First Day in Cape Town!!

So my first impression of Cape Town was that it was hottttttt, especially because I was wearing cold weather clothes. We made it through security, and then some Orientation Leaders from University of Cape Town met us at the airport and took us to our "vacation acommodation" which was dorms that must have been built in the 1970's - so awesome.

The funny thing about South Africa is the time schedule here. No one is in a hurry to do anything, if you eat at a restaurant, you wait a half hour to get the menu, half hour to get food, half hour to get the check, so you really can't go to a restaurant if you are starving, or else you will be ravenous by the time you get your food. So all the checking in and getting to and from places takes a loooooooong time, haha, but its relaxed, and no one worries about anything...its lovely.

Right as soon as we got settled we got a tour of the nearest neighborhood, Rondebosch, which was so cute, and then headed back to the dorm for dinner, and then out for drinks with the orientation leaders and the international students who had already arrived. We went to a place that was really cute called Cafe Sofia, and had drinks and listened to live jazz music and I got to meet two of the boys I would be living with in my 17 bedroom house! After that we moved onto a really local place called the Pig & Swizzle which was awesome, American hip hop music is really popular here, and there was foosball and pool, and a bunch of new students just really excited to meet each other...just like freshman year all over again.

The next day we had a leisurely morning, and then decided to all take a trip to the beach, because we had no orientation activities. The trip turned into such an adventure and an awesome one at that. Of course we waited an hour and a half for a bus that never came to take us to Camps Bay. So we all decided to take a train. We headed like a herd of sheep down to the train station in Rondebosch that only costs about 5 rand which is less than a dollar, and we ended up in the city center of Cape Town and all had to walk through this really awesome flea market to get to the minibus taxis to get to the beach. whew. When we got to the taxis, we all got in them (about 50 students) and then they were the wrong ones, so we all had to get out and get in new ones, and taxi drivers are so scary...they will hit pedestrians so that was exciting. But Camps Bay was so wonderful and worth it. Its the atlantic ocean so it was like ice water, but it was so clear and there was white sand and the gorgeous table mountain range in the background.

My friend Christina from school and I ate at a rather expensive but totally worth it chic and hip restaurant called The Kove, and I had tempura king crab that just blew my mind. Then we layed out and then we headed back, and hit up the Bourbon street of Cape Town, called Long Street. It was intense to say the least, everyone is out and about and the bars were packed and crowded and we met more and more people that were in our program. It was awesome, and then passed out in our lil 1970s dorm, only to wake up super early the next day in order to move into our house!!