At night a bunch of us went to a soccer game at the Green Point Stadium. Cape Town Ajax (pronounced Ahax, I think its portuguese) played the Orlando Pirates (Johannesburg). In case you don’t know, Green Point Stadium is the World Cup stadium, which was really cool to see. There was 14 of us going, but somehow we only had 12 tickets, which we didn’t notice until we were on the way. So when we got there everyone was confused about what to do, so I ran off and asked everyone (really, I pretty much asked every person I saw) if they were selling tickets. Most people were looking for tickets and I started to think that it might be a lost cause, when I finally found 2. I fought someone for them, not physically, but argued a bit, and got the tickets. They were in the 2nd row and seemed like pretty good seats, so my friend Ally and I took them. Getting in the stadium was interesting, there were really long lines to get our tickets scanned, and when we got to the front it was just a big pack of people. Of course, at that moment security decided to not let people in for some unknown reason, and the crowd was getting antsy, it was about 2 minutes from kickoff and we were right at the front. All of a sudden people had a brilliant idea to start pushing, which didn’t help. It wasn’t as bad on our side, but next to us was pretty bad with a pack of guys shoving the whole crowd right against the gates, security responded by refusing to let people in until a line was formed, which of course wasn’t happening, and they continued to push. It looked incredibly painful. Eventually security gave in before people got hurt and we got in right after kick-off. Ally and I were opposite the rest of the crew, but had amazing seats. We ended up being surrounded by Pirates fans, we decided to root for them. It’s not like we had team loyalty anyways. We were in an intense section, and stood on our seats the whole time, dancing and singing the cheers with the crowd. None of the cheers were in English so we had no idea what we were saying, but we went along with it and the crowd loved us, when we left all the people around us shook our hands. The game ended in a tie, but it was such an amazing night.
Early saturday morning we left for an overnight getaway with most of our program. A few people stayed behind to go to Afrikaburn, which is similar to Burning Man. We drove for about 3 hours until we got a township called Touwsrivier. It’s a very poor, colored, Afrikaans town, and we were volunteering at the school for children up to the 5th grade. The school was one room, there was 5 teachers, and over 100 children. We separated into groups, my group, Ally, Cali, most of the guys, and I built a jungle gym, and the rest helped paint and decorate. There weren’t really instructions on how to build it, so we figured it out as we went, and finished most of it in about 4 hours. It was difficult but a lot of fun. I like to think I was helpful, thanks to my Dad for teaching me everything I know about building stuff.
After a nice afternoon braii we got back on the road and continued to our destination- Aquila Game Reserve. I was very impressed when we arrived. Alix and I shared a cute chalet, with our own bathroom equipped with an outdoor shower, and an indoor and outdoor fireplace. We got settled and then went on a sunset game drive.It was three hours long, and we saw elephants, rhinos, hippopotami, lions, giraffes, zebras, springbok, ostrich, cape buffalo, wildebeast and some sort of deer/goat things that I can’t remember the name of. It was amazing, and we stopped halfway through and got champagne to watch the sunset. We got back to the game reserve just in time for an amazing buffet dinner and a nice to enjoy good company and the amazing nature we were in. We woke up early the next morning to go for another game drive. It was still dark when I woke, and as I walked outside I saw one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever witnessed. The pink sky was stretching from behind the mountains and the crescent moon was setting behind another set of mountains. That alone was worth getting up so early. Only about half of us got up for this game drive so it was much quieter. We saw all the same animals except for no elephants, and an addition of cheetahs. The cheetahs were rescued for some reason, and were kept in a smaller area, which was sort of cheating. It was really neat though, they were feeding at the time and we got to see them destroy a huge leg of an animal. There is a video I will try to get a hold of. The lions were also interesting, they were playing together, and we witnessed the dominant male have his way with the female lions 4 times. apparently they do it around 30 times a day. It only took him about 30 seconds, he roared pretty loudly after and went to sleep. After the game drive we spent the rest of the day relaxing before driving home.
Moral of the story: I’m never leaving Africa.
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