Oakwood Lodge Bed and Breakfast Durban

... in Durban is limited. Despite almost constant rain, I've enjoyed walking around the city a bit and visiting several small museums.

Tomorrow I'm heading up into the northern Drakensberg mountains, where I hope the weather will be good enough to hike and ride horseback over the next couple of days.

... back to the fact that I hardly see any white people around. The only other white people I saw were a German tourist (well she looked so German to me) and a group of people on their cigarette break outside what appeared to be a bank I think. I really have the impression that it is really difficult for the blacks to get access to the best jobs and that the best paid jobs are occupied by the whites. You very often see a white boss with black employees ...

... experience one week-end when Lew and Bo, my new friends, took Michael (my French travel mate who has left Europe 4 years ago and traveled/worked in Africa), Maxime (a French trainee working with Lew in a solar panel company), and me to ZUVUYA to celebrate the winter solstice...The name itself creates expectations...
It is a kind of community farm or eco-village in the mountains where 11 adults and their 7 children ...

... groom's family. At this point the bride and groom had both changed into traditional clothing. It's kinda hard to describe, but she wore a colorful dress with a head wrap and he wore animal hide and leather- probably what you would think an African tribal man would wear. [By the way, there are still a lot of traditional practices here- including the paying of lobola. Men are expected to pay the bride's family a gift of eleven cows in ...

South Africa is really... white. Durban is dangerous at night and there
is a huge mall. They have blackouts every day for two hours at two in
the afternoon, and even the malls shut down.

It's been a long time since I've updated my blog. Please accept my apologies. My faculty advisor from UT came on March 3 for my mid-semester evaluation. I was really worried about the evaluation as I hadn't been able to complete a number of the tasks that were agreed upon before my arrival. Thankfully, Dr. Gilbert was very understanding and appreciative of my efforts thus far. Surprisingly, I received an entirely different ...

... without a car as there's limited bus routes even during the day. She said that if I lived where she did that I could easily get a bus downtown, for example, during the day. She recommended that I take taxis everywhere during the day from where I'm living. As I learned today, that's a very expensive proposition. I'm really discouraged about the transportation issue as I am basically dependent on other people, even to get to work every day, as I ...

We spent the rest of our time in Durban meeting up with friends and family, a bit of shopping, coffeeshops, and just generally loafing around. On one of the days we went north of Durban to Umdloti Beach for lunch. This is a really wild part of the ocean so we just walked along the edge of the water and still managed to get quite drenched! So, all in all, a bit of a strange time for me but it was really great to see my mother and sister.

... later, another wave of nausea and again I fed the fish. But once again I felt fine afterward. I stayed out for the entire time the scuba divers were under the water but 4 of the 8 divers ended up coming up early. One guy was very sick. The swells and surges of the ocean were tough on the divers as well as I could see them getting pushed around by the current and the swells. The 2 Germans who I knew said it was actually quite difficult as you had to ...

... work on HIV related health. It was an impressive building that buzzed with activity. The level of research taking place within those walls was inspiring, and really showed the complexity of dealing with disease. But what about TB? How does that factor in, and is anyone interested? It's a difficult question to answer. Of course TB is important, it kills millions of people each year and is spread so easily, passing from person to person through the ...