Another week almost over

It's Thursday already... which seems quite surprising. Time's kind of flying by.

My fan miraculously started working again, which was extremely exciting. I slept so well the night it turned on again!

Classes this week have been a bit more challenging. I had my first tutorial in my politics class, which all of us international students were completely unprepared for. Apparently it goes unsaid that an essay is also due along with the reading assingments in your tutorial. We found out from a second year student who's in our class the night before we had the tut. I had done all the readings, so it wasn't that big of a deal... until I was sitting in the tutorial and saw everyone else turning in 4 page essays while I turned in my page and a half assignment. I also talked to the tutor guy and he was telling me how we should have answered the question -- apparently we were supposed to summarize all of the readings and then answer the question, rather than simply answer the question. So I probably won't be getting a good grade on the assignment, and in the future I guess I will just summarize then answer since most of the reading wasn't relevant to the question we were to answer. It was also interesting being the only American in my tutorial because people don't think about watching what they say as much... they didn't say anything outright negative, but there was definitely a tone behind what they were saying.

We have a zulu test coming up in a week and a half... so I've been trying to come up with a game plan for preparing for that. I spent a few hours typing up the notes in a way that made more sense to me, because they worksheets they give us are illogically organized. I have to say though, learning zulu here is definitely a very different experience from any of the language learning experiences I've had in the States. We jumped straight in, there was no going over the alphabet or phonetic sounds... we didn't start with numbers, days of the week, and colors. We started with things that will actually be conversationally helpful. Right now I still require cues from my notes, but I'm starting to get the hang of it, and soon I think I'd be able to hold a conversation with a native speaker.

I'm getting really excited about all of the traveling I'll be doing in the next month or two. Not this weekend but the next is our group trip to the Drakensberg mountains along with Zulu Falls, Zulu land, and possibly a short game reserve trip. Then the Wednesday after that I'm taking an extended weekend trip to Capetown. For Easter break (fall break here) I'm planning on going to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia... though the groups of who's going hasn't been entirely decided yet. It seems like pretty much everyone is going to those places, but in what order, where they're staying, and what they're doing is yet to be determined. I know which group I'd prefer to go with, just have to figure out if it's really happening or not. Either way it should be an incredible experience!

That's about it for now... hopefully I'll have something exciting to report after the weekend.