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University started about two weeks after my arrival in Stellenbosch. Besides the beautiful campus, lined with palm trees and filled up with students sitting on the green areas and stairways with quite an impressive view on Simonsberg, we have the biggest underground library of the WHOLE southern hemisphere! Since the welcome week I keep wondering how many libraries there are in the southern hemisphere and as well how many of those might be underground .. I highly doubt that Stellenbosch has lots of competition! However a nice fact to deck yourself with ;) The Neelsies is another hotspot for all the students on campus. It hosts a variety of shops and eating places - most excited I am still waiting for the opening of the NEW and ONLY frozen yoghurt bar in Stellenbosch! My Israeli friends and Lena, you know how much I loved it when in Israel :) Besides that I love the wrap, smoothy and juice shop and finally I happy to announce: I found even two proper replacements for my Tilburg addiction (Yay for the good old pasta salad shakers and our nice lunch times in the mensa!)! The winner is the best chicken salad I even tasted at the corner shop of Academia, our residence area!
The crunchy chicken (oh yes I love it) is followed by the Pasta Pesto in Neelsies for only 19 Rand (1,90 Euro) with lots of feta cheese (speaking about one of the greatest creations of menkind, feta, I sense I really need to tell you more about the food here soon) and other good things in it also I really enjoy the chai tea cappuccino, which is perfect to go for the three hour long classes ... oddly, most of our classes provisionally are also thaught within the shopping mall-ish Neelsies! This is because a fire burned the old social and political science faculty nearly to the ground last year... it must have been a huge thing for Stellenbosch and it was Grant, our Accomodation coordinator, who became the hero of the day by saving two women from inside the building - which just for the record was already inflamed at that point. If you put "Stellenbosch University fire" into youtube, you can see what happend (.... speaking about which, Sylvia came into my room just now, asking me whether I noticed this burned smell. Bestranged I got up and we discovered that it was not our chinese neighbour taking a smoke at his window like usual but my tomato soup which I put on our stove about an hour ago! TIA!) Anyways, the inconvenience of having a whole building burned downthe university has to accomodate everyone into a cinema, the Sasol Art Museeum, a sort of garage close to the Museum, a restaurant in Neelsies and random other buildings. My favorite is having class in the cinema, of course simply for the comfortable seats and my least favorite was the restaurant as it was air-conditioned down to a minimum of maximum of germs spinned through the room again and again and a definite non-existance of fresh air! However it always is another opportunity to wear your winter cloth and now after a while my body adjusted, so it feels like I am on hibernation during these three hours each week. Generally I can really only say that the classes I take are very discussion-based and the whole political perspective really adds up to my interest in conflict studies. I have the feeling that political science might be the angle I was looking for to view social science topics from as opposed to the general and quantitative social science methodology and I began to strive more and more passionedly to deepen my knowledge in this field! All of the courses I am taking are focused on transitional justice, negotiation processes, the apartheid and contemporary Africa, Africa's international relations be it colonial, intra-African or to the international community, the nature of conflict and reconciliation and particularly, everything seems to boil down to the overarching question of where Africa is standing right from a philosophical, political, developmental and social view - now after the "official end" of Apartheid in this era of the New South Africa, the rainbow nation!
Before classes started we could get to know all the international students, the new maties (and nope that is not derived from mate but how I learned from my South African neigbours, because of the red-colored shirts of the Stellenbosch University's rugby team all SUN, also a nice appreviation I like, students are called Maties). After a couple of wines, braais, informative sessions and city strolls during this activity week, you at least saw or talked to everyone for a bit and got some plans going for the following days and exchanged exciting travel plan ideas. Considering the large amount of Germans, Dutch and American people even nationalities such as Italian, French or Austrian was mere outliers, in any case there are many many interesting lifestories, different interests and reasons to come to South Africa! In the Orientation week we also were introduced to all the facilities and toured around Stellenbosch, the V&A Waterfront and even up to Signal Hill in Cape Town, beautiful Camps Bay and experienced our first South African braai. I have attended quite some introduction activities so far but - heads off - Stellenbosch topped these by far! In the mornings we were received in a beautiful building where fresh fruit juice - pomegranate, passionfruit, orange, mango - was waiting and the organization was really well done, it certainly made us rethink all the stereotypes of African time! The most applauded was however the trip around the Cape penisula on which they took the whole group of about roughly 130 Internationals. Here you can see catch a look on beautiful Camps Bay, also sadly it was a warm but rather couldy day:
On a real sunny day however we took a Road Trip with Amy and Joup who visited us from Holland on their honeymoon trip through South Africa:
Hermanus is a lovely fisher village which is a famous whale-watching place in the Western Cape! All of the sudden you hear this noise which reminded me of a trompet player at an early stage of his practise .. and it turned out to be more exciting than that: The whale crier! With a sign around his neck which was as big as his upper body he walks the streets and rocks of Hermanus each single day, spots whales without glasses or binoculars and announces his discoveries by the help of the horn. What an interesting job! In a conversation he told me that he spots whales every single day .. although he blew his horn, we could not find any whale even with Joups field glasses, only a seal crossed our way! The whale crier comforted us that this day the waves were just too rough and that anyhow whales do not fully breach out of the water that often - so he must either have an insanely good vision that he did spot one or be a damn good actor ... in any case he is a character!
The rest of the day we spend exploring the rocks, doing some photography, enjoying the Atlantic ocean and inhaling the breezy air and smell you only find when standing on cliff next to the sea ... it makes me think of "Seaside" by the Kooks.Also it was in Hermanus that we had our first close WILDLIFE experience - the nassies! The biver-like animals are approximately as big as a well-fed cat but their faces are nothing like a cut fluffy pet ... their faces have a bit of an evil look and I was not sure at first sight whether they would like me climbing their territory too much. After a while, I got over their evil looks and they accepted us in their sphere and got curious in our cameras. You could notice that there where lots and lots of them crawling out of their niches or we would just randomly run into one on the boulders.
Looks like the end of the world, doesn't it? You gotta love Hermanus!So much is happening here that I am sure I will write some more this month and finally get you up to date on my life here .. so wait for it, there are many stories to follow :)
Besides telling you about hiking in Stellenbosch, my near-life encounter with THE legendary fish close to a place called danger point and some other travel experiences of my first two month in South Africa, I hope I can find the time soon to tell you about the work I started doing in a township called Klapmuts.
For this reason, I will just leave you with this interesting article by a local Matie for some thought on a different and less fortunate experience of South Africa!
http://stelliesjol.com/another-day-in-paradise-with-moksie/
I hope you will stay tuned for my stories and I cannot wait to share some more of the diverse experiences here, which already leave a lasting impression on me!
GOOD NIGHT FROM ACADEMIA, MATIELAND!
