Cape Town

Hiking Table Mountain

As every South African says, Cape Town is like a different country.  The long weekend we spent there was by far the best I've had this trip.  It is a bit like San Francisco in that it is a very hipster city with mountains right next to the ocean.  Right outside the city is gorgeous wine country.  We passed a  leisurely half-day doing a tour of several vineyards--so fun.

Wine tasting on the vineyard's lawn

We drove to the Cape of Good Hope, near the southern tip of Africa, taking the Chapman's Peak Drive route--one of the most scenic roads in the world where car commercials are filmed.  Our our way, we also went to Boulders Beach, where there were tons of photogenic penguins walking around on the sand and diving in the surf.  The next day, to continue the animal theme, we went diving with seals.  The animals were so playful.  They would swim right up to us and twirl around us in the water.  I have seen SO many different wild animals the past several weeks.

Photo taken by my friend who had an underwater camera

Unfortunate foggy view at the top of Table Mountain

Our last night in Cape Town we went to an amazing Italian restaurant.  The day before, after climbing Table Mountain, we happened to meet some off-duty chefs sitting next to us at a cafe.  We struck up a conversation in Italian with them, and they invited us to their restaurant.

Bo-Kaap district

We went to a couple adorable weekend markets like this

Cape of Good Hope, near the southern tip of Africa

Klerksdorp

Today is my last day in Klerksdorp, where I've spent the past 6 weeks doing research.  Klerksdorp is a mining, trucking, and agricultural town, all of which contribute to especially high rates of HIV (19% in adults) and TB--“the twins.”  As a result, it is a promising place to do research, but not an exciting place to live.  Klerksdorp is really a town in the middle of the desert, and the weather reflects that.  It goes from 30 degrees at night to 70 degrees during the day.

Tshepong Hospital, where we work, is a public hospital so it serves everyone free.  Anyone we talk to with any money says that if they got sick, they would immediately go to a private hospital instead.  Nonetheless, the South African system works well enough for it to be a model for other countries of Africa.  The doctors are quite multicultural (from India, Europe, Cuba, elsewhere in Africa), but the "sisters" (what they call nurses) and patients are almost all black with the occasional white person.

First thing every day we attend the medicine department's mortality meeting.  Starting every morning by reviewing people who’ve died in the past 24 hours is not as sobering as it seems, and it marks the beginning of day full of learning for me.  After that, I attend morning rounds in the wards with the other SA medicine students doing a rotation at Klerksdorp.  Seeing patients on rounds has been the best part of this whole summer.  It's thrilling to see how what I've been furiously studying can be put to use to help people.  I've learned the technique of explaining HIV to patients in terms of soldiers (CD4) versus enemies (viral load).  For the rest of the day, I work on my project analyzing mortality data already collected from the wards.  Because of the prevalence of TB, and multi-drug resistant TB, I wear an N95 mask every time I'm in the wards.  At least it worked well to catch my sneezes when I was sick the first week here.

One day there were protests around the hospital, so we had to take our little Suzuki off-roading to get over makeshift road barricades and find an alternate route home.  I'm so glad to have learned to drive manual this summer...and on the left side of the road.  It's actually the first time I've ever driven abroad, and South African drivers are really not too hectic.

In the late afternoon, the four of us Hopkins students all head to the gym together.  The gym is always full of enormous Afrikaners.  Afrikaners are the descents of Dutch traders who settled at the Cape in the 17th century.  Since then, they were pushed more inland by the British and became farmers in places like Klerksdorp.  They are all natural born rugby players, and mostly blond.  They all expect us, as fellow white people, to speak Afrikaans.  It always happens that someone will come up to me and rattle off a full three sentences or more in Afrikaans before I have a chance to explain that I don't understand.  Before coming to South Africa, I thought the language would be more stigmatized and not so many people would still speak it.  However, it is still alive and well.  There are even universities where lectures are unofficially given in Afrikaans, even though they ostensibly follow an English-language curriculum.  There exist many Afrikaans elementary schools, where English or even Dutch is taught as the second language.  Less commonly, Tseswana might be taught as a second language at an English school.  There are 11 official languages in South Africa.  I really recommend Trevor Noah's book Born a Crime for learning about the racial dynamics in this country.

Durban July

My Bloomberg friend and I caught a ride with a doctor who was going to Durban for the weekend to play volleyball.  A weekend was enough time to see everything in the city, and the best part was the WARM weather compared to Klerksdorp, especially at night.  The city was packed because of a surfing competition and the famous horse race Durban July, which involves a lot of city-wide partying and costumes.  We barely managed to get a couple beds in a hostel (on the popping Florida St).

Moses Mabhida Stadium, hosted games during the World Cup 2010

Durban Botanic Gardens

Dinky Donuts on the boardwalk 

No one knows how to swim, but everyone jumps into the waves anyways.  Only a very small slice of the beach is allowed for swimming so that the lifeguards can keep up with all the floundering swimmers.

Moses Mabhida Stadium in the distance

South African Culture

It's been difficult to get a clear sense of South African "culture."  First and foremost, South Africans are very friendly and family-oriented.  They take the time to greet everyone always.  When picking up a call from an unknown number, they ask "How are you?" before asking "Who is this?"  I've heard theories about this cultural practice in other Sub-Saharan African countries with a history of violence between ethnic groups as part of a desire to maintain the peace.

On a city level, the culture is not very engaging for tourists.  Typical cultural activities/attractions have been hard to come by, ie sights, arts, interesting festivals, unique places to visit.  On the other hand, it should be noted that it IS winter and I'm living in a fairly rural town.  Still, we were a bit bored when in Johannesburg and later Durban each for several days.  What most locals do on the weekend is 1. braai (*the beloved SA form of barbecue, but I'll save that for another post on food), 2. drink alcohol, and 3. visit the mall.

Starting at 3:30pm on Friday, everyone races out of work.  The liquor store had a line of cars out the parking lot when we passed.  The hospital frantically tries to clear beds because weekend alcohol-related violence is so bad that "casualties" (what they call the ER) is swamped.  As one "registrar" (what they call residents) put it, people start drinking Friday night, start getting stabbed Saturday, and start realizing they've been stabbed by Sunday.

South Africa has a very high rate of violent crime.  This probably contributes to the lack of street culture because people don't walk anywhere or even exit their cars unless they are poor.  All the houses are surrounded by tall walls with barbed wire and electric gates.  Most of all, people like to talk about how unsafe it is.

The malls are just like American malls, if not more boring, but still locals refer us to them as "can't miss" attractions.  They have wifi and air conditioning and Western-style fast food restaurants—all requirements for the bourgeoise to demonstrate their status, a theory for their popularity in so many developing countries (see the book Lost in Mall: An Ethnography of Middle-Class Jakarta in the 1990s).

All this is not to say that South Africa doesn't have a vibrant culture in its own right.  It DOES have culture in the way that people think and view the world is unique and complex and intimately tied to the country’s history.  Identity in particular is so multi-faceted, but one Sunday a couple weeks ago we got a chance to better understand some aspects.  Through a connection at the hospital, we were invited by an old farmer couple to visit their vast land holdings where they breed race horses.  The family has owned the land since a British grandfather arrived 150 years ago and was told to ride his horse for an hour in one direction, turn 90 degrees, ride for another hour, and turn again until he made a square of land that would then be his.  He built the manor in which the family still lives.  The current farmer/horse breeder graciously drove us for a tour where we stood in the bed of his "bakkie" (what they call pick-up trucks), right behind the cab, to have a good view of the antelope, meerkats, and other animals on the plains.

The land also happened to contain a National Heritage Site of rock engravings done by Bushman people.  We had to trek through the bush and wander until we found them, as they were very understated and hidden, despite being rather famous.  The farmer relayed to us the history of the original peoples on the land.  The whole experience was incredible for better understanding South Africa.  In particular, we got an inside look into how the well-off, white, rural South African population lives.  Clearly this couple's home and history were here in Klerksdorp, and they feel very connected to South Africa.

Afterwards the couple insisted we stay for lots of tea and cookies.  Then they personally sliced us raw antelope meat, shot on their land, served with lemon and wasabi jelly.  (If you're familiar with my iron stomach, it will come as no surprise that, despite my usual vegetarianism, I was the only one to NOT get sick that night from all the carpaccio.)

As a final note on South African culture, the land itself is quite beautiful and a central part of the culture.  Every evening the whole sky is consumed by a rainbow sunset.  I've been pretty lucky in getting to travel across much of the 'Rainbow Nation' and see all the amazing landscapes.  The geography and weather are so diverse that it could be a case study in different meteorological climes.

Atop Drakensberg Mountain Range

Drakensberg Mountain Range

Ladder down the side of a cliff to climb the Drakensberg Amphitheatre