It's actually been cold (yeah, we're roughin' it here in the 55 degree weather...) and kind of rainy here the last couple of days, so no beach or hiking adventures yet. It's supposed to warm up soon though. But we went into town to Long Street, which is where a lot of the backpacking hostels are, so there are lots of cool restaurants and markets. The markets have lots of very touristy things and you see a lot of the same pieces at different stalls, so it's probably mass-produced with tourists in mind, but l will definitely end up buying stuff regardless :) You have to haggle on prices, which is definitely not my strong suit. And it's a little intimidating being pressured to buy things, but they have a lot of jewelery and art and drums and such. We had lunch on Long street and one of my adventurous roommates ordered ostrich, which I was not brave enough to try, although I did order sticky toffee pudding, which, as Becks knows, is quite possibly the best dessert ever created. We also had our first braai (aka BBQ) at the house today! Even though is rained a little bit, it was still nice to cook all together and we had a lot of fun using the word "braai" as often as possible. Mom, we even made bananas with chocolate on the grill...delicious.

Also, we asked our cab driver the other day what the huge fenced in area right down the road from us is and he told it that it is the Parliament building and President Mbeke's house! You can't see any building from outside the fence, so we had no idea. I can't believe we didn't hear anything about that before now, but kinda cool, yeah?

Other good news, though, is that we actually have working internet in our house now! Every time someone has to come to your house to install something or fix something, they never call ahead or schedule a time or anything. Its just kind of "well, I should come by sometime tomorrow (read: next Tuesday) and we'll have that in for you juuuuuuuuuuuuust now." So you either have to wait around for a week, or cross your fingers that someone is home to let the person in. So, needless to say, after a couple times of missing the internet guy (who was very nice, but also quite dorky so we dubbed him Eugene even though his name turned out to be Barry...) we are up and running! When Eugene was installing it, that last thing he had to do was glue one of the wires to the wall, and we all sat, impatient and antsy, in the living room and starred as he VERY meticulously glued a single centimeter of the wire down the length of the wall and then waited for that centimeter to dry before moving on. I'm surprised someone didn't strangle him before he finished. We were all so overjoyed to have internet that we stayed in on Friday and all sat around on our computers...kinda sad, but it was amazing what a loss we were at without it. So anyway, hopefully I should be more reliable with emails and such now. Miss you guys.