KyleKGillis

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 mindset of everyone’s questions. America offers us everything we need, and we have access to many of the best colleges in the world within our borders. Yet with all due respect to the University of ... read more

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 double decker with nearly 180 degree reclining seats, air conditioned, a host serving drinks and a leg rest. You know you've been in Africa too long when you pass a herd of zebra on the ... read more

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 search away. Hopefully you’ll find the quiz interesting and light-hearted, and if you get all the answers right, there may or may not be a little extra something in your stocking come Christmas time. Good ... read more

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 explain African colonization using Legos, one of my favorite childhood toys and one of my parents’ least favorite. Any parent will tell you that Lego bricks on the floor are the household toy equivalent of ... read more

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 Witch’s crystal ball of the internet. Added with the cold, windy rain and new homework assignments, South Africa lost its excitement. Its boldness became long dragged out days and its wild side became my wet ... read more

“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 the second largest white population outside of South Africa. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, now a corrupt, power-rabid ruler, was once knighted by the Queen of England and even received an honorary degree from Michigan State University, both of which have ... read more

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 are adding on to the airport, they’ll need to work on the logistics for the 2010 World Cup, because there are going to be a lot of cranky travelers if the domestic airport doesn’t increase ... read more