My first South African Day

So i will be concise and German in order not to bore you guys to death 🙂

Total amount of transport – 25 hours

– Left Maastricht on Saturday at 13.30 pm to Achen with ma baby 🙂 (who i already miss) – TRAIN

– Aachen – Koln (switch) – Frankfurt Airport – TRAIN

– Plane left with 1 h delay – 11 hours on the PLANE from Frankfurt to Johannesburg

– Johannesburg – i barely had 10 min to talk to my buddy MZ and missed the connection to Cape Town…ran my ass off and caught another one

– Johannesburg – Cape Town – 2 hours flight, got picked up at the airport by a guy from the uny, who drove me to my hosts

– met my hosts, who were having a family barbeque at the time 🙂 ‘braai’ as they say in Afrikaans

Monday

– I left the house at 10 am and got back almost at 20 pm

– did the registration at the uny, opened bank account, paid 500 euro registration fee, paid 240 euro rent, paid 50 euro for mobile internet and modem and had my first lecture

– feeling of the place: a mix of Medditerranean Europe, with Florida and Africa and some Asia…the people are blond (Afrikaners, who speek an old Dutch mix, called Afrikaans), brown (decendants of whites, Indonesian!!! slaves and slaves from Madagascar!!!, they speak Afrikaans as well) and blacks (they speak Xhosa, mostly from Transkei) and all of them speak English

– the weather is: crystal clear sky, beautiful landscape and mountains (which i have to climb), mediterranean vegetation, vinyards and 30 degree heat

– people are friendly, the small town is full of life, roads are way better than in Romania, it is slightly chaotic…a mix of organised and unorganised….whites are the richest, blacks still the poorest and the brown somewhere in between

– I can already say…’Ek praat Afrikaans’, ‘Hoe gaan dit’, ‘Ek kan’n beitjie Afrikaans praaten’

– prices of groceries, cosmetics etc. are pretty much the same as in Holland…so not really cheap…fruits and bread taste way better and are cheaper as it is summer here.

– internet is a huge issue…my mobile one is expensive and cannot use it a lot…hope that the one at the Uny will be better

– till now it feels more like Europe than Africa 🙂

Till then, take care Y’all

– oh and they don’t have presidents on their money but animals 😀 (same thing)

Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa, 31st of January 2011