Week 1 Part 1
Week 1 Part 2
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6 Part 1
Week 6 Part 2
Week 6 Part 3
Week 7 Part 1
Week 7 Part 2
Week 8
Week 9 Part 1
Week 9 Part 2
Week 10 Part 1
Week 10 Part 2
Mfuleni
2008/10/08
2008/10/08
This week a charity organisation offered the possibility to help building a house in the Mfuleni Township. As one of the last Townships were the government started to built stoned houses, the Township still lacked of houses. The charity offered students the chance to join the workers and to come in contact with the locals. On the first three days the walls were built whilst on the fourth day it was time to build the roof. On the Friday the students would finish the work and the house would be ready. This event was introduced to us by Minélle, one of our teachers. She, unfortunately left the school the week before and started working at another one.
My host sister, Mirjam (a schoolmate) and I decided to join the project on Thursday and asked Minélle to take us to the Township. She was also interested in taking part but wasn't allowed to join as a member of our school any more. What's more, there were only three person at a time allowed to help. Nevertheless, we managed to enter as four persons the project.
Our target was to implement the roof, which seems to be a great deal of work. Firstly we had to move the wooden struts to the top. While we were pushing and pulling, the first stones of the walls broke and fell down. After a while we managed to position the struts and started to fix the water proofed foil. After that we put hundreds of tiles on the roof by using the typical working procedure of South Africa. Like the European citizens in the middle age when they tried to kill a fire, we stand in a raw and handed tiles over to the next person in the chain.
Beside the roof, we also worked at the walls, repaired them, closed holes with dagar and covered the wooden window frames with water proof lacquer. The family who will live in the house, provided us with coffee and cake, lunch and drinks. At 4 PM we finished and decided to keep the rest for the next group. On our way back we visited the area of Summerset West and The beach area called Strand.
Kirstenbosch
2008/10/11
2008/10/11
It's time to test some wine. On this Saturday, we'd booked a wine testing tour in Kirstenbosch. This is one of loads of interesting areas for wine tester. The tour started at nine o'clock in the morning and we went to the first wine cellar, which we reached at 10 am. Having the next appointment at eleven, we had only have an hour to test six different wines. Obviously there wasn't enough time to buy any wine.
The next stop was a tour through a wine cellar. The tour was short and the explanations nearly not understandable because of the noise arround us. The wine testing, though, took place in a nice ambient. We were offered some interesting wines while we were standing a part of the wine cellar where several famous wines were stored. Afterwards we again got the opportunity to buy wine.
For lunch we were driven to the city called ... (sorry, I forgot the name.) There we ate in one of the best restaurants of South Africa. The food was really delicious, although we had to use a magnifying glass to find it. Unfortunately the serving took that much time, that we saw hardly anything of the city.
A third wine cellar with some more wines was our destination after lunch. Situated on a beautiful property, the ambience was again really great. The wines were not special but okay. As a last stop we visited a souvenir shop near to Kirstenbosch, which offered a lot of unusual things.