Posted 4:45:20 PM by Ben
spent the whole morning at robben island, the island about 13km out to sea, off of the city where numerous political prisoners were held during apartheid. we did a number of things one the island, all part of a special tour differing from the mass tours, including a tour of the prison complex itself. i was really glad that we went and that we saw those things first hand, but it did not illicit the same sort of emotion response that seeing the prison (dubbed #4) in jo'burg. still, you couldn’t help feel that you were at a place of extreme historic significance while walking around the island. i also got a real sense of what it must have been to be there for upwards of 20 because of the bleakness of the environment. i can't imagine what that must have done to people psychologically. it's surprising that after 27 years in prison, mandela had the strength to do anything else, not to mention lead a government into the future.

tonight most of us are going to this short play written by one of the women who works in the other guesthouse i have not met her, but apparently she is a cool woman). she's written a one woman comedy, so it should be interesting.

yesterday shawn and i took the train down to 'kalk bay,' about 50 minutes out of town. it was just what i needed, i really relaxing day. we sat at this little restaurant over the ocean, ate lunch and then meandered down the beach and found a little spot to sleep/read/play with sea gulls (we tried to get the gulls to teach us to fly, to no avail). much of the way consisted of thinking and staring out into the ocean. while wonderfully relaxing, the sunshine somehow beat into my brain and i was in bed by 10. when i'm old and gray and look back on this trip, i may very well remember it as the one time in my life when i got enough sleep. ahhhh.

i know this doesn't matter to all of you dealing with the intense cold in the midwest, but it has been really hot the past few days. in the high 80's. too much sun for me, although i'd rather not been facing a 50 below wind-chill either. one finally note, i have been trying to get my pictures on the internet, but have been stopped from uploading them by out school's new encryption deal. so, i think i'll e-mail from to andy and have him get them up for me. long story short, they'll be up soon.

Posted 5:53:08 PM by Ben
not much to report today, i just wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent me their support or words of wisdom. i'm doing much better today, just trying to find my own place here and figure out how to do it here. i think i'm getting there, and some days are spectacular, while others less than so. the weekend (yes, the weekend starts on wednesday here, we only have class three days a week) should be full of good times.

Posted 8:55:59 PM by Ben
ahhh, i can feel a rant coming on. i’m not particularly unhappy, but i think today’s the day for some good old fashion ranting to take place. i’ll provide a little table of contents so that if you wish you may jump ahead to the particular rant that most interests you.

1. too many girls on this trip
2. edited football
3. the essence of the u of c
4. being “homesick”

1. okay, first off, let me say once again that having this many girls on one trip (18 girls to 6 boys) is not good for anyone. the gender disparity just causes problems for everyone involved. last night as i was sitting at dinner i looked around the room and realized how completely dominated this trip is my girls. i’m not sure exactly sure how to explain this, but it’s complicated. it’s not that there are more girls than guys and they are making the decisions (and yes, i recognize how close to the line of hypocrisy i am walking right here living in a patriarchal dominated society) or that they dominate the course of the trip (it was actually a big goal of mine this year to make more female friends because i have been hanging out almost exclusively with guys.) no, it’s more the way that i feel personally effected by being constantly inundated with early twentysomething girls. maybe other girls understand this too (the ones that i have talked to on the trip seem too) but it has been my experience that this many girls so tightly packed together for this long simply exacerbates the personal problems that we all face. maybe the same can be said for guys, i’m sure it can in some matter of speaking and that group dynamics always produce tension of some sort, but too many girls is just too much. they all seem to be so bitchy to each other, constantly forming into groups and turning on each other. it’s actually like being back in middle school again. maybe that’s why it’s so distressing. i’ve paid thousands of dollars to fly halfway across the planet to be transported back to middle school.

2. so, last night evan and i watched the first half of the raiders/titians championship game on tv. it was rebroadcast late in the night, and to my surprise it was slightly edited. they would periodically say, “due to time constraints, this program has been slightly edited,” and then go back 3-6 minutes later. weird, and a little disconcerting. i hope i’ll at least be able to watch the superbowl live

3. it’s hard to fully understand the “u of c” mentality until you are immersed in it and when you are you feel like you are drowning, sometimes. anyway, i think today was a good example of it. yesterday i kind of alluded to the xhosa class and how it had been manipulated. well, today was even better. we had a “midterm” today in our history class. note, we have been i the class for exactly four days prior to this, so the concept was a little off but our teacher wanted to get us thinking and evaluate us somewhat. well, last night, i swear people were freaking out about the one hour, impromptu essay that we had to do for today. some were even forming into study groups to go over the information and get ready. come one, get over yourselves kids! we have read one book and had three lectures and people are getting all worked up over grades. silly, silly grades, but people at this school (or that school, i guess depending on your perspective) take so much stock in them. every day i see people so fiercely trying to write down every word that hylton (our teacher) says that people begin to miss what we are being taught. hylton is doing such a good job of integrating what we learn in the class to what is around us, removing a lot of the mumbo jumbo usually found in pretentious classes at the u of c. so come on people, it’s just school, not life.

4. i guess this part is not really a rant, but i liked the structure so much i’m going to put it in. for the sake of continuity. i’ve recently been a little “homesick.” for me, being homesick is not what i thought at all. it has not really so much about missing america or the familiar surroundings, which is what i expected. it’s more just not being around the people that i care about and have a history with. all the people here on this trip are okay people and many i get along with well individually, but i don’t have a history at all, and that is the hardest part to deal with. i want to be able to make inside jokes with people and just share in some common experience. i’ve only known the people here for 2.5 weeks. i guess to look at it from a positive perspective, it’s made me really appreciate things back home. not the country i am from, but the people that make up my life. i’m doing so many new things and it’s almost impossible to share them with the people here on anything more than a superficial level. i guess that’s why i have this weblog. i know that many of the same people that i am missing are reading this and it helps to know that even in some detached way i am able to communicate the way i feel with them/you.

Posted 4:35:07 PM by Ben
come on kids, don't look at gift horse in the mouth.

today we had our third xhosa class and boy had it changed from last week. you may remember from my previous rants that last wednesday xhosa was kind of uncomfortable disaster, but that was our "culture day" removed from any actual language learning. the previous two days were not that bad, a little different than normal classes but still okay. well, a bunch of people had complained so much about the structure of the class that today it became apparent that our teacher, tesa, was altering it to fit our temperament. damn u of c kids. today all the fun was drained right out of the class. we were diagramming sentences and doing all the other useless crap that made me remember why i had such a hard time with language in high school/college. instead of being about leaning the language as people speak it we were suddenly steeped in a u of c style class, deconstructing everything, analyzing everything and letting nothing just go. people need to learn to role with the punches a little. damn school.

besides that, today has been relatively uneventful. we're having dinner up at my guesthouse tonight (which i still can't spell). i'm going to watch one of the two nfl championship games that was played yesterday tonight at 10pm. i have purposefully ignored the outcomes (which is not hard in this country) and a bunch of us are going to watch tonight. should be fun. no other plans for the night. boring entry today, i'm sure future ones will be filled with more drama.

Posted 3:22:53 PM by Ben
if this entry had a title, it would be "a tale of two cities" but it does not have one so ignore that. anyway, the past few days have been very interesting in a variety of different way. on friday, we spent the morning doing a very intense "apartheid tour" but to call it a tour would be an extreme misnomer. we were taken to a few specific places within the cape flats (the portion outside the city where all the 'blacks' and 'coloreds' were push to during the apartheid years) with a group known as the "direct action campaign for peace and memory." their objective is/was to tell their story and the story of those not living though a traveling seminar. it was really powerful to go to these places that help specific meaning to the anti-apartheid struggle and learn about them from people that had grown up there and fought in the underground resistance. as shawn said at one point, until then we had been fed almost nothing but dispassionate reportage of past events and this was completely different. the man running the show was named yasir henry, and was of the more interesting people i have ever met. he told us about his experiences during the 80's and what apartheid did to him and the people around him as well as what had happened since. i am not doing any of the experiences that we had any justice, but suffice it to say that it was a far cry from the stupid head of tourism we had met a few dasy prior. in fact, yasir knew her and called her a bastard. she has tried to shut these guys down because they are reporting/showing a very unglamorous side of the city. something that i really appreciated was the fact that yasir said that they strictly forbid anyone from taking pictures from the confines of the vans we were in. this eliminated the feeling of a "human safari" and when we finally stopped in the middle of crossroads, one of the oldest townships in cape town and were surrounded by dozens of kids, it became a much more "real" experience. many people exchanged numbers with the children and were planning to send pictures back once they were developed. all the things that i was worried about were stripped away and we had a incredibly intense but educational day.

then yesterday i had another uniquely cape town day but in a very different sort. a bunch of us hiked up table mountain, beginning at 1500 ft and climbing all the way to the 3000 ft summit. it was a great hike up, spectacular views and we met some really interesting people. the only compliant i had about the climb was the way the trail it was built it was very steep at many places and to make that more "accessible" it was steps all the way up. natural, boulder type steps but still hard on the knees. we ate lunch on the top, baked in the sun, and then evan, nishant, gabe, emily and i decided to hike down. everyone else was going to take the cable car down, so we set off alone. we didn't want to go back the same way so we took the "very dangerous and not recommended way down." it was great. filled with 6-10 foot rock wall we had to climb down, interesting terrain and a view of all sides of the mountain. i must say, it was more than we had expected, but we all made it without any major injuries. once down to the cable car station on the bottom, we all walked back down the rest of the mountain on the road and back to the b&bs i have never felt more exhausted than i was last night. i was asleep by 10:30 last night and slept for a solid 11 hours. ahhh, does a body good. today i feel sore but that good kind of sore.