Cape Town is AMAZING

So because this is my first foray into blogs, bear with me. As the first week raps up, it seemed like a good idea to start to keep track of my life here for my own sake and to share with various friends and family. My internet is unfortunately limited by how much bandwidth I can use, so pictures may be somewhat sparse. I also can't video chat at all or use facebook very often, because those are huge drains on my data, but will try to keep in touch regardless with audio skype calls and gmail/fb chat. We start classes this coming Tuesday and have had a week of orientation, making me feel quite a bit like a freshman again. We even have rolled out to bars and such in the customary freshman mob. The advantage is that I'm really feeling like I'm starting to get a feel for the city and how to move around.

First things first, Cape Town is beyond gorgeous. Everywhere in the city you can look up and see a huge mountain range looming over the tops of the buildings, seemingly only a few miles away. I live in a Stanford house with the other 25 kids in the program in a neighborhood called Observatory, or Obz for short. Obz is a trendy neighborhood with a lot of college-age students and a lot to do, so we're really well located. There are weekly poetry readings on Monday nights and just last night I went out and saw live Reggae and African music at bars just around the corner from our house. Our house is also walking distance away from almost anything we need, including the train station, Stanford Centre, shopping center, and Jammie stop to head to UCT (the Jammie is the campus bus based off the Stanford marguerite.) It's also amazingly easy to catch minibuses, which I'm convinced should be implemented everywhere as a fantastic form of public transportation. It's essentially a van that you hop on and off of wherever you want, ending in the center of town for less than a dollar. You can then catch another minibus there to anywhere else in the city. There's a driver and a another guy who collects money and yells at people on the street trying to coax them on the bus. Guatemalans (I'm looking at you Ces) know all about this brilliance. Half the time the driver is blasting house, which I'm perfectly content with. Apparently, so is everyone else, because electronic music is huge here. When I've gone out this week, the music scene has been a mix of house and American music or a combination of the two.

I'm acutely aware of race issues while I've been here, and you can definitely see the separation of whites and blacks. All the public transportation (train and minibuses) is taken almost exclusively by blacks or coloureds (people of Dutch, Indian, and African descent with medium dark skin--note: this isn't an offensive term here, it's just a different racial category), and I don't really know how whites get around. I guess they all own cars, because there was not a single white face besides our own when we went to the train station. Downtown is mostly white, but is decently integrated. Camps Bay Beach and Clifton Beach are almost entirely white. And of course, the townships are almost entirely black or coloured.