and so it begins...

Ok so I love Cape Town.  After about 40 hours of traveling, multiple layovers, getting lost a few times in Heathrow airport, and telling the man at customs my phone number instead of my flight number, I made it to our very nice hotel in downtown Cape Town.  I stayed there one night on my own, but there was one girl, Bridget, who was there as well and we went out for a lovely meal in the POURING rain and then went to bed at about 8 o'clock.  The next day everyone got to the hotel and the adventures began! 

There are 9 people in my program including myself, 8 girls and one lucky boy named Patrick.  Out "Sol mate" (student orientation leader) and guy that lives with us is also named Patrick and is from Zimbabwe, 23 years old and very nice.  There is also a girl Ranel who runs both the service learning and the arts and sciences program so she has been around a lot as well.  I feel like we have already established a little family in a sense.  It is just such a quality group of people with different backgrounds and perspectives and a great spirit to do great things for the world.  For people that know, it is kind of like a smaller version of SCCAP (the service group that I am a part of at Santa Clara).  Just a lot of really inspiring people that I cannot wait to get to know better and learn from. 

Basically, we have been just getting an overview of everything for the past three days.  We talked about classes, cell phones, food, and the service projects that we will be doing.  We do not know what exactly we will be doing yet, but it should be decided in the next few weeks! We drove around through the townships, the poverty stricken areas in Cape Town surrounding the city, which was eye opening of course and really unreal how these people live.  I will tell more about that later. We also moved into our lovely house yesterday! It is a big Victorian type house with huge bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, and a kitchen.  Basically it is amazing except for the fact that is it really cold! But really, I shouldn’t complain though.

As for the nightlife, we have been going out every night because it’s the first weeks so you have to! We went to a hilarious comedy act on Monday night on Longstreet, which is the common area for people to go out at night. Last night we went to this bar there that has “rand a brand” on Wednesday nights, which is basically one rand (about 13 US cents) for one shot.  So as you can imagine it is very crazy and got a little out of control.  But all safe and great fun of course!

I won’t ramble on forever about everything, but I will update soon on what we are doing! Miss you all and wish you could be here because you all deserve to see this beautiful country! Xoxox