Sunday, June 28, 2009

Saturday, we woke up late after a long night and went on a late tour of Robben Island. Visiting Robben Island is something everyone must do when they come to Cape Town. It highlights the political activists of the apartheid era. The Robben prison has been often been compared to Alcatraz in San Francisco. Today people still live on Robben Island which mostly includes the tour guides and their families. Children in elementary and middle school have school on the island. We took a 45 minute boat out to the island and then had a 2 hours tour with a guide that was actually a prisoner in the jail during the apartheid era. His name was Michael Ntando Mbatha. The political activists were regarded as more dangerous than murderers and rapists. I thought the tour was an amazing experience but I was a little disappointed in my guide. His presentation was very impersonal and sounded too rehearsed. He used words like “in conclusion” and “thus” that were just a little awkward for the type of speech I expected. He talked little about himself so I really could not tell you about what he was actually in prison for… Most of the information he gave highlighted Mandela. This was frustrating because many people already know something about Mandela before going on this tour and therefore, I was more interested in learning about the other people that were in the prison. After the tour we had lunch on the pier and happened to see fight at the restaurant at the bar next to us. They were fighting over a soccer game....silly... Anyways while we were waiting for the cab to come pick us up I thought I was going to have to use my mase. This man was begging for money but we said no and I gave him some food instead. But then he got mad and jumped at us and swung his arms in our faces. He was speaking another language so we could not understand what he was saying. We all got up real fast and ran off...

We later had dinner with Jessica and her friend Ntombi. Jessica cooked for us at her house. Ntombi works with Jessica. I met her at church my first weekend there. She lives in Gugulathu. Ntombi also invited us to an R Kelly concert before the night was over but we will see if we can get tickets for this week. We stayed there for a couple hours and then went home and watched a movie. Sarah, Liese, and I were all tired but we stayed up all night talking after the movie, knowing the next morning we had to wake up at the crack of dawn for a wine tour.

Sunday, We got up at 8am to leave for a 10+ hour wine tour in the surrounding suburbs of Cape Town. The Boogie Bus took us around to the wineries. The Bus is a taxi/cab service that was referred to us by my advisor at school. Our driver’s name is Steve; he is a character….He gives us really cheap fares and does not try to rob us like most of the cab drivers here. I cannot tell you how many times I was cheated out of money before I met him. Luckily most things are cheap here so cheating me out of money means like I paying $12 opposed to $8 for cab fare. Steve took my roommates and I and a group of Notre Dame students to 5 farms in three different small towns. We also went to a cheetah farm. I got to pet an adult cheetah. Cheetahs are endangered because of poaching but mostly due to the evolution of its habitat. There is only 850 cheetahs left on the continent of Africa. Cheetahs also only live for about 8 years. Later we continued to go from farm to farm wine tasting. To test about 5-8 different kinds of wine; it costs around $2-4. I found that wine is very much an acquired taste. Most of the wine tasted like finger nail polish remover to me… I learned today that I only like the sweet wines which were mostly desert wines. I also prefer white wine. We finally got home around 8pm. We were all tired and some of fell asleep on the Boogie bus. Sarah's head was on Emily and it was kind of funny because we had just met her and the other Notre Dame students that morning and we had grown so comfortable over the course of the trip. We got home we talked to Janine about our day and then went to bed...