Vensters' Day! Thursday February 2, 2012

Today was a busy day. I finally got my card back from the bank, but not without some more adventure. I went to the student center where my card was supposed to be held only to find out I had to find my way downtown to the bank there to retrieve it. So, naturally, I took it as a chance to go exploring.

I made my way downtown with my map which from frequent use is becoming a bit ragged along the edges. On the way there, I asked a couple women for directions. I learned from them that they have both been born and raised Stellenbosch and work here in town. I began to feel like most people living and working in the community are originally from here as well. Moving on to the local market, I met men and women from places like Kenya and Zambia who have moved to Stellenbosch to have a better chance of selling their handcrafted souvenirs to the tourists who frequent the town. One woman, Taby, was caught in thought listening to music playing from her phone when I asked her the price of a ring I liked. Being the inquisitive little bug I am, I not only found out the price of the ring (R20, about $2.75), but also inquired about the music she was listening to. She told me it was a song from her homeland, Kenya, and how she listens to it to remind her of home. She hasn’t seen her family in over four years because she doesn't have enough money to fly back. I plan on going back to talk her another day since she seemed very nice.

Downtown I also found a real “fair trade” kind of store. A couple from Germany runs the store filled with colorful woven tapestries and bags and rugs. Their employees are women from the local townships which they train and employ at the shop so that they can have a steady income. As you can imagine, the work they do is very time consuming and requires a lot of skill and focus - so nothing was cheap. It was enough for me just to look at their creations.

Later that night, it was time to go out and watch the productions the first-years have been rehearsing for the past few weeks since they arrived here. My friends and I got together to walk the streets of campus at dusk.  

This is part of my group from AIFS!

The first years have had to wake up early every day to learn their dance parts and lines for short skits. There must have been at least a dozen of these presentations, each lasting maybe 10 minutes. Each residence hall "res" - they don’t call them “dorms” here - had it’s own skit to put on. The skits featured popular music by Rihanna and Avicii – reasons why I’ve heard Calvin Harris’s beats coming through my windows at 7 am every day! I knew which group was from the residence I live in because I recognized the music! I didn’t understand everything going on in the skits since they were half in Afrikaans, but I got the gist and took some short videos. Each skit had a message around it, like “balance work and play” and “respect your neighbor” – cute cliché things first years should

abide by in order to succeed in school. 

Cute little booths that sold snacks & soft drinks to raise money for the res