Week 2 with pictures

Me in a Sombrero

Ok so this was my first official week of school ( uni) with classes and everything, waaaay intense and fun. first off i have this really cool schedule so i've only got 1 class on a monday wednesday friday. the downside of this is that i have 8 o clock classes on tuesday and thursday , not super fun.

this semester i'm takin pol problems in developing countries, differential equations, calculus 3 , intermediate macro economics and international economics . my classes r pretty fun and my fav for the mo is international ecos , but its got a lot of work . pol is a lil annoying because the american r bein so AMERICAN about it and almost completely obnoxious.

um one of the highlights of the trip so far was wen i told someone i was from south africa and they asked which country , i nearly died of laughter( inside of course) the sad thing was that she was a uni student.

coolness of this week was wen my roomie mayra made me mexican food , waaaaaaaaaaaaay good. omg the food here is crazy , the dinning hall is a super duper all you can eat buffet with amazin variety , vry vry cool

american boys are also very polite, they always hold the door open for you and stuff even if ur a long way off , so that's nice and texans are jus supa dupa friendly.

I realised that i have yet to introduce to u the main characters of my exchange thus far so here they are

The internationals

Katrina: crazy fun austrailian who just turned 21

Kat, Angelica, Gerda and Rachel at the brunch

Angelica : cool swede who just spent 6 months in india so she has the cutest english accent.
Gerda: chilled dutch girl from utrecht

The Americans :

Me, Lauren and Kat

Amanda( Tantour): fun loving christian irish girl witha killer voice and a passion for india
Amanda: intensely smart but way cool girl from DC/Arkansas

Tarryn : quiet but cool artsy girl from colorado

Lauren ; pixie cute quiet and fun girl

Abby: super sporty fun texan girl

Rachel: Katrina's roomie also way fun philipino/american girl

Mayra: my coolness mexican american housemate

Tiffany : my taekwando -doing , japan loving, anime addicted slightly tom-boyish roomie

Samantha: my 21 year old housemate

oh wait random american fact, they don't bath/shower everyday , only when they feel like it. ( wierd, i kno)

um so ya the bestest part of week 2 was my super fun crazy weekend in San Antonio. because it was Kat's 21st and a long wkend a couple of us(9) decided to have a road trip to san Antonio , a town about 3 hours away 4rm us. It was crazy, 5 of us drove down on friday night ( me, rachel,gerda, kat, angelica,) and had an amazing dinner at this super cool jazz bar/ italian restaurant with a belly dancer, very random very cool and the best lasagna ever.

on saturday mornin angelica and i went galavanting, she cut her hair and i bought sum pink hair which will make an appearance soon. We then went back to the hotel ( a super cheap , slightly dodgy in a not so safe side of town bt near enough to the hub hotel) got the other girls and did more galavanting , i've been to the Alamo ( google it). And we waited for the other girls to arrive, they came and we headed off for a crazy fun night of partying. unfortunately howeva since the legal drinking age is 21 in the US most places are over 21 and only 3 of us including Kat wer ova, so we ended up in this random mexican club called Medusa , but we had a good time and I believe it was God's way of keepin me out of trouble without me bein a stick in the mud. the cool thing bout the night though was that the ova 21s got to got to the Coyote Ugly bar and had an awesome time.

next day was pretty awesome too and we woke up at around 9 so that we could have a birthday brunch for kat at the hyaty , it was ridiculously expensive bt we got our money's worth and sat for about 2hours and 45 minutes stuffing our faces with gud food, it was great. Then sum of us went and did more galavanting and in the night we had dinner at this cool mexican resturant. afterword we went walking down the riverwalk and sang random songs and dodged guys who tried to wish us happy collective birthdays, it was great.

Monday was the day we came home and i atea texas shaped waffle.

by the way just to let u kno wen we complain about bein lazy to go to the dinnin hall, i now hav a 10 to 15 min walk to my nearest 1 , its great.

well asta la vista baby
mwa xoxox

rhodent or bear

ok ryt , this is 1st post from the land of the bull, (sigh) my first week was intense.
so i arrived to Waco (pronounced Wayco), on tuesday and the weather was waaay awesome around about 20 degrees celcius. I got to the bearpit ( central meeting place where they keep actual live bears ( waay stoopid and mean)) and there was no one there to meet me cause i arrived early so i was like ok let me walk to my handler's office so there i am trekking acros baylor with my 27kg suitcase, my 10kg hand luggage and my laptop bag. long story short i fell flat on my face got rescued by a neuroscientist and trekked round baylor for no good reason

day 2
met other up with other into's (international kids) and had a crazy fun expensive in rands trip to walmart , good stuff.

day 3
had the longest orientation , BUT they gav us free food and i won a t-shirt (oh yea).

day 4
omg omg omg , we went to the bank and wer there for like 3 and a half hours, not at all fun in any way. But as a sort of redemtion we got to go to the mall and i went shoppin ( life is good). Um we also just chilled and had a blast later on we went to this coffee shop called common ground all the rhodents will get its similarity to home ground and seriosly , its pretty much the same.

day 5
we wer supposed to do this walk thing with all the other into girls bt it suddenly became freezin , it was so cold that i gt brain freeze from the outsyd, nt fun and there wer crazy g-town style winds. howeva the scene was rescued wen we went to starbucks,it was so intense havin americans tryin to correct my pronounciation of rooibos , grrrr
later on we went to my first basketball game and i will say this , i HATE the american way of playin sports , u hav so many breaks that a 15 min quarter turns in2 an hour

essentially all i hav to say 4 the mo is that i'd rather be a rhodent than a bear

ok so ya i thought i'd do this long blog about all the lessons ive learnt in first year, before i say gudbye to my baby ( my computer) but before I get there i need to tell you something that has really been evident in the last week. Don't study alone with boys ever ever ever.... Much akwardness is the only result so this is post no.1 in the series of lessons from first year

Um ya :(

So right , ive established that bloggin once a week does not make me a bad blogger , in fact , it makes a me a great blogger cos i'm regular like that special k ad is always sayin i shud b . n by now sum of u r lyk wat how cud she , but u know wat i don't mind bcos as part of my not quite new years , new years resolution , i aim to be completely and totally real on my blog. What that means is that i'll say how i feel even if the people i'm feelin about read my blog . the reason 4 this courage is probably because i'm goin to texas so non of my texan friends will read my blog and therefore , i can tell all . But ya today was a saddish day because it was my last sunday at my grahamstown church for a while and I was like aaaah noooooooooooooo . but ya c'est la vie. It was also the last time I saw my bestset friend Cristie for the next nine months :( [ insert picture here]

so ya , sadness. Me n cris hav had a crazy year of gettin to know each other its been intense n great n cool. aaaaah ( sigh) life is nt gna b as fun without her :( bt ya i don't know . I want to go ,but i'm also like aaaah !!! but i'm also like i need to leave grahamstown so i can learn how to be again and just be free from public expectation of who chipo should be . But ya its cool and great and scary . On a fun note, this weekend / week was not all sadness and i was a reindeer ot the churches christmas party here are some photo's for your personal comic relief :

I'm from the k-dorp

so now that we've established that i'm a bad blogger , i feel mininimal guilt when i don't blog for days ( no that's actually a lie, i feel bad really bad but a girl must try to keep up her spirits ). lolness no , for serious now as an attempt to make up for my bad behaviour I will entertain you with a few of my stories.
Now my girl friends (friends who are girls ) know some of my stories and know that when i tell a story there's generally atleast a gud 5 seconds of entertainment value when u look back on it and see how " special" i am, lol. But the stories i'm goin to tell you today are stories about a little town called Krugersdorp where I'm from. The K-dorp is a town on the outskirts of Johannesburg , one of South frica's biggest cities. And it's a town full of interestingness. named after one of the "greatest" Afrikaaner presidents the K-dorp is the kinda town that attracts its fair share of Afrikaaner white supremecists who believe that that all black people should die . It's great. In fact we are famous for our assasins ( a Krugersdorp resident was implicated in the assasination of Chris Hani http://www.jrnyquist.com/may14/an_assassination.htm ) Our animal cruelty ( students of Krugersdorp Highschool threw blue spray painted chickens off a second story balcony , to see if they could fly )and the satanic killing of students
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-08-18-krugersdorp-school-rocked-by-satanic-killing .

Aside from that Krugersdorp also has a very prominent racist culture where you can be called easy to offend when say that you find talk of "the good old days of apartheid " from the pulpit offensive. It is also commonplace to be called a kaffir ( if you are black ) in Krugersdorp.Two of the most prominent incidences in my personal memory book are
1) The time when I was walking to the gym from school one day and was accosted by an Afrikaaner youth who screamed Kaffir Bitch as we shared the road.
2) A personal favourite of mine however,was on the morning after our matric dance a friend's mother was driving us to our Breakfast when a taxi driver did one of those annoying things that taxi drivers generally do , like turn without indicating and my friends mother exclaimed " Bloody Kaffir!" only to then remember that there was a black person in the car with her. It was great, as she tried to explain how she "didn't hate black people or think about black people like that" but that he was an unruly driver and in some way deserved the title.

My no1 favourite story from the farm is the time when my church group got together a group of young people to play a game of 30 seconds . Now that day was one of those days when i decided to take initiative and make an effort with my appearance past the normal because well there was this guy that i sort of had a thing for, but only because he was the only non- brother ( in the sense that i was way to close to any of the other guys to actually like them like them) . Any way so we got paired on a team n i was like yes ,time to rock my pretty.The game started and it was going pretty well until my partner got the card black monday. For clarity sake i will explain that on that particular day i was wearing black trousers , black shoes, a black jersey and had black hair. So anyway , we were in the heat of the game tryin to get all the points before ou thirty seconds was up and he said , "what's the day before Tuesday ?" and i was like "Monday " and then he said ( this moment sorta goes into slow motion in my brain) Bloooghg bllo ( slow motion sound effects ) , "What are you ?" and i was like " Black" , it didn't click to me at first, but then the room went quiet. And I was like Omigosh , Omigosh , after years of goin to this church and interacting with these people that's all I am , that's all I am , THE BLACK GIRL( all in my head of course). He sorry , i laughed and said it was ok and conversation nervously picked up again, but up to today and probably for the rest of my life it remains a moment i'll remember.

The really sad part of that story was that the first thing that popped into my head was black as opposed to the multitude of other things i could have thought of , the first thing I thought was black . But i guess thats the product of bein the burban ( Suburban ) black girl in the K-dorp. Another product of this burbaness was that at this , like many other functions , I was the only black person there, which sorta explains the rest of the room goin quiet. Cos in South Africa we have this odd sort of thing we do, where we pretend that race doesn't exist when in the back of our minds its one of the first things we judge people by.

so ya if I happen to be a lil odd sometimes and slightly militant , please remember that I'm from Krugersdorp . I would like to say in its defense however, that the K-dorp isn't all racist and that it does have some nice people and some good times and maybe i'll tell you some of those stories on another day when i've nbeen a particularly bad blogger.

P.S. Sorry this was so deep and intense
P.P. S. I'm really not that bitter
P.P.P.S Ok mayb i'm a lil bitter

list of cool things n random stuff in my life

ok so its official , im way bad at bein a good blogger. but i still love u n now hav more interestingnessess to tell u. well no1 is that ive been accepted to gon on an excahnge program to Baylor University in Waco Texas, random place right . But ya so im waitin on the Lord that I may get my visa in time and ya. No. 2 , i no longer really like linguistics , i think my mum prayed my enjoyment of it away bt ya , no ling 4 me nxt year bt i will takin Maths , politics , economics and _____________ ( an empty space any ideas ?) im thinkin mayb dance bcos i LOVe to dance n that brings us to ( drum roll pls )No. 3. Um well as i love to dance and am goin to America and there is this show called So You think You can Dance and the auditions are gonna b about two weeks after i get to the states and i think i wud like to audition just to find out if ppl who dance think i can dance and to discover whether i shud pursue my dream of becomin a dancer or if i shud become a mathematician politician world something or other. And last but not least, i discovered that i have a vry traditional African view when it comes to eye contact , so i get vry flustered when people look into my eyes because i dnt believe in lookin into peoples eyes unless u know them really really well, it was interestin to discover. And now that i have learned to add pictures i will show you one of me with some people i did a dance with earlier on in the year.

I just had one of the most awesome days eva ,it was ridiculously amazin n a ridiculously phenom part of a fantabulous weekend it was sooo great . today was my 18th b-day party , im nt 18 yet and wont be til dec 11 but i had a party anyway cos my bdays in the holi's n i wudnt hav had it with all my friends if i'd waited . it was such fun , we had a colonially lovely themed tea-party , not many people got the theme ryt though but that was ok cos the party was great anyway . God is amazin and brings joy in2 our lives when we least expect it , wow God is just sooooooo GOOD, its amazingly phenomenally wonderful and ya... yesterday was my sister's 21st party and it was alos fake cos her bdays on the 23rd of nov , but wow it was great , this weekend was great and ya , wow wow wow. oh n 4 the first tym there's sum photos. yayness. oh n im smilling so hard my cheeks hurt. oh my party is the one where im wearin the crown.

Oh n i almost 4got but not really cos it was in my head , i have phenomenal friends, they r really great and essentially rock sox. ok must now sleep. Mwaaah world . xoxox