Day 3 = Nap

Today we had a professor from University of the Western Cape come speak during class. She taught us about the apartheid and how the government was still trying to make up for its wrong doings by appropriating money and land to those who were forced out of their homes. She informed us that the government did not have enough money to give back everything that had been taken or lost, and therefore the settlements the people were being given weren’t really much at all for them to start over. Many people wait for years and years to get any sort of land given to them, but in order to build a house on that land people must have a substantial amount of money to start with, which most don’t. During the apartheid, people were forced to move to areas designated for either Black Africans, coloureds, or whites. The people who were already living in these newly designated areas were therefore required to move or they would be forced out of their homes with their belongings on the street and nowhere to go.

at the V&A Waterfront

After our morning lecture, we were all still pretty jet-lagged and came back to the apartment for an epic nap of about 4 hours. Once we were done with our slumber, we decided to go with a group to Quay 4, a seafood restaurant on the Waterfront. Laura Claire and I decided to split a sampler for one they claimed, and it included mussels, prawn (we weren’t sure exactly what those were), calamari and hake, which is a white flaky fish. It was a huge portion, yet delicious.

This is a prawn, which I'm guessing is a shrimp, just with the body and head still attched. looks mean, right? 

Once we got back to the apartments, we all decided to head over to the hotel bar, (we = all the girls who wanted dessert, chocolate mainly). We all ordered this “hot chocolate pudding” thing, which turned out to be like a small cake with warm gooey chocolate inside and then a ice cream with a crunch toffee outer shell. Fabulous, as you can imagine. As we were waiting for dessert, we met two older men- the more intoxicated of the two decided that I must be Polish. He claimed that if he were to see me on the street, he would speak to me as though I were a Pole. –Definitely never been told that before! I then informed them that I was actually Irish, mainly from my mother’s side. The other man with him turned out to be a Scots-Irishman like me (minus the man part of course). 

group of us down at the Waterfront