Week 3: little safari and weekend away

You better grab your reading glasses for this one, because if you read all the way through, I'll be impressed. Also, the internet is being awful right now, so my pictures aren't uploading fast enough for me to make it to bed at a decent hour, so you'll have to wait for pictures--sorry, friends. For now, enjoy and I'll add in the pictures later!

What a week it has been! I can’t believe all the things I’ve seen since I’ve updated you all. I’ve adventured a little more around the AE campus as well as Pietermaritzburg area and out to the coast!

I saw zebra last week! I went for a 6am run with some of the ladies of my chalet (called Mojalefa—Mojo for short) in the game reserve last week. We followed the same path that we normally do, but I went a little higher than I had before. We got to a little grassy area at the top, and saw 4 zebra! There were two big ones, a medium sized one and a baby. We just stood there for a while watching them in awe. When we finally tore ourselves away from the scene, we began to head back down the path. Within 2 or 3 minutes, we ran into 2 more. We shared the path with these ones, going opposite directions, so we were probably just 4-5 feet away from them.

But after last Thursday, those zebra are actually the less exciting part of this blog. My biology class took our second weekly field trip to the Tala Game Reserve. When the bus arrived and we saw the open-air (safari-style) jeeps that we’d be taking, nobody was left without a smile on their face.

We climbed up into our jeeps and took off down the dirt roads. It felt very much like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, but with real animals and more thrill. Our list of animals for the day got pretty big, including more zebra, ostriches, wildebeest, nyala, hippo, giraffe and white rhino! As we sat there looking at all of these animals and learned about the different natural tools that equip them to live in this area, I couldn’t help but sit there in wonder about how perfectly God created those creatures.

This weekend was an exciting one, too. I’m having quite a bit of difficulty accepting the polychromic nature of South Africans. I’m a pretty time-oriented person, and though I’m not always on time, it does stress me out a little bit to be late. The weekend was full of changed departure and arrival times, lots of (unnecessary?) stops in the buses on the side of the road and a lot of miscommunication. BUT, I had a few new experiences that made it worth it.

South Africa is the home of more Indians than any other place in the world outside of India. Our intercultural communication professor is of Indian descent, so he knows a lot of Indians in Pennington, which is not too far from Durban. We went to a camp there with little chalets to stay in and got to experience a little bit of life there. We ate some Indian food, invited a bunch of Indians from his friend’s church for dinner and games, went to Indian charismatic churches on Sunday.

There was a group of us who got up early for the sunrise on Saturday. We rolled out of bed and climbed in our bus and were in for a treat. It was getting light by the time we got to the beach (just a 5ish minute drive), and we all ran to the edge of the water to stick our feet in. There were crabs all over the shore and flashes of cameras everywhere. As the sun rose over the ocean (many of the group had never seen an ocean sunrise—only sunset!), I just stood there, snapping as many pictures as I could. My pictures can’t show the full beauty of it, but I hope you can get an idea of it from them!

We headed back to a different beach (with shark nets) for a couple hours that afternoon. As soon as we got there, our whole group was in the Indian Ocean, jumping and body surfing in the waves. I could not believe the temperature of the water! We heard it was 77 degrees. The waves varied in temperature, but I kid you not—many of them were WARMER than many baths that I’ve taken in my life! I talked with an older South African couple from Joburg out in the waves, and they laughed at my amazement and enthusiasm. As I got closer back to the shore, the water was too warm for comfort. I was out there in the waves for about an hour or an hour and a half, and wasn’t any less excited about the last wave than the first.

During the dinner/game time together with the youth group members that night, I spoke a lot with a girl named Leona. She’s 24, Indian, and has just finished her studies. It was so interesting to talk with her about her balance of traditional Indian culture and Christian life. We talked about different holidays and churches and compared each other’s. We talked about free time, freedom given by parents, slang and accents (one of the first things she said to us was, “cool accents!” I keep forgetting that we’re the ones with the accents here).

The church experience was very different than anything I’ve seen before. First, the building was 80-something degrees and we were moving around with the music quite a bit. We sang mostly in English, but they did a Zulu medley as well (one song of which we had learned, so we could sing!). The service was just over 2 hours, and we ate lunch with some of the leadership in the church afterwards. It was delicious curry, but it definitely heated us up even more than the service—and we ate in the same hot room!

We headed back to Maritzburg Sunday afternoon. I slept on the bus and woke up as we were bumping along Nonsuch Road..I could tell we were home even before I opened my eyes, just from the smell and sounds that I realized I’d taken for granted. I still am overwhelmed at the beauty by which I am surrounded at AE. I think I have more appreciation for it all now. Maybe except for the monkeys, who kept popping their heads in during biology today and stole a bunch of our mints from the classroom.

There’s a lot of homework to do this week, since we didn’t do any this weekend. I’m not looking forward to writing the papers due at the end of this week and early next, but I think I can handle it—after all, how many people write their papers on a lawn by waterfalls with zebras next year and monkeys to throw water bottles at when they get too close? Yes, for now, I’m happy. It’s my “for now” home and I’m going to soak it up while I can.