Weeks 4 & 5: Final Exams, First Days, and Mosquitoes

I’ll be cramming 2 weeks into this blog!

The Studying:

As our month long course comes to an end, actual school is slowly creeping up. Our course was initially filled with short assignments and field trips, but in this last week we have been tasked with completing 4 essays in a week long span. As a result the house was very quiet and stressed out this week as we all wracked our brains for a topic to write on. We celebrated the end of our first essay by throwing a small house party at Charlton house, in which we invited other study abroad students on the CIEE program. It was exciting to finally meet new people outside of our 14 person cult. We also had two new people, Marcia and Anna, move into the house and they are both the sweetest people ever!

For the final exam we had to choose 2 prompts out of 3 to write a decent sized essay on. We had 24 hours to complete these essays, and as you would expect there was a lot of screaming and delirium in the house those two days. Despite our qualms and constant complaining, we all managed to successfully finish our essays at 7 o’clock! Once again we spent the rest of the night celebrating by playing games of charades and going out for a night at Yours Truly and the Waiting Room.

On Wednesday I went to Plaza Day, which is a club fair except here they are called societies. One perk of being an international student is that you get to sign up for 3 free clubs. After a lot of thought and being sent all over our giant campus by clueless staff, I ended up signing up for underwater club, ballroom and latin dance, biology society which involves a lot of nature hikes, and a cool yoga club that provides free meals at the end. I’m hoping I can commit to all of them, but we shall see as the year goes on. I must admit I’m especially excited for ballroom/latin!! In addition to club sign ups, I also finally registered for classes. This semester I’ll be taking Global change ecology and environment and sustainability (very broad topics as you would expect.) Sadly I have class everyday from 9-11am, and labs Monday and Wednesday at 2-5pm.

First meal with Ellen as students have begun to fill campus, the line was outrageous

House shenanigans:

This week was unforgiving in terms of mishaps and inconveniences. To begin, we spent the week in schedule 2 load shedding. This means the power would go out twice a day for two hours at a time. This usually happened around when we would decide to cook dinner which led to many meals being pushed back two hours, and undercooked brownies. On the bright side, load shedding brought us together at night time for several candle-lit card game sessions, a singing/guitar jam session, and late night talks until 4 am. It’s always so exciting and a little sad when the power comes back on and we all scatter back to our devices.

Perhaps the worst part of the week was the mosquitoes. Oh. My. Gosh. I’ve never had so many mosquito bites on my body in my life. Probably around 30 in one week, and some of them turned very huge and red. I ended up getting a mosquito repellent wall plug-in, however they have still been attacking me in common areas. We also had some laundry machine mishaps. It turns out our water tank ran out of water, which means we’ll need to be extra conservative with what remaining water we have.

You ain’t seen nothing.

The fun:

We took our last field trip to the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. The camp was made to house migrant men who came to the city to work, but it was also meant to hide them away. One of the workers explained that the white municipality hoped to hide the “black spot” of migrant laborers away from the rest of the city, while benefiting from their labor. The museum was super interesting and at the end we took a tour through hostel 33 and the township (highly recommend looking it up!) A few of us decided to visit the Labia, a movie theater, to see Parasite! The movie was definitely shocking, and it also just won a reward. More importantly I get to mark going to the Labia off of my Cape Town bucket list. We concluded the weekend by taking a nice trip to Newlands Forest to look for some geocaches. While we didn’t manage to find the physical items, we saw so many beautiful sights. It was kind of surreal walking through the forest as the beautiful voices of an African choir floated through the trees. It was definitely one of the most peaceful places I’ve been and I hope to go back soon!

I’ve had so much yummy food this week that I can’t remember all of it but some highlights included homemade pizza by Lucy and I, Ethiopian food, Gelato Mania, Ellen’s pineapple dump cake, and these delicious tiny chicken wings from a Korean/Thai restaurant. It was my goal to keep track of all of the restaurant names but I’ve fallen off this past week.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something since so much can happen in 2 weeks, but hopefully it’ll make it to next week’s blog!