I just got back from Durban this week, what an amazing weekend! It was my 21st birthday on Thursday so we went out and celebrated on Wednesday, and I spent the actual birthday going to class and sitting on a bus. We rode about 12 hours through the night and then walked a few miles to the hostel, Banana Backpackers. This place was an old converted building with a huge open air courtyard in the middle, and it had a lot just for being a hostel. I'd recommend it to anyone and it was only about $10 a night.

We spent Friday going to the beach and getting in the Indian Ocean for the first time, and then went out to dinner at this really good Italian place, probably the best food we had in Durban and certainly stuff you can't get in Grahamstown. Saturday was crazy, we went to the beach in the morning and then left to goto the rugby match about 2 or 3 hours before kickoff. We ended up walking the whole way there, probably about 5 miles, most of it down the median of the highway with some Australians, then cutting through a broken fence and walking across the construction site where the world cup stadium is being built for 2010.

That stadium is going to be spectacular, brand new for the world cup and it looks like it's coming along, although I'm still worried about South Africa hosting the world cup. The ABSA stadium, where the game was, was pretty different to American stadia. It was constructed to be really steep so all of the seats were really decent. While it wasn't as big as an American one, there was no bowl-type quality to it. The game itself wasn't amazing but there were several tries late on and Australia won 27-15, with South Africa getting booed off at the end after losing 3 straight matches.

After that we hit the town again, saw some fireworks, and then went to bed to get up at 6:00 the next morning. We drove about 3 hours to the Drakensburg Mountains, where we had a local Zulu guide take us on a 6 hour hike through the country. The mountains there were pretty enormous, we saw some cave paintings that were anywhere from 2000 to 10000 years old, and also saw some baboons and boks there. It was amazingly beautful, there's such an expanse of natural beauty in this country.

That pretty much took up the whole day and then it was up again at 5:30 the next morning to catch another bus, this time it was Greyhound and a lot nicer than the other bus we took. That got us back about 7:30 that night and after watching about 6 straight hours of Prison Break at one point I was ready to get off the bus. Two of our friends from Princeton, Ed and Ryan, left to go back to the US the next day and had to hop on another 12 hour bus ride to Cape Town the very next day.

All in all, it was a really good trip, a great 21st weekend. Hopefully I'll be heading to Cape Town soon, but I'll post pictures of my trip later in the week.

Post #2

Just wanted to say a few more words about a couple of things because I keep getting questions:
Weather: The weather here is really strange. Right now it's on the back end of winter, yet it's warm enough most days to wear shorts and a short sleeved shirt. At night it gets colder, but still not too cold, except for a few nights. Pretty soon it'll get a lot warmer and probably be in the 90s/100s by the time I leave. It's also gotten really windy here, and there are pretty moderate to heavy winds almost all the time. This just happened in the last 2 weeks. It hasn't rained once since I arrived, in nearly a month.

Class: My two classes are in Politics and Philosophy. The Philosophy course is an examination of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. It's quite a complicated text, but the long and short of it is that Nietzsche uses an historical evaluation to question "The value of our values." Basically, Nietzsche wants to cast light on how Christians in 19th Century Europe arrived at their system of values, and open the door for others to examine the intrinsic nature of these values.

Politics is a course on the study of Democratisation in the western world, focusing mainly on ancient Athens, Britain, the United States, and South Africa.

Both these course will change later in the semester, I'm not yet sure what I'll be taking then.

This weekend I will be doing some traveling. The Tri-varsity is a massive sports tournament between Rhodes and two other regional schools, and the big event is the rugby, although other sports will be played. It is in Alice, a small town outside Port Elizabeth, and that is all day Saturday. If I decide not to go to that, I may end up traveling to the beach, but I should have pictures either way.

Next week is the Tri-nations rugby in Durban, and we'll be leaving on my birthday, Thursday the 21st, and riding a bus through the night to Durban. Then we'll have all day Friday to explore the city, and then head to the Tri-nations game on Saturday evening. Should be a lot of fun!

Post #1

So I'm now here in South Africa, just a little about the place. I'm in Grahamstown, which is in the Eastern Cape. It is a very nice town and the university sits at one end. The town backs right up to the campus and has a very nice high street which has plenty of restaurants, shopping, banks, etc. At one end of the high street is a massive cathedral, and at the other is the Rhodes clocktower, it looks pretty impressively laid out.

I arrived 1 week before classes started and got to know the place and the rest of the international students, many of whom I still see on a daily basis. After one week, I moved into my permanent residence, Graham House, and the people here have been really awesome. You get a lot closer to the others in your dorm than you do in America, and we eat together and generally play rugby/cricket/soccer every day.

I still feel like I haven't really gotten to see much of Africa, you can get very sheltered here in Grahamstown, but hopefully we'll be traveling to Port Elizabeth next week for a rugby tournament in which Rhodes will be playing, and then again the next weekend to Durban for some professional rugby when the Boks play the Wallabies in the Tri-Nations.