"Oh, here we call it Megan."

It kind of feels like I’m living a double life here: it feels pretty American. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it, but there’s something weird about making new friends – friends who are very similar to your friends at home – when you know your friends at home will always be the better version. That’s where I am now: friend-flirting with the girls that sit next to me in class and the friends of any African friends I already have. Still, all of my close friends here are American. Two live in my house. Welcome back to sorority land, I guess.

Ever since school started, life here has been less exciting. My schedule is kind of like high school in that Monday through Friday, I have class until about 3 pm, with a few random periods off during the day. Every class is 45 minutes long (they end at the :45 so you can make it to your next class on time). Most of my classes are daily, so I have reading to do every night. Thank goodness the reading here is light. For example, on the first day of my History of Antisemitism class, the professor said there is a required textbook. “Great,” I thought, “there goes $100.” Then he passed out the book, which is about the size of a Dover classic and is paid for by the school because he wrote it. The syllabus literally assigns about 6 pages a week. My politics class has a lot more reading, with required articles that can only be found in the library. We aren’t allowed to check these books out, so we have to sit inside and read them (or in my case, skip them). Anthony Butler, my professor for this course, is a world famous political scientist, and a very boring lecturer. And the class of 100 is half American, and the South Africans seem kind of spiteful that we are invading their department. It turns out that because this is the continent’s best university, everyone here is very career-focused, and therefore uninterested in pursuing an education in the liberal arts. Political Science, one of the largest departments at Berkeley, is on the smaller side here, and has a huge emphasis on government structure and public policy (I assume because most political careers are focused on these).

My sex class (Sex from Sappho to Cyber…seriously), is the best course I have ever taken in my life. The professor is amazing and sunny and dynamic, and I actually look forward to going each day even though it’s my first class of the day. Right now we are learning about the role of sex in ancient Greece, basically learning Greek mythology through how it relates to Eros, God of “love.”

Oh, and I started volunteering with a group of 8th and 9th graders. The on-campus volunteering is monopolized by a program called SHAWCO, which runs on study abroad students looking to help cute African children. Working with the older students, there aren't as many Americans at my site. The school is made of a combination of classes, from townships to middle class. They all wear uniforms, you you can't tell who is from where. Except that it's obvious that the Colored (that word is an actual race name here, it means Brown) students are better off than the black students, and have nice pencil bags full of markers and stuff like that. Frankly, it didn't seem like the kids needed us to be there, but it was still nice to do anyway. I am going again on Thursday, and still need to decide if it's worth the time.

Beyond school, there isn’t really anything new to say. Here are some cultural differences worth knowing about Cape Town:
- Instead of “What’s up?” everyone says “How’s it?” And anytime you say anything, they reply with “Is it?”
- Stores don’t sell red cups or liquid laundry detergent.
- My yard has guinea fowl in it all the time, they keep up a lot of people in my house.
- Smoking is allowed inside, so every night I hang my clothes from my bedroom window to de-smoke them.
- It’s weird for girls to drink beer.
- The cans are a thicker metal, so shot-gunning beer is very difficult. And when you drink soda, you think there’s more left than there actually is. And sodas are called “cool drinks.”
- The fashion magazines here feature affordable clothes rather than the obscenely expensive items in American magazines.
- The big trend is for boys to wear t-shirts with tacky phrases written on them like “I <3 Chicks and beer” or “1 tequila, 2 tequila, 3 tequila, FLOOR!” The girls dress really stylish and it’s hard to keep up.
- There are no water fountains ANYWHERE.
- Fruit is amazingly cheap ($.75 for 5 bananas, $89 for a carton of grapes).
- You get sunburned from walking to class.
- Hookah is called Hubbly Bubbly (hubbly or hub for short).