Today I had my first day of orientation with a group of
about 400 international students from across the world. The Germans make up the
largest foreign study population, with US close behind.
I had a delicious breakfast at the center where orientation
was held. It is a popular breakfast here to have homemade granola with fresh
fruit yogurt. Yum! Granola is one of my favorite things to eat so I have to be
sure to find a place where I can buy a
good, fresh mix like the one they served today.
The information sessions were great! We learned about safety
on and off campus, student clubs and societies, and other options open to
international students to get involved on campus and travel.
Are you ready for
this? I SIGNED UP TO GO SHARK CAGE DIVING IN FEBRUARY!!!!!!!! I know my mom isn’t
excited about this, but I am!!! I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait! I
need to buy a disposable underwater camera before I go. Ah! I signed up with a
group of other girls in my program so we’ll all be going together. I’M SO
EXCITED! This is one of the things I’m most excited to do in South Africa. It
only costs about $175 in American, which I believe is a totally reasonable
price to meet great white sharks face-to-face. Oh, and the price includes
lunch. And I mean lunch for me, not the sharks. Ha ha! Get it?
The roads here are crazy, by the way! I’m pretty sure
there’s no speed limit. They drive on the left side of the road, with the
driver’s side on the right. Whatever you know about pedestrians having the
right of way, forget it when you come to South Africa! They do not care if they
plow you over since most of the driving population is not ensured and a great
percentage doesn’t even have licenses to drive. Living in Stellenbosch IS safer,
but it is still very tricky to cross the road. I would love to rent a bike, but
I don’t think I’m up for that challenge with the cars here.
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| This is how I know when it's ok to cross the road :) |
We had two brief language and culture information sessions,
one on isiXhosa and one on Afrikaans. I’m no good with languages, but the
speaker had me shouting with the rest of the students songs in isiXhosa. I took
notes to reference back to, but I mostly remember “Moyo” is hello and “Balaka”
is run. Useful, huh? Afrikaans is a language that is largely based on Dutch and
the words are unusually long. I’ll post some pictures of signs for you to see.
Some words are pretty close to their English counterparts, just with about 8
extra letters thrown in. Everyone here speaks Afrikaans and English at least,
so I’m in luck with that. Being an American is pretty easy when it comes to the
language thing…
We also had a campus tour, and I do believe it’ll take me
some time to get a hang of the roads around here. I come from a tiny campus
where we have a total of 2,000 students and now I’m in a place where they have
nearly 20,000! I’ll be making a lot of use of the maps they provided us with.
So far, I can find my dorm and the student center pretty well. Not bad for my
second day.
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| And dis is where I liiiiiveee (just go up those stairs 1 floor!) |
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