Thursday, September 2, 2010

loving it


Well I have finally finished my exams for the week. I cannot believe my semester is half way over; time is flying by! I leave for spring break tomorrow and I could not be more excited. 10 of my housemates and I are going on a ten day road trip around South Africa. We're going through the garden route, up to Durban, hopefully through Lesotho, up to Kimberly and then back to Cape Town. It's going to be an insane amount of driving, but the boys bought a car (automatic) and then we rented two stick shifts because they are so much cheaper, but only the boys know how to drive them so I guess I won't be doing any driving on the wrong side of the road haha.

Other than tests I have done two pretty cool things in the last week or so. I went to the first soccer game at the world cup stadium since the games finished. It was really incredible being there knowing that only like two months ago I was watching games from America that were taking place there. I had such a good time, even though I wasn't that into the game. The fans were insane and the vuvuzelas from the world cup were out in full force. They are so loud! It was really awesome seeing all the fans. Hermann, one of the germans in the house got a crowd of about 50 south africans singing "Deutschland" over and over...even though no one else was from Germany haha.

The following day I went to the District 6 museum. During Apartheid something in between 40 and 50 towns were stripped of all diversity, all of the blacks and "coloreds" were forced to move into townships outside of the city and suburbs. District 6 was one of the suburbs. Prior to Apartheid it flourished and had incredible buildings with breath-taking european architecture, but when the blacks were evacuated all of the buildings were demolished. The whites politicians wanted no remembrance of what the area was. The problem was that everyone got along so well in District 6 there was no racial tension at all (I was told this by my tour guide who was a minority and was born in District 6 during the late 1930's). After the area was torn apart it never recovered, it is just now beginning to rebuild, but for as long as Apartheid lasted it was lifeless. The photos blew my mind. Mind tricks were played on the people on signs whenever whites were mentioned in signs it would say "white people only" but if it was forbidding minorities it would simply say "no blacks allowed" the word people did not apply to them. I've learned in my classes that the brainwashing was inspired by the division the nazi's created with the jews. On a less violent scale of course, but nevertheless the minorities here had to face police brutality for far too long and visiting that museum made my studies here much more real.

Anyway, sorry for the somewhat boring entry. I promise my next one will be much more entertaining since it will be as soon as I get back from spring break in like ten days :]

<3 Carly

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