I Gotta Try Some of Those Industrial Strength Drugs!

Monday, July 30, 2007

First day of classes today. All this time the campus has been empty, but it felt small and I wondered how it would feel with 20,000 students on it. The answer, I learned today, is crowded. The campus feels like a packed high school hallway during passing period actually. Even McGill was never this packed. It’s not even that the campus is tough to get around with so many people, it’s just overwhelming. Fortunately, the small campus means you run into people all the time, but lines for food and other services are daunting - nothing new here though.

*I shouldn’t say the campus is small, it’s just the academic area of the campus is very compact – upper campus it is called. Middle and lower campus are actually quite large, but there isn’t much there worth note except for a few academic and administrative buildings.*

My first class today was Religion, Spirituality and Ecology, and only has about 7 people in it, half of them American. The workload also seems heavy, despite it being a second year course, but we’ll see. I’ll spare you a detailed description of all my classes, except where entertaining or helpful for those looking to come here next semester (what’s up Zach and Laura!)

I’m signed up for an African history course that is also full of Americans but might be worth taking. The professor managed to introduce the entire course in 10 minutes and essentially told us the class was un-failable. Unless we tried really hard to fail by using industrial strength drugs, he told us, we would have no problem passing. He continued to tell us that this class is for those study abroad students who are here on vacation, not school, and those of us who wanted a real class should take the honours course. I’m not actually signed up for it, but might have to take it. It depends on the workload of my other classes (I still have much of Cape Town to explore, after all.) He also seemed really bitter about having to teach the course to a bunch of SSAs (Semester Study Abroad), not that I blame him.

I’m going to the armchair theatre tonight which serves pizza, beer and shows cult movies every Monday – should be fun. My first rugby practice is tomorrow. If I don’t post for a while after tomorrow, please inquire as to my aliveness.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Today I became an official UCT student. I was expecting a parade and flowers, but instead they signed us up for the upper campus walk-a-thon. I spent all day running around from building to building signing up for courses, getting info about courses or meeting with professors – kinda like McGill. Of course after all that I still don’t know what classes I’m taking, but I was expecting such.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Being here is finally starting to feel real. That is, I’m starting to feel like I live here instead of being at summer camp. I think having our first free weekend since we got here really helped. We went out on Friday to Long St. which is always crowded on weekends. The bars and clubs actually remind me a lot of Montreal, except the people are more friendly. The street is full of clubs and bars pumping music and flashing lights and people overflowing into the crowded street, lined up for street fare and mingling on balconies. It seems that every night I go out we end up meeting someone new and without fail end up making a contact (minus a few weirdos and skeezeballs, but that’s usually only a problem with the girls.) Just this weekend for instance, we met an African drumming instructor from Ivory Coast who teaches at a bar on Long St. and records all over the world. Thank you mom and dad for sending me to French school – he was very impressed by a French-speaking American.

We went to the V&A Waterfront on Saturday – my first time there – for dinner and a movie. The waterfront is one of several very very wealthy areas of Cape Town that also happens to be mostly white and have a distinctly Western feel. I went knowing this, but still felt very weird walking around a mall that could have been anywhere in the States, particularly after visiting the townships but even when comparing it to the neighborhood that I live in. The movie theatre also plays almost entirely American films, but we went to see an African film from the South African documentary film festival. It was confusing and I slept through much of it. Movies are only 25 rand (about $3.50) and because I miss home a little I will be going to see the Simpsons movie tonight. Classes start tomorrow and I still don’t know what I’m going to take.