Orientation: Day 1

     Today was the first day of Orientation and I feel like I have information overload!  I am going to start with the end of last night.  The sun is hardley ever down here. 

This is at 7:30 pm.  It didn't even start getting darker until about 8:20.  Not only does it take forever to set, it comes up insanely early.  The past two days I have woken up around 6:20am and it looks exactly the same as 10am.

     Once again, as soon as it started getting later the weather got beautiful, so we ate outside.  We still don't have any kind of oven or anything we cooked hot dogs in the microwave.  We also found some baked beans to eat with them.

The hot dog buns were so good.  Here in Stellenbosch there are no hot dog buns in bags.  To get hot dog buns you have to go to the bakery and ask for them.  They are so good!!  The baked beans tasted like they were almost in Spaghetti-o's juice, but not as bad.

     The juice here is very different from the juice back home.  A lot of the juices back home have almost a tangy taste at the end that most juices here don't have.  Also, Mustard is pretty much a big deal.  The places we have been to eat don't have katchup available at the tables, but I have seen mustard. 

     I am starting to get more used to the currency here.  I kept looking at the rand thinking, "Where is the one rand bill?"  I just now realized that the one rand is a coin and not a bill.  Oops!!



5 cents



One rand



10 cents, 50 cents, 2 rand, and 5 rand



20 rand and 50 rand



     I really like the bills because of the animals on them.  I know that sounds kinda weird, but I think it's cool.  Ok, now I can get back to Orientation.  There is another exchange student who i.  s livin in the same housing development as us.  His name is Jonotan and he is from Stockholm, Sweden and he is really nice.  We saw him at orientation and hung out with him for awhile.  For the first part of the orientation a group of speakers talked to us about stuff we need to know about Stellenbosch.  One of the things that they talked about was Safety.  Apparently I can't go anywhere by myself, but the University is actually a very safe place.  We are going to have to get cell phones obviously, but other than that we are plenty safe. =]

     We got put into different groups for the campus tour so at this point I can only speak for myself.  It got pretty hot today.  It got somewhere around 80 degrees and I got a bit of color from walking around in the sun so much.  The campus here is really spread out so it takes awhile to get around campus.  I discovered that the langugae department is at the very far end of campus closer towards the downtown area, so I am starting to lean towards biology instead of afrikaans.   One of the girls in our group was from Germany and she was burnt pretty bad, but she acted as if she had never been burnt in her life.  She even once asked how long it takes for a sunburn to fade away.  She was pretty interesting though because she could speak German, English, French, Latin,a nd read Hebrew.  There are a lot of really tall and really skinny girls in the exchange program as well. 

     After the Campus tour we watched two videos on HIV/AIDS.  I knew that it was a big deal and a very serious disease, but it's so different than what you would think here.  These videos were so difficult to watch and the statistics are even worse.  For example, 1 in every 3 pregnant women in South Africa has AIDS.  That statistic kinda shook me more than all the others beacuse those could be children with a disease they did nothing to get and it also means that those children will lose their mothers before they should have.  There is a pill here that has amazing results for HIV/AIDS, but it's really difficult for the people in the townships and in poverty.  There are a few places that give this pill for free, but some people have to walk for 4 days and 3 nights to get to it.  It is also tricky because you have to take the pill on a full stomach and for people in the townships here, that's a big thing to ask for.  They pretty much have to chose between food, their children's schooling, their homes, and their lives and the question is what do they give up?  I have never seen poverty like I have seen just looking into the townships.  I haven't been in one yet, but they look like pictures of hoovervilles made of tin.  It's really shocking to walk through Stellenbosch and see how well off so many people are and then see the townships.  There is no inbetween and it's really shocking.

     On a lighter note, we have found out some of the other places that the international student club will take us while we are here.  There is a tour of Robben Island that we really want to go on as well as