Let me see. We had house break in number 2. I may have mentioned this already, but I don't think there is any understating the amount of crime here. So here it is again. In the middle of the day, (?!) a man was seen by Andreas with a knife a prowling around our back garden. He had taken Cyril's computer and camera. The police came surprisingly quickly with guns drawn, but amapolisa akanceda thuthuthu (the police don't help at all, at all). So nothing was done and they tried to blame this on some shoes being kept outside. Shoes lure criminals. That logic falls apart when the criminals fail to steal the shoes. Get your country under control. That may have been 3 weeks ago at this point, regardless it still falls into the Winter Epoch.
We had a man in a florescent jacket steal a bag of a friend from underneath the table while we were sitting at dinner. Inside of a restaurant. The restaurant manager (Sloppy Sam) then commissioned some security guards to chase the thieves down, but don't turn them in to the police; rather he wanted them brought back to his restaurant so he could "have a word with them." This guy was so clearly in the mob.
I got hooted at by some hookers. WHO WERE MEN! (you could tell.) That, "Hey Baby," was a high-water mark for awesome times in the last few weeks.
I tried to replace my passport last week. This was the beginning of the end for me. I decided to take the train to Steenburg and then walk an hour to the US consulate general. Why I would ever decide to take the train and then walk an hour in Cape Town is beyond me. Something about US Consulate said safety. Anyways. I buy my 3rd class train ticket, board the first car that stops in front of me. Looks like a rundown Cape Town car as usual, good enough. I ride for a while, listen to a blind man sing Kumbaiya (sp?), watch some other man who is clearly nuts make some creature out of wires and beads, normal day on the train. Then! In a surprising turn of events, security actually shows up (for the first time I've ever seen) and starts checking tickets. I show mine, and the woman checking it alerts me that I'm using a third ticket in a first class car. I ask her, well how can you tell the difference? (because the same crazies are on this car and it looks the same) This man will tell you. And a man comes over, tells me where I must look to determine the class and also I must pay a R40 fine and a extra R8 for the first class ticket. Very cheap fine, but still an annoyance. When I exit the train, the area looks pretty filthy. But using my ever-shard sense of direction, I start following Military Road in what I believe to northern direction towards the US Consulate. I walk for quite a while, and as I walk, the fact that the US Consulate is probably not in the direction becomes exponentially more apparent. I start seeing the corrugated iron used for roofs in townships cropping up in increasingly clever places (fences, walls, etc.) [this is not a good sign], I start seeing hungry dogs, then I come to the outdoor markets. And I begin to realize I am the only white person on the street at all. But I keep walking... That is until I get to Prince Edward Blvd. Because just beyond this road is the township all the poverty around me has been hinting at. At this point I realize someone is hollering something at me that I don't care to listen to. All eyes on me. Here I go into a VERY brisk walk back to the train station. Upon my arrival to the station, I realize that I went the wrong way down military road in the first place and I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by reading the directions a little more carefully.
The next night I began to feel a little sick. The awfulness of the sickness was compounded by my first and only real assignment of the semester that I had to spend all night writing. Obviously, I didn't get any healthier by staying up all night. The next morning was perhaps the sickest I ever remember being (but I don't get sick very often). I was rather delirious at the time and convinced myself at the time that I had caught TB 0r some other serious disease during my brief jaunt to the township. That lasted about 6 hours; since then, I've been more or less confined to bed. But I'm on the mend, and am optimistic Cape Town is breaking me down so it can rectify in a big way right before I leave. Probably in the form of the World Cup.
Winter here is strange. Number one. It's still hot during the day unless it's windy. Just really cold at night. The next three days are rain. I've missed rain. I think it's rain maybe 4 times since we got here.
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