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Published: August 20th 2009
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Wine by the barrel
Red wine maturing in barrels. Finally, another blog. Turns out motivation for these things is not as high as I thought it’d be. Here are a few updates from life in the Bosch.
Fun stuff: The carnivore inside me roared the other weekend when we returned to one of my favorite places: Mzoli’s Meat. It’s an outdoor restaurant where literally all they sell is meat. You go inside to the butcher attached, select your meat, they season it for you, you pay, take it to the braai masters (who are very, very good at their job), and pick it up grilled and perfect and amazing. It’s actually in a township outside Cape Town called Gugulethu, but it’s probably the most integrated place I’ve seen here. Thus, I have concluded that meat, the rightly named “national food of South Africa,” brings people together.
We continued on that day to see the #1-ranked rugby team, the South Africa Springboks (lovingly referred to as “Bokkies”) play Australia in Cape Town. Most of us bought jerseys for the occasion. Though I had to watch most of the game with my eyes AND ears (crowd cheers=I cheer) due to not knowing much at all about rugby, it was
Wine NOT by the barrel
The white wine is stored here. White wine doesn't have tannin (the sort of feeling you get on your teeth when you drink red), which is also given by the wood. a great experience to be at the game, which is such a big part of the culture here. Oh, we were also TV-interviewed by a big cellular company here, Vodacom. It went something like this:
Vodacom: Who’s your favorite Springbok player?
Us: Uh, all of them!!
Vodacom: Which one is the sexiest?
Us: Uh, all of them!!
Vodacom: How do you cheer for the Springboks?
Us: Wooooo Springboks! We love them!
Fortunately, I think high-intensity fanatics is what they were looking for as opposed to an intellectual analysis of the team, and I’m pretty confident that we gave that to them.
I also saw a guy open some sparkling wine with a sword. For my one-credit “Introduction to the South African Wine Industry” course (yes, I am now a wine connoisseur), we got to go on an all-expense paid wine tour to three vineyards (they’re not that expensive anyways, but it was still nice). We got a cellar tour, which great to see after learning about the process of making wine in the class. The first winery we went to was the founder of South Africa’s version of Champagne (you can only technically call wine made from grapes from
Cap Classique
The "Champagne" ages in the bottle. This process helps remove the extra yeast from floating in the wine. These are hand-turned twice a day, every day for 8 weeks. You can do it by machine in 5 days, but I guess if you have space to do 8,000 more bottles by hand, why not? the Champagne region of France “Champagne”; the rest is “sparkling wine”). They call it Cap Classique. Anyways, our guide just tapped on the tip of the bottle with a sword, and the top shot off due to the pressure inside, leaving a clean edge around the top to pour from. Moral of the story: my new sparkling wine opener… a sword.
Volunteering: Volunteering with the International Student Org. ended up working out, due to my Thursday professor deciding that class will only go until 1:30 instead of 2:00. Works for me! Going to Kayamandi to volunteer is definitely an experience. Firstly, there are about 25 international students that go at the same time as me. That means that on the bus on the way there I will most likely hear people speaking in German, Dutch, and of course English. Then, we get to the school, where all the students speak Xhosa. It’s really amazing to listen to Xhosa actually; it’s a language with clicks built in. Sometimes it’s more subtle within a word, and sometimes it’s a loud pop of the tongue that commands attention. I work with an after school program for seventh graders. They’re really just
A wine opener, sort of
He opens his Cap Classique with a sword, don't you? normal kids; playing card games, flirting with a special someone, drawing attention as the class clown, or interacting and laughing with friends.
The hard part is that even though most of their schooling is in English, there is still an obvious language barrier. It definitely makes the realities of their education apparent. It’s a struggle (though definitely possible) to speak conversational English with them, yet they are doing homework where they have write definitions of phases of matter and other scientific terms. I didn’t feel like the boy I was helping understood what he was writing, literally; instead, he was just copying from the notes. Hopefully it gets easier to help them actually understand their homework. We also did skits this week, which was a little chaotic but ended up being fun. My favorite was a skit about cleaning up garbage, which starred a little diva who said we all need to clean up our enVIIIronment (while making a large Z motion with her hand and snapping for added attitude).
My favorite part of the day is when we get to play four-square outside. I was quite the four-square fiend in my middle school years, and I feel
Connoisseurs
Edward, Andy, and I at winery #2. like the talent is coming back with every game I play. It’s also a great icebreaker and some non-verbal interaction with the kids, which is much easier. But watch out, Ikaya Primary School seventh graders, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Classes: Truth Commissions is still my favorite. The highlight of the last two weeks was that ex-combatants from the liberation struggle came to speak. The first speaker was really interesting because it was a white woman who was a commander for the ANC (African National Congress, Mandela’s party). I think the overwhelming majority of the ANC liberation fighters were black men, so it was really interesting to hear her point of view. She talked about being put in jail in isolation and having her baby taken away from her. They would tape the baby crying and then use it to try to break her, to get her to talk. She did one of the victim’s hearings that was a part of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Then the next week we heard from two other ANC ex-combatants and one from the PAC (Pan-African Congress, another mainly black party fighting for liberation). One of the guys’ noses
A touch of home!
Winery #3 had a lake with a few turkeys! I got pretty excited. looked almost like the lightning-shaped scar on Harry Potter’s forehead; the squishy part at the bottom was in the right place, but the bones connected to it took a horrible detour to the right before getting there. It was obviously broken badly and not set properly to heal; it made me think that he was probably tortured in jail, too. It’s crazy to think of the complexity of the situation. Ex-combatants were definitely victims, too, and they needed to have more programs to help deal with their experiences and be able to re-integrate into society better. It’s still surreal to think of what they’ve been through and that I got to sit and listen to their stories.
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