Out and About

Sorry again about my lack of posts. Blogging has turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. The whole sitting down at a computer and writing is very hard when there's so many other things I could be doing! This week has been a good one. I'm still loving my internship, and am learning tons of things- not only about the medical field here but about the culture in general. It's been amazing to get to sit in with a doctor through all their appointments without having anyone worried about hipaa laws and what not. Things that continue to surprise me about the ARV clinic and Beautiful Gate in general include:

• The fact that there are no appointment times at the clinic. Patients are simply told to come in on a certain day, where they then must wait copious amounts of time to be seen by a doctor. The entire things seemed very inefficient and unreasonable until I learned that getting to and from the clinic is an issue for many of the patients. Because of that, if given times, people would miss their appointments more often than not. Furthermore, the issue of people not being treated for illnesses becomes a lot more justified when treatment requires many to devote an entire day every other week to see a doctor. Under the same circumstances, I'm not sure I would want to go to the doctor either.
• How willing and excited the entire staff of Beautiful Gate is to have have us there. You can truly tell how happy there are to have us there to help, and how much they appreciate us being there. Yandi, one of the social workers is even giving us 5 interns (us 3 plus the 2 girls from Holland) Xhosa lessons. As said before, Xhosa is one of South Africa's 11 official languages, and is the language most of the people living around Beautiful Gate speak. Last week she taught us how to say what is your name. Right after learning I met a young girl and decided to test out my new skills on her. Not kidding she laughed at me as soon as I finished haha. But then she answered so I guess it worked out!

Classes are going well. Spending the day at UCT on Thursdays, surrounded by students our age is a good change for the group. Because our weekends basically start on Wednesday after work, we have been accomplishing tons Thursday- Sunday. This weekend consisted of:

• Thursday night after class we hiked up Lion's head. Lion's Head is a mountain located very close to Table Mountain, and therefore the city. It is a tradition among the locals here to hike up the mountain for the sunset during the full moon because the moon is bright enough to light your way down. Naturally, we did just that. The hike took us about an hour, a refreshing change from the 3 it took to climb Table Mountain. The trail was very hot and sunny at the beginning, and ended with bouldering up the side of the mountain to reach the top. Part of the hike reminded me a lot of the Angel's Landing hike as we had to use chains and handles to climb up the mountain. 

Dana and I at the Summit

The scenery was absolutely incredible- not kidding you one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. We all loved it so much we heavily debated about going again the next night. Although that trip didn't happen, I'm sure we'll get plenty of use out of this hike, and I already can't wait to take my parents on it when they come!

The view of the city on one side

The view of the sunset over the ocean on the other side!

• On Friday we went in to the city to go to Bo-Kaap, the muslim part of the city. We had lunch at a cute restaurant looking over the city from atop a very large hill that reminded me of San Francisco (or the BVI's if you know what I'm talking about) because of how steep the incline was. Bo-Kaap is well known for having beautifully colored houses. Each house is a different color, and I honestly never saw two houses next to each other that were the same color. It was amazing! After lunch, we spent the rest of our afternoon going to a museum, wandering the city, and going to happy hour at our new favorite hang out spot, The Neighborhood.

A pretty bad picture of one of the streets

• On Saturday night we went to an outdoor concert on the beach. The concert started at 7, with the sun setting shortly after then. There was tons of people there, way more than I was expecting, and we couldn't have dreamed of a more perfect venue. The professor of our class on South African history, Vincent, is married to a woman named Vickie. Vickie happens to be a pretty famous musician in South Africa and she was the main attraction at the concert. Both her, and the other 3 bands that played were incredible musicians and basically played covers of popular American songs the entire time. This included Sweet Caroline, Billy Jean, and Waka Waka (the World Cup Song). After we went out in Camps Bay, a part of the city we haven't spent much time in. The crowd was approximately 8 years older and everyone was wearing prom dresses compared to our outfits so it turned out to be a rather interesting, but entertaining, night.

All in all, it was a great weekend. Sorry about how lengthy this post got- hope I didn't bore you! I'm off to bed though, 6:30 still comes wayyy too early for me. Salakakuhle! (Goodbye in Xhosa)