47. Can't be a tourist forever

Wednesday 29 May, I felt a tiny bit sad to be back in Stellenbosch. The Garden Route trip was so fun, and I hadn't really anticipated it that much because I'd been so busy leading up to it that it was kind of a surprise for me. I hadn't mentally prepared myself for five of the most beautiful, exciting, wonderful and carefree days of my life. But you can't go on being a tourist forever. And I wouldn't really want to, but that doesn't make the first day back in reality any easier. Everyone was kind of bummed and sad I think, just realizing that we only had two and half weeks left in the program and most of that time was designated for writing papers, giving presentations and taking finals. Ewww.

But they let us ease back into class with a movie on Wednesday morning. We watched The Bang Bang Club about a group of photographers who worked for The Star, a paper in Johannesburg, during the final years of apartheid and the transition years. There was so much violence and bloodshed in the townships between the government-sponsored, Zulu Nationalism Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC "Mandela boys." Anyway, it was a really interesting movie. Here's the trailer if you're interested. I would definitely recommend the movie, but I have to warn you it's intense and there's lots of not so pretty things, but then again, reality, especially in apartheid-era South Africa was not something pretty.

Then in the afternoon, an Art History professor from UCT (University of Cape Town) came to lecture us about landscape art and South African history. It was kind of interesting, but his target audience was definitely a classroom full of grad students studying the art history of politics, not twenty undergrad American study abroad students who got back last night from a five day road trip on South Africa's garden route. I alternated between being fascinated and falling asleep. But c'est la vie.