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London
The Buckingham palaceHello everyone!! I hope this blog finds you all well.
I have now been in Cape-town South Africa for 4 days and I LOVE it 😊 My trip to get here was also probably one of the easiest I have ever experienced. I left Boston at 930 at night on Thursday and arrived in London at 8 in the morning on Friday. I had a twelve hour layover there so I had contacted another girl who was also going to be volunteering with me, who also had a 12 hour layover and we decided to meet up and go walk around London for the day.
I have wanted to come to London ever since I can remember, I have always said that England would be the place I chose to settle down when I got older and everyone used to say "Well you have never been there before, how could you possibly know you will even like it...blah blah blah". I can now say that I have been to England (only London but still) and I WILL LIVE THERE when I am older. It is the most amazing place I have ever been, so full of history and interesting
South Africa
The view from Megan and I's bedroom window people and its so beautiful. I had a window seat on the flight from Boston so I got to look out the window on the decent and before and I just knew by what I saw out the window that England is the place for me. Everything is so green and the little towns are so cute...plus there are castles, I mean come on who hasn't ever thought about living next to / near a castle?? So just letting you all know...I will be living in England, once I am down traveling the world and helping out all the people that need it. Glenna(the other volunteer) and I took a taxi into Central London and spent the day walking around. We got to see the changing of the guards, but it was kind of insane and we decided to get out of there quickly because there were just SO many tourists and walked through St. James's Park. We then walked up to Big Ben and all those other cool sites and got lunch at the Red Lion Pub. The day was shorter then I had hoped it would be but I was still so glad I actually got to see
London
The immense crowd of people watching the changing of the guard London.
My flight from London left at 7:25 but we ended up having to sit on the plane for almost an hour because someone had checked bags but never showed up for the flight so they had to find the bags and once they had removed them they rearranged our bags wrong so the weight was uneven and they had to go back and redo them. But it was fine, the plane wasn't hot and there weren't any crying babies that I could hear at least. I slept for most of the flight and when I woke up we were 40 minutes til the start of our decent. Unfortunately I was not next to a window for this flight and the guy next to me kept the divider between us up so I couldn't see anything so the next thing I knew we were making contact with the runway. I waited for Glenna at the gate, she was on the same flight just further back and then we went through security. You don't need Customs cards to get through customs here in South Africa, but unfortunately you do need your departure information to make sure you aren't going to
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Saint James's Park...it is so pretty :) be there for longer then 90 days, and of course I didn't know this so I didn't have mine but they let me through after I made up a bunch of lies about how I was coming there to visit family friends who were born and raised in Cape-town yadayadayada. After customs and everything we met up with 2 other girls who were on our flight, Aimeé who is from England and Bianca from L.A. We then met up with the driver who loaded all of our bags into the van (it was only us 4 that were arriving at that time, we were the earliest to arrive) and he drove us to the home base. The drive there was pretty shocking, because around the airport is the Township of Khayelitsha which holds over 2 million South Africans. Once you get past Khayelitscha you start to see nicer and nicer houses, the huge difference in class in South Africa is apparent from the minute you leave the airport.
Cross Cultural Solutions South Africa has two home bases because of the amount of people who want to volunteer there and because houses are expensive and they can't/wont buy a house
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The guards marching down the street....an everyday occurrence. big enough to fit everyone in together. I am in Home Base 2 which is the new home base and has never been lived in before so we are the first. There are 16 girls living in the house, with two girls per room. Its actually pretty nice. I am on the second floor where there are 3 other bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a common room and there are 4 bedrooms downstairs with a dinning room, 2 kitchen areas and a lobby. The home base is located in the neighborhood known as Rondebosch which is a middle class community and about 2 miles from the Capetown University campus.
On our first day there (Saturday) there were only 5 of us until around 5:30pm so we decided to take a taxi down to the waterfront to walk around and see what it was. The waterfront was pretty insane. It is a walk way filled with shops and restaurants and also a mini mall full of couture shops like Prada and Gucci and the people walking around the waterfront are definitely not from the town ships. It is such a shock to see how wide of a gap there is in
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The guards again classes here in Cape-town. But the waterfront definitely had a lot of cool restaurants to eat at and some pretty cool Pubs. We had dinner that night back at the house at 6. While we were down at the waterfront 9 other girls had arrived, they were all rooming downstairs so Aimeé and I were pretty anxious because our roommates weren't there yet and we really wanted to meet them. My roommate didn't end up coming until around 10 that night and I was already asleep when she arrived but she sorta woke me up while unpacking and we talked for a bit. Her name is Megan Shackelford and she is 21 and from Jefferson City Missouri but goes to University at Kansas. She is wicked cool and Aimeé, Megan and I are getting pretty close and do pretty much everything together. We are all so similar and are all here for pretty much all the same reasons.
On Sunday we started orientation and I wanted to kill myself. It was sooooooooo boring. We started the day off by going to Home Base 1 and watching a power point that pretty much had all the same information we had
been made to read OVER AND OVER again about 4 times before even leaving the states. And then we were split into 4 groups and given maps to follow. Aimeé and I were put in the same group and we ended up going to this place called the Commons. It is pretty much just a oval shaped park with grass, I guess it is were a lot of people go to run in the evenings. But it was pretty boring and not even pretty to look at. So we walked back to the house. Then we had lunch which was a BBQ but the food wasn't too good. After lunch we went on a tour of the City. It was an amazing sight to see. I have a bunch of pictures that I will upload so you can all see it, and my two new friends Aimeé and Megan. That night Megan, Aimeé, Glenna, Shanika and I went down to the Waterfront to a pub called Mitchelle's. They have amazing pizza, beer, wine and other drinks. We met two really cool guys, one from Ireland and the other from South Africa. The guy from South Africa was an amazing meet,
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Wellington Palace?? Its the place where the Guards museum is. seeing as he is a Tourism Consultant or something like that and told us about everything that we needed to do and everything that we could skip. He also promised to get us good deals on Safari's and the such, but we shall see if we use him for that.
The next morning we had orientation again at 7:30 in the morning. We got split into two groups and thankfully Megan, Aimeé and I were in the same group. In the morning we had placement orientation which was really pretty boring and then we had lunch and in the afternoon we took a tour of the Town-ships. The tour was such an eye opener especially compared to the city tour. The townships are so depressing and there is just so much to say about it that I really just can't. So I will attach some links. First there is
Gugulethu and then there is
Khayelitsha and a bunch of others you can find if you wikipedia South African Townships.
I am going to post this blog now because I am tired and going diving with Great White Sharks tomorrow morning. We are getting picked up at 5:45 am
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Me in front of the wellington palace place and that is EARLY. But I wanted to get this post out there so people didn't think I was dead or anything and because my parents are probably starting to worry or something. I have an amazing week to write about though and some amazing pictures to share with everyone.
Pictures from the township tour will follow
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Annmarie Barone
non-member comment
Awesome!!
Katie, What great pictures! Write another blog soon so we know that you survived diving with great white sharks! (jealous......) Love, Annie