Now that I actually have work to do, I am quickly discovering that it is nearly impossible to get anything productive done around here. The weather is almost always perfect and the beach (or anything, really) is always more tempting that homework...but I promise I'm not slacking off too much. It's still hard to gauge how difficult the courses are here because I haven't actually had anything graded and returned to me yet, but it really seems pretty managable. My sociology of poverty and development class is really interesting and I'm starting to think that that might be something I would like to look into for the future, but then again, who knows with me. I change my mind every other day. My history class on liberation movements in southern africa is actually kind of disappointing because the lectures are always really disjointed and you kind of end up feeling like you're not sure how 45 minutes went by of the prof talking but you not actually gaining any knowledge, but we have a lot of guest speakers in the class, so some of them have definitely been worth while. The professor also gave us a HUGE reading list (literally at least 100 books) obviously without intending for us to read them all, but he didn't give any kind of hierarchy and you just never know what he's going to lecture on, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be reading for that class, so I'm just picking at random. I just read the autobiography of Albert Luthuli, who was the president of the African National Congress and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote his autobiography much earlier in the struggle than Mandela, so it was really interesting to compare their perspectives, especially since Mandela lead the militant branch of the ANC and Luthuli was fairly opposed to armed resistance. So even if the class isn't that great, the library at UCT has an amazing selection of readings on the topic that you can find on your own.

Tuesday I went to SHAWCO again to actually teach the first lesson. It was a bit tougher than the fun day because now the kids actually had to do work. My four kids all know each other, so there was a lot of typical 13-year-old stuff to deal with, like people kicking each other under the table and teasing each other. It was interesting to observe that they (at least my 4 kids) have no interesting in writing whatsoever. It was painful to try to get them to focus and write a single sentence, but as soon as we started on the math problems, they were much more interested and listened very well. So basically the opposite of me, but I think it'll get easier as the weeks go on.

After class on Friday, me and Zoe and Natasha (housemates) took the train to this really funky hippie town right on the coast called Kalk Bay. It is definitely now in the running for new favorite place that I've been. There were tons of thrift/antique stores, lots of cool clothes, and an endless series of ice cream shops, so basically I was in heaven and spent way too much money. One of the thrift stores actually sold old postcards that people had sent from South Africa and another had old Iowa lisence plates!

This weekend I also climbed Devil's Peak with the Mountain and Ski club (yeah, you can actually ski here in the winter...crazy, I know). Devil's Peak is the mountain that is the backdrop of the UCT campus, and I have to climb a little bit of it every day to get to campus, so I figured I couldn't leave without actually climbing the whole thing. It's about 3000 feet, though, and it was probably about 1 part hiking and 2 parts rock climbing. When we got to the very top, we were completely in the clouds and couldn't actually see the view, which was kind of disappointing, but you didn't have to go very far down to get out of the clouds and the views were amazing. The first picture on this post is Devil's Peak and the UCT campus and the second is the view of Lion's Head from Devil's Peak.