Before leaving for South Africa, I was asked why it was necessary to go all the way to South Africa to study for a semester. Surely I couldn’t get a better education down there than I could get in America right? Even at tiny Albion College, a patrol boat college, I could get a better education for a semester than I could in South Africa. My dad joked that some of my classes would include Spear-Chucking 101, along with Lip Plate Inserting 101. My classes turned out to be a little more relevant than my dad suggested, but I understand the [View Full Entry]

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More than any other trip, I worried about travelling to Namibia the most. It was the first trip I’d planned purely on my own, and I was going with no other American study abroad students. I tried comforting myself by saying that this is how true backpackers travel, but my worries still lingered. But in the end I had nothing to worry about. I started early Sunday morning by taking a 24 hour coach bus ride from Cape Town to Windhoek (pronounced “Vind-hook”), with a coach company called Intercape, and it turned out to be the Bellagio of coach buses; a [View Full Entry]

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The countdown until I return home is now under a month, and I can’t believe how fast the semester has gone. I’m looking forward to the cool, fall weather in the U.S. South Africa is heading into the summer months and while many of you might be jealous to know that I’ve been wearing shorts and t-shirts for the past week, I’ve always preferred the cool fall weather over the heat. To borrow a phrase from Greg Easterbrook, an ESPN.com columnist, the “Christmas Creep Up” has hit South Africa too. I’m sure that stores in the U.S already have their Christ [View Full Entry]

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As we reach the end of October, I have one month left here in South Africa and one more week of exam prep before my finals. The American media wants me to believe that everyone back home is depressed by the economy, and that people are pillaging and chanting “Attica! Attica!” in the streets, so I’ll believe them. In an effort to take your minds off the struggling economy, I created my own final exam below based on South Africa. Nearly all of the answers can be found in my previous blog posts, and if they aren’t, they’re a mere Google [View Full Entry]

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“TIA: This Is Africa.” -Danny Archer, Blood Diamond Early Thursday morning I boarded a Greyhound bus and made the day-long trek across the country to Durban on South Africa’s east coast. The little red lines of the Indiana Jones map dotted as we stopped at many small towns and large cities along the coast. We stopped in Port Elizabeth, where they are building another stadium for the 2010 World Cup, and the city of George, where they played the 2003 President’s Cup that resulted in a tie after Ernie Els and Tiger Woods couldn’t finish the playoff due to darkne [View Full Entry]

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Not only does South Africa sit on the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, it also sits on the confluence of the first and third worlds. Cape Town and its neighboring suburbs are identical to American suburbs, without Wal Mart or Costco. When you’re living in Cape Town, it’s very easy to forget that just a few miles outside the city are township slums where poor blacks and coloureds are still dealing with the fallout from Apartheid. Although Apartheid turned the class gap into a canyon, it was African colonization that originally dug the hole. I find it easiest to [View Full Entry]

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When I returned from my overland trip to stormy Cape Town and my UCT classes, I hit the bottom of the U. I may have slipped near the bottom earlier in the semester, but when I returned we lost our internet for an entire week, and my antidote for homesickness went with it. The internet was the oil to my Tin Man, the cryogenic ice suits to my Mr. Freeze. It kept me smiling reading e-mails from family and friends back home, and enabled me to see what my friends were up to back in the States via Facebook, the Wicked [View Full Entry]

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“The political, social, economic, and security situations in Zimbabwe are volatile and could deteriorate quickly without warning." -U.S Department of State website "Where you're going is the only place in the world where the geese chase you." -Ian Malcom, The Lost World: Jurassic Park Finally I reached the third and last crusade of my Indiana Jones-saga spring break adventure. The day after rafting, we woke up early and crossed into Zimbabwe from Zambia and entered that infamous country, the same country that once upon a time had one of the strongest economies in Africa, and had [View Full Entry]

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Author Patricia Shultz in her best-selling travel book “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” remarks that the Zambezi River is one of the best rivers in the world for white water rafting, partially because it is one of only a few rivers where you can go down class V rapids, the most dangerous rapids. I read the Zambezi entry in Shultz’s book, and I can honestly say from experience that it would have been only fair of her to write: “Author’s note: The traveler might want to make this place #1,000 due to the high chance of death that could [View Full Entry]

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Even though I’d already had a spring break at Albion, when my family and I visited my cousins in Washington D.C and North Carolina, my spring break in South Africa started with a 6 am flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The name ‘Johannesburg’ has a negative connotation in many Americans’ minds due to the xenophobic attacks that took place in the city in the spring before I’d left, but the airport was clean and modern, as if it was the airport in a major U.S city. The domestic airport in Cape Town is tight and crowded, and even though they [View Full Entry]

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