Fearless

Long time no BLAg for me! I've been itching to tell you all about my life for some time now, but each day I keep saying to myself, "oh but tomorrow is going to be so cool, I'll write it after I do THAT!" Ha, well, as you can tell I just had to slap my self into the reality that pretty much every day here is worth blogging about and thus, I need to stop somewhere occasionally to sit down and praise it here! Lets see... where did I leave off? Oh yea, SCHOOL! This was my first full week of classes and let me just preface this with saying that it was just a little tincy wincy bit stressful. It never really occurred to me how spoiled we all are at Richmond... classes with minus 20 students instead of 250, direct access to our professors, great dining hall, no bus route, and no one on campus complaining about having American's in their classes! Ha, I mean maybe not always complaining, but I've over heard a good majority of students laughing at the amount of talkative, hand raising American's in their classes. It doesn't surprise me at all, I mean I'm pretty sure we are all hotwired to be over opinionated and obnoxious, but I myself have refrained from speaking too much in class.

The main objective in a classroom here tends to be to listen, shut up, take notes, and re-write in your work what the professor tells you to. The creative writing factor is slightly reduced in comparison to what we are encouraged to do in the States. This will be a slight challenge for me given that I am about at tooty fruity as they get and have to reel myself back in regularly at Richmond when I complete assignments. It has been a truly interesting experience however to sit in a class full of people where I, for the first time in my life, am the foreigner (that is excluding a republican roundtable if I ever attended one... I think I'd just catch on fire). Most of my classes are any where from 3-4 times a week and all of them have required tutorials (TUTS) that must be attended, however you can skip the occasional lecture if you've kept up with your work. I only have one class, Afrikaans, in which attendance is taken. This is another enormous difference given that at Richmond, not only do we have rosters, but we have rosters with our pictures on them just to ensure that the professor knows when we are present. Should I therefore see the UCT system as a more favorable situation? Ha, perhaps I shouldn't get too used to it. Among the things that I love about being at UCT are the Course Readers, the raw and diverse population, and the view! Course Readers are given out for each class and are a compilation of every single article that you will read for the semester, thus you won't be wasting print credits on every daily reading! In terms of the population feel, it doesn't seem to posses the same type of security "polish" that a school like Richmond has. For example, this last week there was a Slam Poetry stage that took place during our lunch break, featuring talented rappers and poets speaking out on everything from women’s rights, to black rights, to how much weed someone liked to smoke. Like I said, raw, unprecedented, and wonderful.

However, my biggest pet peeve about the campus is that it is NOT COMPUTERIZED in its entirety. Thus, when one (aka me) needs to switch a course, you have to go get a course approval form from the faculty (college) in one building, walk five minutes over to another just to wait in a really long line to have an old man with coffee stains on his striped shirt and a strong stench of cigarettes ask you why you want to take "The Political Theory of BLA BLA BLA." Well, my answer for all of this was so that I could have Friday off, but I doubted that that answer would have achieved me the approval necessary to switch. Luckily, I worked it out FINALLY that I did indeed have free Fridays to travel around South Africa with: which I will be starting this weekend when I adventure down (or up) the Garden Route on the coast to do everything from bungee jumping at the highest commercial point to riding an ostrich. I mean, by now all of you should know that I'm not about comfortable normalcy... bring on the bizarre, insane, the adventure! Ha, it seems like each weekend I'm testing the bounds of my frail, human life a little more... but come on, it makes for a great Face Book album right ;) I think my wires were switched at some point an where apprehension should have gone, a lust for intrepid voyages took hold at my brain stem.

On Friday, my friends and I decided to re-kindle our love for Table Mountain (just kidding... we still love you after you tried to kill us last time) by taking the Cable Car to the top for a nice Saturday lunch. Luckily, there was NO wind at all and we had a fabulous time! Tons of food later and some spectacular views, we descended in the Cable Car and relaxed for the day, later taking it upon ourselves to attend our first Rugby Game. SO MUCH FUN! Regan and I decided to go against the grain, as per usual, and purchase our own tickets outside the travel company with a few other people to the WESTERN PROVINCE VS. THE PUMAS match at Newlands (the stadium). The game was so much fun to watch and our cheap tickets managed to score us some reasonable seats just behind the team benches. We really did have a great time! The next day, my entire house got up bright and early, excited for our Robben Island Trip! Well, it got cancelled due to weather, unfortunately. Stumped on what to do, the lot of us jumped into a near by mini bus to the Old Biscuit Mill Market. Basically, it's a farmer's market on steroids with some of the most delicious cuisine I've ever seen/ tasted! Its seems that everyone has fallen to the costly trend here of when in doubt, use your mouth! Regan and I split one of the most sinfully delicious cookies I have ever had... wooooowwwzaa that was some good stuff. That night, the lot of us decided to go and see INCEPTION... if any of you hobbits have yet to make to the theaters to see it, GO! It was so intense, so brilliant. I almost gave myself a bladder infection in the theater because I was too afraid to leave for the restroom and then miss something... again, I risked my life for this experience. It was that good. We all returned later for in the morning, at 4am, the crazier bunch of us would be making the two-hour drive to Gansbaai in order to cage dive with perhaps the most evolved Apex predator on the planet... the Great White (aka my teddy bear).

After a good two hour sleep, we boarded the van this morning and trekked onwards to Gansbaai. Our driver was a little ballsy, really zipping around the mountainous terrain that was lit only by star and moon-light... perhaps its a good thing we were all too delirious and sleep deprived to notice too much. Every now and again, I would look up from behind the backs of my eyelids and become lightly washed over with the bliss of the dark outlines of mountains and dunes in the distance below the blanket of enticing stars. It was still dark when we got to White Shark Projects, but luckily they had a delicious breakfast prepared for us before they gave us the "We aren't responsible if you die, YADDA YADDA YADDA...." form to sign. I'm starting to think that I may set a record for the amount of those signed by the end of this trip... don't I get a "Die Once Get One Free" coupon or something? At about 7:30am, we all boarded the boat and set off towards the peach flushed horizon of the rising sun, Dreyer Island and Shark Alley just visible off the shoreline.

We were all in sweet morning bliss when all of a sudden, the boat made and awful sound and jolt. All of us looking back to see what we had hit, we saw an angry wale, basically flipping us off with his tale, in not far off the back of the boat. Yes, my friends, us model greenpeacers HIT the damn whale. I mean, it was fine, not like we could see it or anything... but I felt pretty darn guilty, not to mention the poor driver who looked like he had just torn Woody's arm off in Toy Story. I'm pretty sure that those crazy people on "Whale Wars" would have megaphone their hatred for us, only to follow shortly with a firing of stink bombs. Luckily, as I said, the whale was fine, but one of our engines failed which resorted in half of the boat having to be escorted off in a dingy a few hours later at the end of the dive.

Our boat anchored itself just off Dreyer Island where tens of thousands of Cape Fur seals reside, hoping to avoid nasty Great White Encounters that we were aiming to find. Every now and again, you would see about a dozen sprinting seals making their way between landmasses on a strip of sea known as Shark Alley. They were literally swimming for their life. Once we where stationary, the boat crew began to chum the waters and all we could do was wait. Our skipper yelled for the first five volunteers to get suited up, ready for the first shark. Of course, I shot my hand up like Charley Brown on Thanksgiving. I looked around, and only one other person out the 16 had done the same. Figures. A little hesitantly, Regan joined in on the first cage dive with me, as did another three people. After suiting up in oversized, full body wetsuits, we jumped into the quiet water, filled with hundreds of small fish. The visibility was great, but it was so incredibly eerie. We had no snorkels, thus when someone up top spotted a shark, they would yell at us to dive and we would climb out way down to the bottom of the cage to get a glimpse of the shadow in the distance. Finally, someone screamed "DIVE! DIVE!" and there he was, my first Great White Shark, swimming confidently past the side of our cage. I never once felt fearful, but just a leap of excitement from my toes to my ears! For the next three hours, we watched at least 7 different enormous sharks pay us a visit. It was an unbelievable experience. Each group of 5 got about 20-30 minutes in the cage. What a spectacular experience.

At one point, a few of us had been chilling on the top of the boat when, as I was luckily peering down the side of the boat, a 12 foot Great White fully breached about 8 feet from the side of the boat! We were absolutely speechless. Imagine seeing a lion doing a back flip, that is how incredible it was. Sadly, our time had to come to an end and we all threw our fleeces back on and headed to shore, passing a small group of penguins playing in the open water on the way back. After today, I feel much better about having to miss Shark Week for the first time in my life this coming week. Today's experience was truly unforgettable and I am sure that I will find a way to re-visit my new friends at Dreyer Island sometime in the near future. And so, that leaves me just about where I am now... really behind on reading and continually procrastinating on it by writing this blog! Ha, but I can't wait for my next wave of adventure that I will be sharing with you all oh so soon after my Garden Route voyage! Make sure, however, to keep re-visiting the site for smaller posts that I plan to send out in the mean time about random things that yall might find interesting!

“May we be fearless... from friends and ...from known and unknown ... from night and day...May all the directions be our allies.” - Atharva Veda

Hopper :)