Almost two weeks

Hi there,
So, tomorrow our big final presentation is due and let me tell you, the caffeine is coursing through the veins of almost every student on this trip. It's been a very intense past two weeks--it happened to fast that it's almost hard to believe that it's over. Katie and I are editing a little sneak peak movie to show during our presentation because we don't exactly have financial models or anything to go over tomorrow.

It gives me the butterflies, I'll try and post the opening scene on the blog, because it's our favorite part, and the best we've got so far. I don't know when we'll finally get it uploaded, because our internet connection is like molasses at best... but I'll set the scene for you. It's a shot I took as I was taking the train with my boys to Khayelitsha, where Cebisa (the c is a click noise, by the way) was going to show us where he grew up and his friends. Anyways, so its the scene through subway doors, and we have text explaining our field study trip and the train's noise fades into "waiting on the world to change" by john mayer. everyone we've force fed it to says they get the chills. I'm excited.

Our lunch time (and dinnner time) meals have become very easy to predict. We think we are SO funny, we'll be walking to the canteen and we'll say, okay, so i bet today, for lunch, we'll have hmmmm bread.... and meat. And voila. I must say, the South Africans are quite creative with combining just two simple ingredients. Samoosas with meat, egg rolls with meat, pies filled with meat, braided rolls filled with meat, tortilla wraps filled with meat, sandwiches filled with meat, muffin things filled with meat, pita pockets filled with meat, the list goes on and on.
they must have run out of ideas today because it was just a chicken wing and a roll. But don't get too excited, generally the meat filling is steak or beef or...something else that is brown and chewy.

Our palettes are definitely overwhelmed meat-wise, that's for sure. At breakfast in the hotel, half of what they offer is a schmorgasbourg (sp? do i care?) of cold cuts and cheese. Lunch is carbs and meat, usually snack is meat and dinner gets topped off with more meat. I will never experience an iron deficiency in my life because of all the meat I am being fed on this trip.

The funniest part of all about lunchtime to me is the meals they invent for the vegetarians in the group. Today, instead of a slab of chicken meat, the vegetarians got chocolate mousse cake. Clearly the nutritional equivalent of a chicken breast. I love when the vegs try and explain to TSiBA students, people we meet or the township people that they're vegetarian. They just look and say, "what?!" and "are you allergic?'' and if we're out to eat, chicken is usually the non-meat offering. It's been interesting to see that specialty diets (for lack of a better term) seem to be a "developed world" concepts. (cept for you buddhists living in countries with emerging markets out there) Here, if you have something to eat, you eat it.

The food item that comes to mind smiley. Smiley is a seared sheep's head, minus the brain of course. (There's a picture of a woman preparing it in an earlier post). People in the townships began eating smiley during apartheid because butcher trucks would drive by and leave the sheep heads in piles in the townships. The rest of the animal was reserved for the whites. It's amazing to think that a small group had such stringent control over an entire nation--down to what they ate.

So, this is me, just musing on food. More to come...no doubt.

dobtown