My homestay starts tomorrow (Saturday the 7th). I'm living in a largely black township called Langa on the eastern edge of Cape Town. The homestay family will speak English but I will constantly pick up more and more Xhosa while living in that area. I'm living with a woman (Nombulelo Msizi) who works for an NGO and has three sons. One of them, who is 25, lives with her. I get picked up every morning at 7:00am. I'm the first person to get picked up before school. Hooray. Seven people including me are picked up for class every morning.
Today, we did something called a "drop-off." What happened was that we were all assigned different goals and objectives to complete during the day. Our drivers drove us around the city and dropped us each off at separate point s in the city and we were expected to find our way to the place we needed to study, then find the meet up point to go home. What made it really crazy was that today was the day that Parliament opened so there was a ton of traffic and processions of politicians. There were hundreds of soldiers with automatic rifles all up and down the streets.
I needed to find St. George's Cathedral and examine the religious community in Cape Town. This is where my story gets whack!! So I happened to run into Blake, one of the guys from my program. He had already finished his task when we met up so he went with me to the cathedral. After we sat inside for a whilee we decided to head over to the meet place just so we could figure out where it was so we wouldn't end up getting lost later. While we were walking down a small side street, we happened to walk past a group of three men. I looked at the short man in the middle, proceeded to walk...stopped and then did a double-take. I told Blake that Archbishop Desmond Tutu just passed us! We then turned around and as he was getting in his car (he was driving in a white Toyota Corolla) we approached him, greeted him in Xhosa, and had a little chat with him!!!! In case you don't know who Tutu is, he is undoubtedly the most famous and influential South African today save Nelson Mandela. It was incredible. The crazy thing I learned yesterday was that Cape Town is actually the murder capital of the world....who knew!? Haha. And to think I'll be living in a black township for a month.
The group went out tonight for dinner. It was a lot of fun. So far, I've eaten springbok (like an antelope), ostrich, chicken liver, mopani worms (smoked catepillar-like worms), and crocodile!! Quite the menu.
Cape Town was ungodly hot today. My forhead has not stopped sweating since 9:00 this morning. It's 12:36am right now and my forhead is still sweating!!