It is 6:05 am in NYC, but in Cape Town it is 1:05 pm
I find that I have mixed feelings about being here. It's beautiful and I'm having a lot of fun and getting different perspectives on things. BUT.
I am here with a group of students. A group of 10 American students. It's difficult to deal with all the time. People are banging it into our brains that we cannot go many places alone and how dangerous it is here, especially at night, etc, etc.
That is hard to deal with on it's own, much less when you are with 10 other people who are strangers to you. It brings a lot of mixed feelings. Half of the time I feel like an outsider who was somehow able to join the group but somehow is not also all the way within the bounds of the group. At the same time, I am having a lot of fun with some people here. Sometimes, however, I feel almost invisible. AND the dependence on others. I am fine with being alone and doing things on my own. In fact, that's the way I like to do most things.
Then you come here and are beat to death with the fact that you cannot go out alone because you will get mugged, raped, etc. It's difficult.
However, I get to feel this difficulty in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Table Mountain looms outside my window. Everywhere you turn there is a beach with turquoise water. The weather is pretty much perfect all the time, warm to hot with a breeze during the day and cool to chilly at night. It can't get much better than that.
In the place though, one can feel the tensions of the 'New South Africa' (whatever that indeed truly means). The political energy is in the air. When you pass the townships in your van, you realize the long way this country has to go. You feel the tensions, the dichotomy, the oddness, incongruity of Clifton Beach where people seem to have no end of money, they have the most beautiful beach side homes and then you drive into Khayelitsha one of the largest townships and you are in a third world country most definitely.
It's thrown in your face and being who we are, where we're from we don't always know how to deal with.
Just thoughts.
Fragments.
I am here with a group of students. A group of 10 American students. It's difficult to deal with all the time. People are banging it into our brains that we cannot go many places alone and how dangerous it is here, especially at night, etc, etc.
That is hard to deal with on it's own, much less when you are with 10 other people who are strangers to you. It brings a lot of mixed feelings. Half of the time I feel like an outsider who was somehow able to join the group but somehow is not also all the way within the bounds of the group. At the same time, I am having a lot of fun with some people here. Sometimes, however, I feel almost invisible. AND the dependence on others. I am fine with being alone and doing things on my own. In fact, that's the way I like to do most things.
Then you come here and are beat to death with the fact that you cannot go out alone because you will get mugged, raped, etc. It's difficult.
However, I get to feel this difficulty in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Table Mountain looms outside my window. Everywhere you turn there is a beach with turquoise water. The weather is pretty much perfect all the time, warm to hot with a breeze during the day and cool to chilly at night. It can't get much better than that.
In the place though, one can feel the tensions of the 'New South Africa' (whatever that indeed truly means). The political energy is in the air. When you pass the townships in your van, you realize the long way this country has to go. You feel the tensions, the dichotomy, the oddness, incongruity of Clifton Beach where people seem to have no end of money, they have the most beautiful beach side homes and then you drive into Khayelitsha one of the largest townships and you are in a third world country most definitely.
It's thrown in your face and being who we are, where we're from we don't always know how to deal with.
Just thoughts.
Fragments.