Better late than never....

At the beach

I’ve been studying abroad in South Africa for a little over 6 weeks at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth. I’ve been having the most incredible time and falling in love with the country. For the past few weeks I've gone on several game drives and weekend trips around the coast. The beauty of the country is overwhelming and I can't get enough of it.

When I first arrived to PE I had lots of expectations and visions of what South Africa would be like, but there were several parts of the experience that has surprised me.

Things that surprised me about South Africa:

• Load Shedding*
• Driving on the left side of the road
• Monkeys running around freely on campus
• Being less than 1 mile from the ocean
• The metric system
• How cold Africa can get
• Wind and rain
• African Penguins
• Taxi drivers yelling "TOWN" out the window as they drive by you, every single time
• No heating in houses and having to turn the hot water on before showering at least 2 hours in advance
• Brick fences and barbed wire/electric fences around all house. The compound where I live has a huge fence around it, with both barbed wire and an electric fence over the top. To get inside there is a biometric system where you have to have your fingerprint scanned to enter into the "cage". The cage is a set of two metal doors where you have to go inside the first one, wait for it to close and then the second door will unlock. The whole process takes far too long and is a pain, but I guess it helps keep the compound more secure. 



Annie's Cove- the compound I live in

• Horrible wifi- I mean horrible, I'm unable to skype and posting photos can take up to thirty minutes for around 5 photos (just posting this blog has been difficult with wifi going in and out)

Load shedding is the strangest concept to me. It exists because SA does not have enough energy to sustain their use, so for about 2 hours during the day the power will go out in the city. It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen a few times a week. This means all power, the stop lights (called robots), power in houses, everywhere that doesn’t have a backup generator is black. Sometimes load shedding happens in the middle of the night, other times in the middle of the day and the worst is around 7pm when it’s totally dark out but not time to go to bed.

African Penguins

There were numerous other things that surprised me about the country, but mostly I was surprised with how safe and similar SA is to the US. Even though SA is a third world country, the city in which I live is like a first world country. They have malls, grocery stores, bars and restaurants just like you would find anywhere in the US. They have all the same types of foods and restaurants, so I haven’t tried any exotic food. The only “African” food I have eaten was an Ethiopian restaurant which was delicious!

Overall I have loved my time in South Africa and I can’t believe how quickly it is going. I still have over 3 months in this amazing country and then traveling Europe after I leave South Africa.