On Saturday I went to the Aquarium. It is such a relaxing place to go! I loved seeing all the fish and specially the jelly fish they are so cool! They also have a very big predator tank that is very cool...
Yesterday the ABFT had its annual Township Jazz Festival. I was the one in charge of organizing the logistics of the event. It was a fun thing, it went on from 11 am to 3 pm and we hosted the Milton Academy from Boston. The children from our programs performed some songs together with the Milton Academy and also each group had some stuff of their own.
This weekend Elizabeth and I went wine tasting to Stellenbosch! It is sooo pretty there, its almost an hour or 45 min. away from the City and they have like 150 different wineries that you can go and visit. Most of them are free, and the wine is not very expensive at all… we stocked up on good wine and we ate in this really nice place outdoors.. it’s so pretty there.
Nelson Mandela's cell mate Ahmed Kathrada was a Youth Reading Role Model for the ABFT last Thursday. It was very interesting to meet him, he is in many of Mandela's memoires and it is amazing to meet someone who was an active participant in the srtuggle for democracy in South Africa. I was honoured to meet him and I am very glad he agreed to read for our children!
I know I have not written in my blog for quite some time so now I want to catch up on all my new adventures! The weekend of 9-10-11 March was great, it was Peter’s last weekend here and he requested to go to the beach, so on Saturday morning after Elizabeth and I went to this “mystic fair” (they were actual fortune tellers at the fair, it was sooo funny) we picked up Peter and headed to the Indian Ocean to Fish Hoek. It is a very small, quiet beach, very pretty and pleasant. We soaked up the sun for some hours and then we went to this amazing seafood restaurant in Kalk Bay.
After the race there are some tents where they sell food, where people can rest and even get massages, the end of the race (where all the tents were) was 3 blocks away from my house so Elizabeth and I went just for curiosity and it was FULL of people. I wish I had known about this before I got here, maybe I would have liked to participate since it is such a fun thing to do, but I needed to train for about a year and if I had known that before maybe it would have been fun to do it… 
These are two of the girls I worked with the past 2 weeks. Now, I will only be going to the township once a week because they need me more in the office. I think that maybe I can make more of a change here looking for grants and funding and using my skills than trying to do something with children that do not even understand what I want to say.
I was impressed by the austerity of the Castle, I though it was going to be a lot more imposing. Anyway, it still has a very "colonizer" feeling to it. The artifacts and decorations are all imported Dutch things from those times, very old.. I understand why women stayed at home, they had to do so many things! they did not have microwaves, or electrical appliances such as washing machines and other stuff.. I feel so lucky that nowadays women can just do housework and also find a real job and get away with doing both... cause housework does not have to take them all day long..
Justice (the driver of the Foundation) invited me to his son Liya's 1st Birthday party on Saturday. I was very excited to go because I did not know what to expect, my first party at a township! Well, it was a very interesting experience. First of all it was very funny that all the men are drinking outside in the garage (obviously at the end of the night they were all skunk drunk!) and all the women are inside, this is very traditional, the women are cooking or just sitting inside but they cannot go outside with their husbands. The children were all sitting and the music was super loud.. but it was good! the menu was fried chicken, pasta, green salad and lentils, it was pretty good. Peter and I where the only white people at the party (I had never felt soo white!). I also found interesting that all Xhosa women are fat. I asked Peter (he works at Amy Biehl and has lived here for the past 8 months) why was this and he said that in this culture a woman MUST get fat, because it means wealth, and that their husbands actually care for them and for their well-being. If a woman is thin it means that she has to work and that her husband does not feed her well... I thought this is hilarious, cause all the women at the party were fat.. Oh and men like fat women, they are disgusted by thin ones... I just think that is just so different from our standards of what is beautiful and what is not.
This was the cake, a nice truck! made with cookies, gummy bears, licorice and icing... very nice.
The cousins of the Birthday Boy...
They gave us tickets on Tuesday to go to see Il Divo concert in Kirstenbosch Gardens, this group is sooo popular here in SA, they were here for 2 nights and both nights were sold out. Anyway they donated these tickets to the Foundation and everyone from the office went. The place was great, I think it is one of the most beautiful concert setting, you can see the mountains while you sit in the grass and have a picnic, they were some people who even brought bottles of wine or champagne... well NO ONE TOLD ME THAT IT WAS GOING TO BE THIS WAY! I went with nothing! I had no blanket to sit on... no sushi, or sandwiches, or fruit and obviously NO WINE OR CHAMPAGNE! I felt like such a loser... and no one from the office new that either, only Carolyne this Austrian intern that works with us took a blanket but it was too small to share.. Well, taking that out the concert was really funny. It is this group of 4 good looking dudes who sing kind of opera in Spanish and Italian.. it is very hilarious, but anyway it was free!!... so it was OK.. I just think its funny that people here love them so much, I can't figure out why yet...
