Archive for July 12th, 2008

South Africanese 101: Braai = BBQ

Today was move-in day!  We had to say goodbye to our hotel rooms and hello to our dorms, but it ended up being a definite upgrade!  (The hotel we were staying in used to be a prison… yeah.)  At first I was very disappointed with my dorm because it has no view, and the 3 other rooms do!!  (They are more like apartments – four separate bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen.)  So the other 3 roommates get this amazing view of Cape Town, and I get to view the doors to the other dorms.  (The building is like an O-shape, and I’m on the inside of the O, if that makes any sense.)  Plus I have the smallest room.  Somehow I think they knew I wasn’t paying for this trip and gave me the crappiest room!  But it’s ok because it’s a space of my own and it’s bigger than the singles at Georgetown so how can I complain?  Oh yeah, and I’m in South Africa, which is definitely nothing to complain about.

 

One of my roommates is in CIEE with me and she’s from South Carolina, and another one is a guy named Neo from Lisotho, a small country surrounded by South Africa, for those of you non-geography people.  He’s really nice and cool and he’s good friends with Tawanda so it’s nice having all those guys over.  After I settled in we took a group trip to the grocery store, and it was great to be walking around a regular South African neighborhood and seeing non-American faces!  I tried to disguise my accent in the store but it definitely didn’t work… oh well!  I’ll work on it I guess.  But you wanna know something interesting?  They don’t take showers here!  Only baths.  (Yes we are clean over here!  I just realized how that last sentence could have been misinterpreted lol!)  And I was grossed out at first but then I actually took a bath on the first day and I was like WOW, I could get used to this!  It was very relaxing!!!

 

After that, we had a brie, which is a barbeque.  It was so fun, because me and Lowena were dancing for a lot of it trying to get the crowd hype, and plus the food was SO good!  Moses is throwing a braai this Sunday, so that should be fun too.  Apparently they love BBQ’s here even more than we do in America, believe it or not!