We are Family!

My parents arrived in Cape Town on the 22nd of June.  I met them at a hotel in the city where we were going to stay for a few nights before starting our family road trip.  I'm not going to blog about everything that we did because it would be another blog in itself.  But, I'll give a brief summery.

Essentially, my family arrived, rented a car and then we spent around 3 weeks driving around South Africa.  We started in the south-western corner (Cape Town and Stellenbosch) and headed north-east towards Johannesburg and Soweto.  Along the way, we stopped at a bunch of places along the way including a humongous hole in the ground that used to be a diamond mine, and the Apartheid Museum in Jo'burg.  We made it to the eastern edge and drove around Etosha National Park.  Then we started heading south and hugged the coastline.  We stopped in the province of Kwazulu-Natal in a town called Eshowe where we first went to a cultural museum and then tried tripe and boiled dumplings in a basement of a local "restaurant."  We went hiking in the Drakensberg Mountains that border Lesotho, then drove through the Eastern Cape to Cape Agulhas (the southern most tip of Africa).  We finally made it back to Stellenbosch to celebrate my brother and mine 21st birthday.  We spent one more night in Cape Town and then we all got on airplanes.  My family was heading back to the US and I was heading to Malawi for a little more than two weeks of work at a non-profit.

It was so fun to travel with my family.  Not only was it great to finally see them in person, despite all of our video chatting, but it was fun to show them around where I had been living for around 6 months.  I was able to show them the classroom I worked in, the tire playground we built with the learners in their school yard and to cross the bridge that I bungee jumped off.  It was also nice to experience entirely new parts of the country and to learn more about its history and culture.  It was fun to see some of the places that I had learned and read about in my history class or heard other people talk about.

We took several hundred photos, so I'll only post some of the highlights here.

This is how I spent the first evening with my family - eating by myself and watching a movie and my family sleep.  I forgot that they wouldn't be used to the time change.

Planning our trip...

We spent the first day at Boudler Beach (penguins) and Cape Point.

It was fun to show my family where I had spent so much of my time and energy during the semester.  One of the projects that I helped with was building a play structure with the learners at Lynedoch.  My brothers and I are standing on our tire "snake" that we built with the grade 3 and 4 students.

In the distance is the Afrikaans Language Monument, which was built in the 70s to signify the importance of the Afrikaans language as well as the Afrikaner people.  

Just chillin' with the family - watching the Lion King.

Vineyards in the fall.

A typical dinner - cooking with a water boiler in whatever hotel/hostel/bed and breakfast type place we found for the night.

When my family asked if there was anything that I wanted to do before I left, one of the only things I really wanted to see was the Apartheid Museum near Jo'burg.

One of the interesting things the museum did was to categorize you by race according to your ticket.  Then we had to go in different doors and saw different things when first entering the museum.  It was a powerful way of giving visitors a tiny taste of what daily life was like under the apartheid regime.

Some of the sculpture outside of the museum.

At the end of the museum, there was an art instillation where guests got to pick a colored stick according to different values.  You then took a stick and placed it in boxes.  Funnily enough, each one of us took a different of the 5 colors.

Soweto was incredible.  It used to be a huge slum, and it still is a very poor area, but it has developed a little bit.  Soweto is short for "South West Township" and was were several influential anti-apartheid fighters were born like Oliver Tambo who helped start the ANC Youth League.  A huge student uprising against the introduction of Afrikaans as the main language in schools also took place here in the 70s.  What was most incredible about the area, however, was the shear number of houses and people living in the area.  It is kind of hard to tell, but on the hill behind all the cars are houses.  It was like this on all sides - a sea of houses for as far as the eye could see.