And so it begins..

Today, I left my wonderful hostel for the luxury of having a private bathroom, electronic key, and one roommate. She is arriving tomorrow sometime, so I have my own room tonight! Oh, and chocolates on the pillow. A step up, I must admit. My program officially began today and I met almost everyone. There are 10 people with 4 of us from GW. Everyone seems very nice and so eager to begin. I am so happy to finally meet them. I met 3 of the girls today when I was checking in and we went to Green Market Square. A vender was a very good salesman, but at the end we promised to come back on our last day, November 15. He was trying to sell us little hippos. He said us that because our "green papers" said "In God we trust" that he "trusts in us!"
We briefly went over the plan for the next couple of weeks because classes don't begin until 25 July. Surprise, surprise, we're going to Table Mountain sometime in the next few days. I'm becoming a regular there. A good place to be known! We're going on a tour of a township as well. If the weather keeps up, we'll go down to the Cape of Good Hope, the most southern tip in Africa, and where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. Maybe I'll even get to see some penguins. Tomorrow, we're just having some more meetings and we'll be able to buy a cell phone. Besides Junior 4 Point at Gould (8 days in the winter woods), this is the longest I have gone in a long time without a cell phone. It's been nice, but frustrating at times. If I want to know the name of a song on the radio at home, I can just hold my phone up and it identifies the title and artist. If I want to know something quickly, I can just google it. Not here! I won't have a smart phone here, just a little one to text my friends here.
Tonight, we went out to dinner and it was fun trying to figure out the rand to dollar conversions. It's getting a little easier, but still so much harder than the euro. I'm looking forward to learning even more about CIEE and the service programs we'll be doing over the next 4 months. I'll learn about Cape Town's history, as well as South Africa's. It will be an information packed couple of weeks for me over here, but I'm so ready for it to begin.

On the picture front, it seems impossible to find anything compatible with my version of Mac. I guess it's too new? Oh well, I will get them up soon! I am getting sick of only looking at them on a 3" screen.