We spent our first weekend in Durban! They let us stay in a backpacker hostel in the city on friday night, to give us a break from our host families and vice versa. It was fun to explore the city a little bit. They are building a ton of stuff in prep for the 2010 world cup, so you can see all the enormous construction for the field/dome, as well as a bunch of hotels and stuff. We spent friday night on Florida Rd, which is where everything happens in Durban. Saturday we went to the beach, and got really horrible sunburns-which has been making my role as a human jungle-gym for all the neighborhood kids pretty painful. Black people don't understand the concept of sunburn, and are really facinated with poking your skin. And then we headed back to Cato in the evening.

This week we're mostly in the classroom hearing lectures. A typical day in Cato Manor/at school:
I wake up around 5:45 am, and then have until 7 to splashbath, eat, and get ready for school. We get picked up in a minibus at 7 by our driver/zulu instructor Thula, who's pretty cool. We usually have 3 two or two and a half hour lectures each day, with breaks in between. Thula drives us home around 5 or 5 30. Usually, I play outside with kids until it gets dark around 7 30. My family usually eats dinner at 8, when Generations, the national Soappie that everybody watches religiously, comes on. And then time for homework and bed.

This weekend we're heading to a rural village to study the SA gov't Sustainable Integrated Development Plan or something. The village is called Gxwetlintaba (the x is a click), and it's in the Transkei, which is about 400k south/west of here on the coast. On sat a bunch of us are going on an all day hike in the Drakensburg Mountains, which should be pretty fun, and then we'll be living in the village until tuesday.