molweni & jammer!

That's Xhosa for hello everybody and Afrikaans for sorry, for being MIA for a while--because I'm sure you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats to hear from me. Right. Anyway, since I no longer have a laptop, any opportunity I have on a computer is usually dominated by schoolwork, job/apartment searching for the summer (if you know anyone who is willing to pay a college student to do almost literally anything in the greater Burlington area this summer let me know. I'm pretty desperate) or emailing home.

My bad luck from February has disappeared as far as I can tell. March was lovely, spent lots of time at the beach and a couple trips to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town for Sunday evening summer concert series. I also have a new favorite SA music group--Goldfish, I suggest looking up their music! Adding to my list of adventurous food, I have now eaten a dried Mopani worm (very popular in Botswana and high in protein! But not very good) tried crocodile and wildabeast. My classes are still going well, I got a 73 on my first paper in my American Foreign Policy class which weirdly is actually really good--I don't really understand the grading system here but I guess a 75 is the equivalent to an A in America. Kayamandi gets better every week, as I get to know the students better and specifically the girls in my group. The program is pretty strict when it comes to bringing a camera, we have to ask permission and then can only take pictures in the last five minutes so we don't cause too much chaos, but I'm definitely going to take some pictures of my girls before I leave.

Everything is moving really quickly here. We leave for our semester break Garden Route trip next Saturday and I can't wait! And then the 2 Oceans 1/2 Marathon is the day after we get back from that. Yikes. We haven't been training too intensely, but I think we'll be fine, plus Alex says we will still be able to run while we're stopped at the backpackers we stay at during the trip. I'm nervous but really looking forward to the race. Micho, Ilana, Jill and I are also planning our end of the semester travels, which is exciting but I don't want to think about it being May or June yet!

Tomorrow I am going on an excursion with the rest of my intro to the SA wine industry class. We leave at 8:30 tomorrow morning and visit several wine farms in the area. The class was really interesting, I learned about growing grapes, making wine, the history of wine production in South Africa, how to taste wine properly (swirling it around, scoring it, etc. Very classy.) and how to match wine with food. Our lecturer said this is a really good time to get to see the wine production process because it's the start of fall, and the grape harvest just happened.

Talk to you all again after Easter!