After three weeks of touring around South Africa, meeting countless people and becoming acquainted with Cape Town, I can finally say that school has begun and I have completed my first week of classes.
Although I’m excited about diving into my courses, I dread the walk to campus every morning. My morning routine back at USC consists of waking up, maybe having breakfast, and hoping on my beach cruiser for a 5-to-10-minute bike ride to class. Nice and easy.
Yet, now, I leave the house about 30 minutes before class begins equipped with a full water bottle and as little as possible in my tote bag to help ease the steep, uphill walk to campus. On really hot days, I feel like there’s no point in wearing cute clothes or spending time on my hair because by the time I get to campus, I look like a hot mess. The walk to campus is much like walking on an incline on a treadmill for 15 minutes; it’s a solid workout.
Even after just one week though, the walk to campus is getting easier each day and once I’m there, I can only be happy walking between the beautiful ivy-covered buildings and seeing a panoramic view of Cape Town from the middle of campus.
This semester, I am finishing my international relations minor by taking two upper-division elective courses, in addition to two more courses of my choice:
HST 3024F: War and Genocide
HST 2032F: Southern Africa to 1900
SLL 1042F: Afrikaans Intensive A
MUZ 1201F: African Instruments (for study abroad students only)
**”F” stands for “first semester.” The seasons are opposite hear so our spring semester is their fall, or first, semester.
So far, Afrikaans is my most fun class. Everyone in the class has zero experience in the language and is open to learning by making silly pronunciation mistakes every class. Afrikaans is similar to Dutch and sometimes sounds just like English, but with a South African/Dutch accent. For example, “what” translates to “wat” and is pronounced phonetically like “vat.”
The best thing about the language is that the verbs are not conjugated. There is one verb for a particular meaning and it keeps the same form for every subject. Also, some words in English are the same word (but said with an accent) in Afrikaans. For example, “student” translates to “student,” but the “-ent” part of word is pronounced harsher and emphasizes the “t” at the end. (Look at the title of this blog post for a complete sentence in Afrikaans using the word “student.” It reads, “I am a student at the University of Cape Town.”)
The professor promised that we would be fluent by the end of the course, which I’m not sure if I fully believe, but I have definitely learned a lot in just the first week. I even read a candy bar at the grocery store the other day that was written in Afrikaans.
During orientation, CIEE and UCT scared us by saying that courses here are very difficult and we cannot afford to slack off, which I agree with; however, after reviewing the syllabi for all of my courses and going to several classes, I do not think there is any reason to stress about these classes being more difficult than what I am used to at USC. Of course, they are college-level courses, so they are not going to be easy, but I feel prepared and am actually excited to learn and take these unique courses that I could not have otherwise taken at USC.
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