UPDATE!!!

1/25/06
I am at JFK airport in New York ( by the time I post this I imagine I will be in SA) but I already feel like I am out of the country. The British airways/Iberia terminal is COMPLETELY unlike the Northwest terminal. Its actually tackier. But the chairs are comfier. And I am surrounded by Britts. Eh, wot?
I’m not going to go into the whole visa debacle except to say I have it NOW and that really is all that matters. (yes there was a period when I thought I wasn’t going to get it). But at one point, when things looked their worst, my friend David, who is Australian, sat down next to me and asked me what was wrong. I explained and he asked “so what kind of visa are you applying for? F1?”
“Um, a standard student visa.”
“Ha! You don’t even know the official title?”
“um….”
“It could be worse you know. You could be coming to the US. When I went to get my visa I was in line behind this girl who had scheduled her appointment to turn in her papers three months ago and the woman sniffed her paper and went ‘did you get perfume on this? Did perfume spill in your bag? I’m sorry, we can’t take this. Come back in three months.’”
“um….”
“I know people who’ve gotten their visa’s rejected because they used the wrong type of pen.”
“oh dear.”
“So yeah, it could be worse.”
…
I got to the airport obscenely early, because this is the first flight I booked through a travel agency and honestly I expected something to go wrong. But everything was fine, there was no line and I literally waltzed through security.
I don’t honestly know why I was suspicious of the travel agency but I am also suspicious of my program as well. Someone is supposed to pick me up from the air port in Johannesburg (or Jo’burg as I should get used to calling it) and I don’t actually trust that its going to happen. Totally a hold over from me-being-only-dependent-on-myself-on-my-last-adventure. I got so used to waltzing off the plane and on to a bus and going to a hostel that I looked up etc etc etc. Even if I got to Wits on my own they wouldn’t let me on campus until I had a Wits ID. So yeah, here’s hoping that they remember to pick me up.
Type A personality? The hilarious thing is that I'm not this control freaky usually. Or maybe I am and I just haven’t noticed it.

1/26/06
Madrid? I did not appreciate Madrid. I was jet lagged and homesick and I just wanted to get back on the plane so I could finish the journey.
However, the one interesting thing that happened was at least two people started talking to me in Spanish and I would go. “Yo no hablo espanol.” They would look at me and then very slooooowly and loooooooudly continue to speak Spanish. Of course I still didn’t understand them. No amount of enouciation will make you understand a language you don’t know. But I do think it was some form of revenge against stupid Americans who do that in English. Yay!

1/27/06
I realize now that I am not going to have access to the internet for two weeks. My very first culture shock I suppose. So anyway, I'm going to try to keep this going so I have something to upload when I actually get connected.
…
So yeah, I made it to South Africa safe and sound. All that you read above? Everything went smoothly. Except jet lag. Which never goes smoothly.
The strangest thing is probably how NOT culture shocked I am. The English South Africans actually have an accent similar to ours. Just a little more melodious. The parts of Jo’burg I’m in look just like Europe or America. Except for the razor wire and electric fencing. But that makes it even weirder when someone talks to me in Afrikaans or when I hear a streetlight referred to as a “robot.” Or when people driving after 11 just ignore red robots because that is the best way to avoid a carjacking. Or when I nearly get hit by a car driving on the wrong side of the road. (Seen Closer?)
Also culture-shocky is how well they treat us. My room is gorgeous. International House puts NYU dorms to shame. Its very rectangular but in a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright sort of way, not in a soviet way. My room is only slightly smaller than the room in New York that I shared and it comes with pots and pans and a water boiler. And the kitchen is bigger. Fancy that.
My giant window overlooks a greenhouse that is crawling with cats. I don’t know if they are feral or not, but they look well groomed. I have decided they will be my friends, regardless. Also there are trees with interesting birds I have never seen before. Not in a tropical-rainforest-ungodly-colors-sort-of-way. But just strange. I think I may have to get a bird book.
Everything is lush and green. Apparently that is unusual and its because of unseasonable rain, but the city is gorgeous because of it. Jo’burg is so vegetated its practically a forest. The hilarious part is that it was all empty grassy planes before settlement. (Edit 1/30: actually, Jo’burg is classified as the largest manmade forest in the world.)
Every now and again the sky will open up and pour as though it were just turned on. Its not at any particular time the way I'm told Indonesia is. But its still intense.
So far (12 hours in) there isn’t anything I haven’t been able to find. Twinnings tea is ungodly expensive, but I will crack and buy it because I am spoiled and its absurd to have my parents ship it to me. There is lots strange meat that I will have to taste (hello ostrich).
Tonight we went out to eat in this wonderful artists area called Melville which seems similar to bleeker street but with cooler people. I had a pasta dish that was fantastic and would have cost me $15-20 back in the states. Finally total (including drink) $8.
The strange thing about homesickness is that its always more intense than you expect/remember it to be and shorter that it feels like it will be. I literally spent all yesterday wandering around Madrid in a jetlaged stupor crying and wanting to go home. I don’t think it helped that I spent 30 minutes staring at Picasso’s Gurnica.
But now that I’m here and I’ve met some of the other students and started to explore I am feeling better. I’m still frightened about the program, about being the only person in it who isn’t an actor, but that will get better once we start (I hope).
…
In the mid nineties car theft was rampant (its still rampant but dropping). Poor people with out jobs and prospects discovered that if they watched peoples cars and made sure they weren’t stolen the people would tip them. They would even help drivers into a tight parallel parking space. As the practice became widespread territorial disputes broke out. The city realized that it couldn’t ban it and so it institutionalized it. They mandated that every public area would have parking attendants (keep in mind that these are parallel parking areas, not a garage) and gave them funny lime green vests.
…
Quotas:
40% of the music on all South African Radio stations must be South African.

1/29/06
So 10 out of 13 people in our program have arrived. I don’t know when the other three get here. Even though I’ve been a wee bit bored the past few days I'm glad I got here when I did. The four of us who were here the first day are tight (as tight as you can be after three days) and we feel like we have mastered the campus, Melville, taxis and the Wits bus. The new people just sort of wander around dazed.
Last night 8 of us went out partying in Melville. If one of us can pass as South Africa (I got asked for directions twice yesterday) then 8 of us STAND OUT LIKE A SOAR THUMB. But it was fun anyway.
In Jo’burg you don’t hail a taxi, you call a service and they send someone to you. They’re a bit expensive but seeing as Jo’burg has no public transportation, and the Wits bus are impractical they seem to be our only option. Until we make friends with people with cars. Then the world is ours.
Taxi drivers are primarily African though we had an afrikaaner driver today. They try to cheat us but we caught on quick and have gotten good at bartering them down. Though I do feel bad about it because when I say a taxi ride is expensive, I mean after you split it three ways it costs a buck fifty, and really that’s nothing. And that extra 10 or 20 rand they are trying to get out of us they probably really need. But we also don’t want to get taken advantage of. So.. yeah, conundrum.
We caught a taxi today after going grocery shopping and we asked him to open the trunk.
“Ze vat?” (this was the Afrikaaner driver)
“the trunk the trunk.”
“Vat? Vat?”
“The bloody trunk.”
“Huh?”
“oh, um, could you open the boot please.”
“Ah Ja, vhy didn’t you say so.”


1/31/06
Before I came here friend of mine who had lived in Ghana and Rwanda sat me down and gave me a bunch of advice about Africa. One of which was brings things like vitamines and pain killer because you wont nessisarilly be able to get it there.
She was sorta wrong.
Jo'burg has all these malls that look like they belong in LA. Big shiny places with American brands and Claires jewlery. They give me a headache in the same way American malls do. It's easy to forget that you are in Africa when you are looking at Aldo shoes.
I know that the reason that Greg, our coridinater keeps taking us to places like these malls is because they are safe. And you cant exactly send a bunch of Jet laged american college students wandering around Soweto on their own without expecting something bad to happen. But less than a week in I am sick of rich-Jo'burg. It's exactly the same as the reast of the developed world.

2/2/06
Wits does not belive in making life easy. Internet is impossible to get, for example. Everything is done by paper. And even though Wits has an ENORMOUS forgien student population they make them sit for FOUR BLOODY HOURS to regester with the international office. FOUR HOURS.

2/3/06
I have offically been here for a week. In theory I will have internet in another week. At the rate things are going, I really highly doubt it.
Yesterday, the cleaning lady woke me up at 8. Yes we have cleaners. Which is very nice, but I also am a big fan of the sanctity of my space ( which NYU housing has tried desperatly to kill.) And now there is this cleaning lady who has a key and and can come and go as she likes from MY space. She is very nice and introduced herself to me but it still makes me uncomfortable. Yes it is a job that needs to be created (south africa has a huge unemployement problem) but I also dont like having my privalage waved in my face.
Wait... I go to Wits. And NYU. YAY privalage.
I am sure there are these statistics somewhere but here is my guess at the demographics of Wits
50% africa.
50% Indian
50% white
25% Asian.
25% Muslim
.02% American
THOSE TOTALLY ADD UP I SWEAR!

2/6/06
So you know how I came here to take a break from play writing? I did emphasize the "play" and not the "writing" part right?
Friday I had my first class and it was amazing. It was creative writing. ( ::cough cough:: I KNOW OKAY, I JUST DONT KNOW HOW IT QUIT IT.) My teacher is in many ways the steyrotypical creative writing teacher, shes very dramatic and gives us lectures on the seriousness of play. She's also ungodly beautiful and she is one of those women who looks even more gorgious when she's pregnate (shes due in 3 months). She gave us a lecture on paying attention to the flavor of words which made me fall out of my chair. After a year and a half of being told "every single word must move the story forward," its liberating to hear that.
Saturday we went into Soweto. Soweto is essentiallly what I thought South Africa would look like. I am sure many of my rich (white) south african friends would object, but its true.
Soweto, for those of you who dont know, was a shanty town (parts of it still are). In the '50's the Johannesburg governement removed all black people from Johannesburg proper and dumped them in Soweto. It became a thriving comunity though and one street, Vilakazi street, has produced two nobel peace laureates (Mandela and Bishop Tutu). In the 1970's, students protesting the Apartheid government we fired upon by police. 200 children were killed.
We went to the Hector Peiterson museum which comemorates/honors the Soweto student uprising. Hector Pieterson was the first student killed. He was thirteen.
We all were kind of in shock afterwards. Halfway through, Russell, a south African boy who was helping to drive us around came up to me and asked "what do you think."
I just sort of gaped at him and was like "um, I, um, I dont, know, um. I cant really say." But to answer Russells question clinicly it was a remarkably well organized and effective museum.
Then we went to a sheeben which are unlicensed bars, and got lunch, though this was more a touristy place so I doubt very much its actually unlicensed. But the food was fantastic even if we didnt nesisarrly know what we were eating. I know there were intestines somewhere, but I think I avoided them.
Then we went to Nelsen Mandela's old house. Which is about the size of a two bedroom appartment in manhattan. Four people used to live there. The house has been made into a museum and our tour guide was very VERY happy to be working in Nelsen Mandela's house.
It was cool but I would have liked some time to just BE in Soweto which is interesting and thriving in a way the much richer Jo'burg suburbs are missing. While Jo'burg has abandoned it's city center, rich blacks are moving back to Soweto and trying to bring more life to the economy. There are lovely houses and then there are shacks and sometimes they sit right next to each other. Unfortunatly, due to my lack of car and my skin color, Soweto is not really a place I can explore on my own.
Sunday was South African comedy night. Oh, and trying to do grocery shopping but thanks to the Wits bus which came 45 min late my milk spoiled. Grrrrrrr.
So yeah, anyway, we went to this place called cool runnings (classy, I know) which has standup every sunday. It was just me Jennifer and Brandy and Russell who took us so we were a little less conspicious than when we travel as a herd of 13. I would say we understood about 75% with Russell there to translate. But 25% just went over our heads compleatly. Still, for only having been in the country a week I think thats a pretty goor ratio.
Here is what south africans seem to find funny (in order from least to most):
5. Poverty
4. Thabo Mbeki's voice.
3. The Poverty of Afrikaaners.
2. Crime
1. The poverty of fat Afrikaaners.
There actually werent any American Jokes but I think that's because the MC didnt discover us in the audience. He did however find both an Arab and an Israeli sitting on opposite sides of the room and went to town. Also made fun of a brittish bloak and a croatian.
Words I need to add to my vocabulary:
Cheers.
Dodgy.

2/8/06
Yesterday me and my american friend Eric decided we were going to walk across the Nelsen Mandela bridge. Cause we didnt have anything better to do. The Nelsen Mandela bridge opened maybe three years ago and was built to conect Braamfontein (which is where Wits is) to Newtown which is inner city Joburg. Its part of an attempt to revitalize the innercity which experenced a devistating flight of industry in the mid ninteys when crime was spiraling out of control. Newtown is becoming safer and more vibrant and houses the Market theater which is the Public of Joburg. But next door Hillbrow I have been told to avoid at all costs.
Anyway, we set off for the Mandela bridge but actually we headed in the compleatly wrong direction (oops) but luckly, eric's friend Neo found us and took us around. It was nice to get out of WIts. I've been feeling very clostrophobic and traped. Not that someone who looks like me should walk across the bridge alone. (As we were wandering around Newtown I was very happy I was walking with two black men.)
Again, Newtown is what I though Joburg would be like: a combo of poverty and art. We didn't spend very much time there because Neo had to get back to campus but we are going back this Saturday to go to a play at the Market theater. I will report back.
Note: I belive the South African film Tsotsi is opening in the US soon. Its beautiful and moving AND takes place in Jo'burg AND has several shots of the Nelsen Mandela bridge. All reasons you should go see it.