went to the District 6 Museum, a few outdoor marketplaces, went to a coffee shop and got properly acquainted (Properly meaning caffeine and talking politics), and found an outdoor Eastern Bazaar courtyard restaurant where, since I walked off a 12 hour flight and began a 6 hour orientation, I proceeded to murder an enormous plate of chicken schwarma and naan bread.

After we finished, we were met by another co-ordinator, who took us on the mini-bus "taxis", which are actually vans with far too many seats for the space who pack people in for a cheaper price and drop them off as they drive. We transferred at the station to the local busses, where we learned how to get back to our respective houses in Observatory via public transit.

I was in bed by 9:30, asleep by 10:00, and up at 8:00 today for Orientation round 2, which was
a) acquiring a proper cell phone, b) Going through the program staff, objectives, and activities, and
c) signing contract and paying deposit on room.

My meal plan turned out to be an great idea. The woman who does the cooking (also our Xhosa teacher!) does it all out of her own kitchen and does drop offs in the evening for dinner and the next days packed lunch. Her food is amazing, and so far I've eaten a vegetable pesto pasta, bacon and eggs, and a roasted pepper and real cheese sandwich. I missed real cheese.

Update on luggage: My cell phone isn't working for 1-800 calls, so I brought the number with me to VACorps office and phoned from there. It turns out my luggage was still in Washington, for heaven knows why, and should hopefully be forwarded to Cape Town, to the office.

I have my first meeting at my placement tomorrow, and my roommates have lent me additional clothing until my luggage gets here. I need a better fitting coat, though. A fellow intern has expressed a like-minded enthusiasm for thrift stores, so there may be an adventure happening in days to come.

Oh! There's another intern starting at my winery when I'm starting! He's in the business internship, but apparently we both start out on the tasting floor to get the hang of the wines and the info. So, I'll not be by myself for transit there and back!

Hrm, what else-? Oh, right. We have cockroaches. Apparently, they are manageable, and not as enormous and horrible as they appear in movies. However, I was warned that if I think I feel a bug in my hair in the night, it is not, for once, me being a mental hypochondriac. Lovely. Another adventure to look forward to. Fran the Centipede revisited, this time featuring my head.

So.

How do I feel now, after I've finally arrived and found everything to be incredibly easy and well laid out?

Relief! My fear of being sold into a human trafficking ring has vanished entirely, and my feeling that this will go by far too quickly and remarkably easily is through the roof. I've already found my way home alone once, every single person I've encountered speaks English, and the homes of the other interns and the VAC office are all within a 10 minute walk of each other, and within 10 minutes of a grocery store with ATM, mini-mall, and the train station. I love my bedroom, with it's high ceiling, queen bed, bookshelf, and spacious wooden computer desk. I love my roommates, who have so far lent me their computers, their toiletries, their towels, and their clothing until I settled in and figured out the food, internet, and luggage situations. Also, they are most of them majoring in interesting fields and have interesting reading material which they are happy to let me plunder. We're kind of from all over the place, academically speaking. There is International Law, Human Rights, Social Work, Gender Studies, Business, Psychology, Hospitality, Tourism, and one who's fresh out of high school. Very interesting conversation material so far.

Oh, I'm also taking Xhosa lessons and hopefully Thai Kickboxing classes. Hot Yoga will probably occur as well.