Durban

The weekend in Durban went great. Although I am exhausted because there was hardly any downtime. I got back this morning at 9:30 from the airport. I called Rory to leave a message in the middle of the night (it would have been around 2:30), he answered and was wide awake because he was driving down to Sauk to catch a truck to North Dakota again. They’ve moved on from Rolla a little bit and are now working in Foreman. The timing of my phone call was impeccable and we finally got to catch up because all my roommates were sleeping and he was in the car! Anyway, here’s the play by play of my weekend. To put the weekend into one statement is: I feel a lot more cultured.

Thursday, we arrived in Durban. This is one of the largest cities in the country with the biggest port in Africa (6th in the world I think). It is a very beautiful and urbanized city. But it of course also has the townships outside of the main city. We stayed at a hostel here, called Surf ‘n Dreams. Although it was nowhere near the beach. It wasn’t the best of accommodations. It was in a house, so the owners lived there too. And they just seemed to despise having us there! Just not the type of people to own a hostel. Anyway Thursday we went to the Temple of Understanding. Which is a Hindu temple that was built in part to recognize apartheid. A man there discussed the temple and described Hinduism for us. The temple was very beautiful. After the tour, a group of dancers came to perform for us outside the temple. They mixed African Zulu tribe traditions, Hindu and Indian traditional dance forms. The result was very beautiful and interesting to watch. They had performed at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration and also at this private performance for us, so we felt very special. For dinner we went out to an Indian restaurant. We were the only people in the restaurant and they had a buffet for us. Unfortunately all the food was too spicy for me, so I mainly ate rice and tortilla like bread. Which was still very good.

Friday morning we went on a walking tour of the “oriental” part of Durban. The tour was kind of funny in the fact that we really only saw the mall and then every market possible. It was a lot of walking. One cool thing we saw was a traditional healing market (the largest in Africa). I think it was a mix of Indian and Zulu healers. (A sidenote, in this part of South Africa Zulus are the main group of people. In Port Elizabeth, Xhosa is the main group. Durban also has the largest Indian population in the country.) The healing items they sold were tree barks, tree leaves, roots, animal body parts, and animal blood. It was very weird, but interesting. Of course it had a smell to it. I could have bought some love potion! During our freetime this day, we went shopping in the mall and in one of the nicer markets. I bought a dress to where for one of the August weddings! Friday night we went out to eat and to a jazz concert. It was fun to listen to the music, but our food and drinks took hours. Some people never got their food. It was quite a hassle. I can honestly say that I have not had one server here who would make it under the strict governance of Companeros management! This was also my roommate Alison’s 21st birthday so we celebrated that in style at the jazz concert.

Saturday morning we went to the KwaMuhle Museum. It was about how the apartheid system worked in Durban, mainly how it affected the Indians. This was very interesting and applied to a few of my classes. I love it when something I learn in class helps me understand something I see in a culture here, or vice versa.

We had freetime again today. And you’ll never guess what I did!!!! Saturday morning, a group of people organized a trip to go sky diving. I never really thought about it, but counted myself in. So 11 of us piled in a taxi to drive about an hour to Pietermaritzberg to go sky diving! Since I didn’t plan it in advance, I didn’t get too nervous. I just didn’t think about it. I watched several people go ahead of me (11 of us went). When it was my turn I started to get a little nervous, but still not too bad. I put on a jumpsuit and a harness and walked out to the plane. It was tandem sky diving, so I was going down hooked up to Martin. My friend Joe and his tandem were going at the same time as me. The plane was tiny, only a four seater. But it had no seats. It also had no door. Luckily, I sat in the back and the three boys crammed in in the front. Climbing up to 10,000 feet we had beautiful views. I took lots of pictures. It was a cloudy day, so the clouds looked a little like snow. There was a bumper sticker in the plane that said “When people look like ants, pull. When the ants look like people, pray.” I memorized this advice. All of a sudden, we were at the right altitude. And I really mean all of a sudden, the whole prep and jump happened so fast there was no time for me to think about it! I was hooked to Martin at four points. He had two parachutes on his back. There was also a computer to set off the parachute in case he had a heart attack or something. Just like that, Joe was out the window, I didn’t even get to say good luck or good bye. Then just like that, one foot after another my legs were out the window. I tucked in my elbows and 1, 2, Martin pushed us out! We started off in freefall, which lasted about 35 seconds. But I barely even remember it. Martin said it would feel like 5 seconds to me since it was my first time. I put my legs toward my butt and arched my back and we started to do flips. After about two flips I think, Martin hit my hip 3 times. This was to signal me to pull the cord for the parachute to go off. I was not paying attention and so confused though that I didn’t pull it. Thinking of my safety first I’m sure, Martin pulled the parachute for us both. It went up and it was yellow!! The parachuting down was my favorite part because it felt like you were flying like a bird. You could control your movement with handles on the parachute. You could make it standstill, where you literally don’t move. You could make it go straight down really fast. Or you could spin it downward, which was my favorite. I was taking pictures and just not coordinated enough to steer the parachute, so Martin did that. This part lasted about 6 minutes in the air. The view was beautiful. I could always see the landing strip and Joe’s parachute below me. When I got closer, I saw and heard all my friends waiting at the small airport for us. The landing was a little rough. We hit on our feet first then slid on our butts. Which is what we are supposed to do, I just hurt my ankles initially a little bit. As soon as we had all gone, we hopped in the taxis and rushed back to Durban because we were going to be late for the ballet!

The ballet was the infamous Russian Ballet. We were only 15 minutes late, although we didn't look the best. I surprisingly enjoyed the ballet, the dancers were amazing. Afterward we went out to eat for Mexican food. The restaurant was called Taco Zulu and was good. Pretty close to normal Mexican food, although no comps. And the service was extremely slow again, we didn't get home till 12:00am.

Sunday I got to go out on the shark boats, which wasn't as cool as I made it sound. I guess the shark boats don't take on passengers on the weekend or something, so we were in a different boat watching the shark boat. There is a problem with sharks in Durban, so they have nets enclosing the beach. There actually are many separate nets that overlap, so boats can get through, as well as dolphins and fish. But the sharks come in from out of sea, so they don't know the nets as part of the habitat and can't figure out how to get through them. 1-2 sharks a month get stuck in the nets. That's what we were looking for. We didn't see any, but it still was really fun. Just being out on a boat was fun. There were huge waves and some people got sea sick. But I took dramamine beforehand just in case. After this the group split up, I went on a nature hike in New Germany, a little outside of Durban. It was a fairly easy hike and enjoyable to be outside. Durban is (in my opinion) the hottest city in SA. It was really hot this weekend, so the hike was hard in that respect. We saw lakes, pretty views from hills, impala, and blue duiker (like a really, really small deer kind of). They also had snakes in cages. I got to hold a python (like a boa constrictor). We also saw this python constrict and eat a mouse. Kind of gross, but cool. Then we went out to eat at the Mexican restaurant again. It's pretty rare to see that here, so we wanted to take advantage of it. Sunday night we went to a comedy show. The man was very talented and funny. We didn't get all the jokes because we don't know everything about SA yet.

Oh and I think this was Saturday night, that the first crime happened in our group. Sometime in the middle of the night, someone got into the hostel (it is all fenced in with electric fence) and stole money, cameras and cell phones from the boys. The 10 boys were in a room that was the extension from the garage. The shady hostel managers never gave them a key for their room. It happened while they were sleeping. It may be a blessing that they didn't wake up because then there could have been violence. 4 of the boys didn't have anything stolen because they were in the back of the room. The 20 of us girls were in the main house and although we didn't have keys for our individual rooms, we did have a key for the house. It was very sad.

Then Monday we flew home. As always, I'll have to post pictures later. The internet doesn't work at our flat at the moment, so I'm at an internet cafe. Tomorrow we have volunteering and school so I'll be able to go on again there.

Thank you for all your thoughts about Pendla school here. Mom, I will try and think of something that you can do. We do have a large account of money that we raised before we left that we'll do something with for the kids. Half of that has to go to the AIDS Haven, which has their own needs too. We'll see how tomorrow goes!