Ew. Study? But I'm in South Africa! I don't want to study. Well at 11 on Monday morning, I had to show up in my first class on this side of the world: Politics and Economic Perspectives in South Africa. We had several hundred pages of reading due, but don't worry. I skimmed it all. :)
My professor is fantastic! A two hour history lecture went by without me even looking at the clock once! It was a quick summary of South African history in a nutshell to prepare us for everything else in the course. I think it is going to be a great course.
After class I went to the student center, which was mobbed and had a DJ and was basically like a show going on. What?! Norris never has that kind of crowd. But Norris isn't exactly like a mall with a salon and spa and phone store and movie theater and candy shop and tons of kiosks and an antelope burger joint and lots of sandwich shops and banks either. And Northwestern isn't exactly home to the best college rugby team either. Monday was the championship game for NCAA basketball back in the States. But here in Stellenbosch, Monday was the championship game for college rugby. It was a huge deal! The Stellenbosch Maties, undefeated all season were matched up against the Pretoria Tuks. Being great supportive Maties fans, we all bought our R20 student tickets ($2.22) and went to the game. We got there two hours early since we were a tiny bit overexcited, but the stadium was already filling up as it drew closer to kickoff (I am not sure that's what it's called), I could feel the excitement mounting in the stands. It was also a gorgeous sunset just behind the stadium. Ryan Field needs a mountain behind it I decided.
There were school boys - yes, South African kids have to wear uniforms and the ones that go to private schools wear these fancy red uniforms with dorky shorts and jackets and long socks and look like they walked out of a different century. But they were handing out these giant pink cardboard posters that said something in Afrikaans on them on the front. We assumed they were for us to sit on, so we all sat on them. But then we realized that they also had something taped to the back. The Varsity Cup was speaking out against abuse against women and wanted all the fans in the student section to form a giant pink wall with the posters during the singing of the South African national anthem and every time...some rubgy rules I did not understand. I got even more excited and couldn't wait to participate and show my support for women in a country where gender violence is higher than it is anywhere else in the world and where women's rights are abused as a norm.
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| Some things just don't change no matter where you are... |
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| ...Such as the flag spread out on a field during the national anthem being sung at a sports event. |
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| The complexity of the rules and the physicality of the sports... |
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| ...is not one of those things that doesn't change. |
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I am sad to report that the Maties lost the game. It would be more accurate to say that they were brutally pummeled and crushed at a whopping score of 45-5. All I know is that the Tuks managed to have a guy leap under the goalposts a lot more times than the Maties. I can now tell you that rugby games are comprised of two 40 minute halves. There is a thing called a ruck where the two teams get into a pyramid formation and have momentary amnesia and think they are all on the wrestling team and then recover from their amnesia and one of them grabs the ball, a sad-looking deflated version of an American football, and throws it. I also observed that the ball is always passed backwards in rugby - you can't throw it forward. I also observed a few people get injured, and one guy was unable to move and was taken off the field in a stretcher; I'm pretty sure he broke his leg. All in all it was a sad evening for the Maties. But I have now experienced college rugby in the most avid rugby-playing nation in the world. And it wasn't just any ordinary rugby game, but their varsity national championship game. Oh, in case you were wondering, Prof and Pokkel both came out and entertained the crowd. It was great. I considered checking out when mascot try-outs were...
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