Hello everybody! I have sailed past the half-way point of my time here in Cape Town but do not have much new to share. It was a pretty typical week. Nothing out of the ordinary at work this week. I spent the second half of the week working from home so that I could use my personal computer to tag photos. The computer at work is fairly old and the most photos I have been able to process in one day has been 7,000. By staying home and using my personal computer I was able to process 23,000 photos in one day and I even got to sleep in a bit. I have a little under 30,000 more photos to process so I will probably stay home a day or two this next week to get those completed and off my plate for the rest of my time here. After I complete the photo processing I will clean up the excel sheets and most likely be done with that project. Other than photos, I helped the monitors clean out the boma on Tuesday (which is literally just raking and shoveling eland feces) and helped with some more trailer training. That was all that happened at work.
On the activities side, I hiked Table Mountain, went to a market, casino, and a movie. On Friday the VAC activity was a hike to an area called Cecilia Forest, as this did not interest me and some of the other interns we decided to hike Table Mountain instead. This meant two hours straight up the side of the mountain. It was definitely the most difficult hike that I have encountered here in South Africa but good news, we were able to take the cable car back down. What took two hours to climb, took only about three minutes to go down. It was an exhausting trek but we all felt very accomplished to reach the top, especially after seeing all the people who took the cable car to the top rather than hiking. On Saturday we went to Mojo Market in Sea Point. It was a very stormy day so it was nice to find an indoor market with heaters. It was just a small food market with a few trinket and clothes shops. I had a Korean chicken dish that was pretty tasty. Later Saturday evening a group of us went to the GrandWest Casino. We did not go there to gamble however. The casino is a complex that has a food court, ice skating rink, the casino (obviously), and a movie theater. The theater is the reason we went, although we did try our hand at some gambling. It did not go well. We couldn’t even get the slot machines to take our money, so we left without gaining, or losing. The movie we went to was Crazy Rich Asians. I enjoyed it and it was nice to sit down and veg out for a couple of hours instead of always trying to find something to do. On Sunday I took a lazy day, did my laundry, went to the store, read (I am currently reading Trevor Noah’s book titled Born a Crime) and watched some Netflix (currently into Black Mirror). It was a pretty mellow week.
We will see what this next week holds.
