Is this a thing?

Tomorrow is my last day at my internship here, so I’m baking chocolate chip cookies today.

I wanted to bring something for my last day, and chocolate chip cookies were the most American treat I could think of. As evidence that people don’t bake chocolate chip cookies here as much as they do in the States:

1. I couldn’t find chocolate chips at the grocery store. I chopped up a Cadbury bar instead, so no big deal.

2. I had a hard time even finding the sugar in the grocery store. It wasn’t by the flour. It was by the tea. All I can think of is that people aren’t in the habit of baking sweet things.

I hate good-byes. I really hate them. Remember how in Steve Carell’s last episode of The Office, Michael Scott leaves town the day before his good-bye party so that he doesn’t have to say good-bye to everyone? I totally get that. I said good-bye to people at church yesterday. One of the ladies I word with will be on leave tomorrow, so I said good-bye to her today. Another co-worker only comes in on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, so I said good-bye to her last week (although she said she might come in tomorrow to say good-bye if the weather is good).

Good-byes are especially bad when it’s people you really like, but haven’t necessarily gotten that close to. Good enough friends that you’ll miss them, but not good enough that you’re likely to actually keep in touch. I guess there’s always Facebook. But some people aren’t on Facebook. Old people, for instance.

Okay, so I know I haven’t posted in a few weeks, so you might all be waiting to hear all about my exciting adventures over the past couple of weeks. There hasn’t been a ton, really. But here are some highlights:

1. I drove down to Cape Point with some interns from Peace Studies master’s program at Notre Dame. It’s popularly (but falsely) believed to be the place where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic motion, and it’s billed as the southwestern-most point of Africa (which doesn’t really mean anything, if you think about it). But I can see why people want it to be those things. It really does feel like the end of the word. It’s this skinny little piece of land with cliffs and beaches and a lighthouse. There are some shipwrecks there (which we didn’t have time to go see), and the whole placec made me the think of pirates and buried treasure. Very fun trip. Also, we saw baboons, sprinkbok, and sea lions. Not all at once. I can’t really picture a place where those three animals would be hanging out together.

2. I spoke in church last week. Afterwards, the best compliment I got was “I loved your talk, and afterwards, I turned to my daughter and said, ‘See what happens when you travel? It turns you into a fascinating person!'” Thanks.

3. I was interviewed on the radio! Well, it was an online radio station. Radio Veritas is the Catholic radio station here and they did an interview with me about my paper I wrote.

4. I finished my paper! I finished it early, so I did another little paper too. My main paper was about public transportation, and my little paper was about wastewater treatment. Yeah, I totally geeked out about South African infrastructure this summer.

On Sunday, the other interns were still off on their trip with both of the cars, so I rode the train to church. I thought it would be good because my research topic this summer is public transportation, but I hadn’t actually used public transportation in South Africa yet.

It was an experience. The train station was pretty empty that early on a Sunday morning. I had a hard time trying to figure out where to buy a ticket. I got hit on by a stoned homeless guy (he complimented my new haircut though, so that was nice!). A first-class ticket was just one dollar, which was cool. I got into what I thought was the first class car. Maybe it was. It’s hard for me to imagine what the other cars were like though, if that was first class. The only amenities I think you could have taken out would have been the seats.

Then at church, I met these two American guys from Utah who were on their way through Cape Town as they were backpacking around the world. They had done Europe, were just finishing Africa, and were leaving for Asia the next day. After seeing the state of the train that morning, I was a little nervous about riding it back into town, but I convinced these guys to ride back with me (they were going to take a cab), which both saved them money and made me feel safer.

On the way up, the train was mostly empty when I got on – it was just me and two or three other people. On the way back, it was so crowed, we just had to pack in like sardines. Still not sure what the difference between first class and third class could be.

The guys I was with mentioned that they were going to hike Table Mountain that afternoon and asked if I wanted to come. I’d ridden the cable car to Table Mountain before, but I had been wanting to do the hike, so I said I’d come with. We all stopped at my place to I could change into some better clothes for hiking and I made them some lunch.

I did briefly question the wisdom of picking up a couple of random backpackers and bringing them home for grilled cheese sandwiches, but then I figured, “Yeah, it’s probably okay.” And it was.

We ended up taking the cable car up Table Mountain and hiking down. Which was more than enough. That’s a legit hike. I am still sore today. Not like just I can kind of still feel it. Like I can barely walk. I’m just shuffling around like I’m a 90-year-old woman with two wooden legs. It’s terrible. But the hike was fun. Totally worth doing. I just should have thought to stretch before and after.

Afterwards, we went to get dinner and I had my first Shawarma since Jordan. It’s better in Jordan. And cheaper. But it was still cool.

The other interns from my school all went out of town for the weekend, so I was on my own today. I decided to museum it up.

1. District 6 Museum

This was really moving. District 6 was a really racially diverse area in the 1950s, until the Apartheid government declared it as a whites only are in 1966 or so, and they started moving everyone out and sending them to go live in townships. By 1984, they had bulldozed all the homes and left only the churches standing. The idea was to redevelop it for whites, but no white people wanted to live there because there was so much controversy over the way everyone had been thrown out. Anyways, this museum was built in an old church that is still there and that was kind of a center of resistance against Apartheid after that.

When I got to the museum, the guy at the desk told me he was about to take a group of students around the museum, so I was welcome to join the little tour. He had grown up in District 6, and had been one of the people who had started the museum, so he had a lot of personal stories to share. The whole District 6 story and all the Apartheid planning reminded me of a lot of the Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs urban planning controversies that were happening in the US at around the same time. That was at least less overtly racist, but the point is the same: city planning as social engineering doesn’t work.

The District 6 museum is not so much a collection of awesome stuff; it’s more of an exhibit that tells one specific story. Kind of like the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. In fact, it was meant to be just a two-week exhibition in 1994, but they’ve kept it going ever since. Also Michelle Obama was there last week, and our tour guide was the one who had taken her around.

2. The Castle of Good Hope

This is an actual castle. It’s really big and they do have guided tours, but I missed one by a couple minutes, so I just wandered around on my own. It was really cool. They had all these rooms with old furniture and it was all fortressy with cannons and stuff.

And there was a torture chamber there. Having just come from the District 6 museum, and then reading the sign describing how it used to be in the torture chamber, I was thinking, “Wow. Not cool, humans. Not cool.”

But I liked the castle. Lots of cool little places to explore and stuff.

2.5. Then I was so hungry, so I went and got lunch. It took longer than I expect to find a lunch place that was open. The place I finally did go to was pretty quiet. The owner came and talked to me while I ate my sandwich and remarked that he was even thinking about not opening on weekends anymore since harly anyone comes in on weekends. He asked me all about where I was from and about my family and between hearing that I was from Utah and that I have six brothers and sisters, he asked if I was Mormon. And he told me I was the first Mormon he had ever met. Yesterday, I had had to explain to my coworker about how Mormons were different from the Amish, so I made sure I cleared that up with this guy as well. But he was all straight on that point. And he mentions that he really likes my homeboy Donny Osmond. So that was cool.

3. The South African National Gallery.

There was a big exhibit of Vladimir Tretchikoff, whom I had never heard of, but apparently he was the second highest-earning painter in the world in the 1950s. After Picasso. So now we know. And there was also an exhibit of photographs. And an exhibit called “Random Works?” Which was literally just a random collection of pieces from the museums permanent collection. And the question mark was to imply the question, “Does this work?” And I guess it did. There was no particular theme. Yeah, it was good.

4. The South African Musem.

I was going to head home, but I still had a couple hours and I realized I was standing right outside the South African Museum. And it was raining. So I decided to go in and see what it was all about. It turned out to be a musem of natural history. The had dinosaurs and all kinds of stuffed animal exhibits and a thing about cave painting. And a really creepy video about bushman healers. So that was cool. There was some really interesting stuff. An exhibit about Darwin’s visit to South Africa. All kinds of stuff.

So that was my museum day today.

The first time I ever went to a foreign country was when I was 16 and I went to go spend a year in the Czech Republic as an exchange student. Now that I think of it, that may have only been the second time I was ever even on an airplane. Wow.

Anyway though, 16 and 17, that’s a very impressionable age. So that year shaped and reinforced a lot of my attitudes and the way I interact with people. There was some reverse culture shock when I got back. The very first day I got back, I went to the dentist. After spending a year in a culture where people are generally pretty reserved (some would say cold), I was totally overwhelmed by the dental hygienist. She was so over-the-top friendly, enthusiastic, and chatty. It was really off-putting to me at the time. And I still feel that way about dental hygienists. I wish they would just back off a little.

I loved my dentist in Seattle, not because the dentist himself was really anything to write home about, but because the dental hygienist was awesome. Strictly business. She didn’t ask questions about your love life or tell you about hers. She didn’t get all excited about every random thing you said. She just cleaned your teeth. She would warn you if she was about to do something that was going to hurt, but other than that, she minded her own business. I loved her.

What I realized today is that my attitude about dental hygienists does not apply to hairdressers. At all. At. All. I like American hairdressers. I like them to ask me all kinds of personal questions. I’m happy to tell them my entire life story, and to hear about theirs. And I like it when they talk about how great my hair is and how I must take such good care of it and how I’m basically just the best ever. Those are the kinds of things I’ve come to expect when I get a haircut.

What this is all leading up to is that I got my hair cut today and the woman that cut it was so mean! She hardly smiled at all. She was like a robot.* I came in and she asked me how I wanted it cut, and I tried to explain it a little, and she was like, “I have no idea what you want.” I tried to explain that I had a haircut that I liked about three months ago, but my hair had gotten longer (as hair does), so now I just wanted it back to the way it was. Then she made me look through some style books to point out haircuts that were like what I wanted. I pointed at a couple and she said, “All of those haircuts are the opposite of what you just descibed to me.” She pointed out a couple pictures and asked if that was what I wanted and I said, “Well, that hair is longer than mine is now, and my hair is curly, so it wouldn’t ever look like that.” And she looked at me in this really mean way and said, “I know.”

At that point, I wanted to just say, “You know, let’s just forget the whole thing. I’ll just get it cut when I get home to America. Where hairdressers are nice.” But I was too intimidated by this lady. So I just tried to convince her to just start cutting my hair and see how it goes.

Then she asked me if I wanted a moisture treatment that would make my hair less frizzy and awful, and I was like, “No thanks.” And then she asked if I color my hair, and I told her no I don’t and she was like, “Why not?” I didn’t really know what to say. I just mumbled that I liked my natural color. She looked surprised and she wrote on her little form, “Happy with natural color.”

So then she finally started cutting. After a couple minutes, she said very calmly, “I’ll be right back.” And she went into this back room and came back with a bandage on her finger. Because she had cut her finger on her scissors. It looked like it had been a pretty bad cut. But she didn’t say anything about it. It was so weird. This woman is a robot.**

Actually, she started being a little nicer toward then end. Like I think she smiled once at the very end. And I was really satisfied with the end product. It’s a really good haircut. I’m happy with it. It might be one of the better haircuts I’ve ever had, but it was one of the worst haircut experiences. So overall, I guess I’m satisfied.

*Speaking of robots, one of the awesome things about South Africa is that traffic signals are called robots here. So when someone gives you directions, they say stuff like, “Head straight down Kloof Street, then turn left at the robot.”

**When I say she was a robot, I don’t mean like a traffic signal. I mean like this kind.