#--entire lil self into the cover and force him to close it and then scurry on top of p&p indicating that she wants him to read it to her

[psychicthepsychic-daily]

i miss jen T-T can we see her again please?

BASED ANON!!!

canon trivia: she's an Austen fan. pride and prejudice is her favorite book <3

[type-a-nomad]

First Blog Post: Cape Town Day 1

Sunday Feb 11 2018

Growing Pains

I landed in Cape Town at 7:30am local time (CTT= Cape Town Time/ CT= Cape Town).  Because I slept from SFO to Heathrow, I got little to no sleep from Heathrow to Cape Town, resulting in my accidental all-nighter from 11:30pm CTT.  Everything is sort of hazy and out of whack.  It seems like everything that could have gone slightly wrong, has gone slightly wrong.  Or, at least, very far from the expected result.  The first of these instances was in the CT airport.  There was a driver that was supposed to meet me at 8am CTT and by 8:20am I was starting to feel quite nervous, as it is easy to direct my unease about the general situation of moving continents towards a short-term, tangible problem like my transportation.  By this time, I am sweating from nerves and general physical exhaustion from hauling my duffle bag around looking for the guy who is supposed to have a sign directing me to him.  Finally, I call the emergency number of the program I’m going through and they tell me to go to the information desk and wait for him to meet me there.  So I do.   Another 20 minutes later, all is well and my driver, Kyle, is blasting Lil’ Jon while speeding down the highway past the poorest parts of CT.  There are thousands of houses made out of scrap metal.  I saw roofs held onto structures by the weight of fractured concrete, wooden planks and sheets of tin propped up against each other, some structures were even two stories high.  Then we were zooming through Cape Town, the first thing I saw was the prison, which was almost as depressing as the slums.  But once we cleared the poorer outskirts, the water was visible and it was stunning.  It was like the surface was covered in gold glitter it was sparkling so much.  We stopped in front of a house in a rundown neighborhood, directly facing a large, white, and mostly windowless primary school.  Kyle grabs my duffle bag out of the car (bless him) and dispassionately drops me and it at the front door of a dusty, brick-red house.  I ring the doorbell as Kyle drives off.  Nobody answers.  After a minute, I ring again.  Still, nobody answers.  I reach past the metal grate blocking the wooden door and knock.  I am starting to panic (again) and am knocking and ringing, feeling stranded and mildly disgusted at the dead, partially-squished rat I had to walk over to get to the door.  10 minutes pass.  I am still frantically knocking.  Then, I hear something. A short girl answers the door.  She’s maybe 24, with a sleeve of tattoos- one of which is a large elephant with a very South African looking tree next to it.  I introduce myself and she says her name is Cassie and she essentially runs the hostel.  She takes me upstairs and shows me my room with three bunkbeds lining the walls, and a file-cabinet-like dresser against the fourth.  The floor is covered in clothes and there is a girl sleeping in her underwear surrounded by around 5 half-empty fanta bottles and two sticky glasses with flat soda in them.  I say hello and she makes no noise, clearly a bit irritated her sleep has been interrupted.  Cassie tells me to meet her downstairs in a few minutes when I settle in.  I sit down on the bed and basically curl up in a ball of confusion, anxiety, and relief.   When I have taken some deep breaths, reapply deodorant, and listed things I am grateful for and things I want to learn, I hop down the dirty stairs in the dim  house and find Cassie.  She gives me a brief tour of the house and shows me how I have to shower in a bucket and then dump the bucket in a larger bucket.  Then, when you want to take a number 2 you have to walk to the big bucket, fill up a small bucket with water, then find a way to dump the water in the small bucket into the toilet tank so you can flush.  This is way harder than it sounds and it an extremely awkward process that is almost as stressful as it is embarrassing for me because if you grab the bucket everyone knows you aren't just going number 1.  Most of my stress here hinges on the idea of making myself more embarrassed than I already am by fûcking up this process in one way (technically this whole extravaganza is called a grey-water system). After the somewhat unnerving house tour, I am starting to realize how incredibly foreign all of this is.  Moving to and living in Florence was traveling to another country, Cape Town is another planet.  Everything feels slightly uneasy when you walk down the streets.  I felt very watched and distrustful of anyone around me because I had been warned so thoroughly about the impressive theft that was pulled off, even in broad daylight. Then, the first genuinely positive interaction of my day happens.  Three girls, Jonna (Sweden), Ella (Sweden), and Natália (Brazil) say that they're gong to the beach and if I don’t have any plans I should come with them to get lunch and then go to the beach.  The tight little ball in my chest loosens. We all go to the grocery store and upon our return, Cassie comes up to me and tells me that tomorrow I am moving to a HomeStay.  My reaction is:  “WHAAAT??!?!?!?!??!?!????”.  I was NOT supposed to be at a Home-Stay and was clearly told by the volunteer service that I would be based at the volunteer hostel.  I was completely caught off-guard and this was the LAST mix-up I would expect to happen.  I make her double-check that it’s the right person she’s talking about and she confirms that yes, in fact my program is in an area much closer to the poorer neighborhoods, because those are the kids we are serving.  Thus, I need to live close to them and that means living with a family.  WHAT THE FÜCK?  I regain my zen and try to just be a “go with the flow” kind of person, but I feel like a rock being unwillingly dragged down a river by the force of the water.  After many minutes of mindful breathing and sunscreen application, we are in the uber to the beach.   The beach is gorgeous.  The South African Sun was incredibly intense.  Even when applying several layers of thick sunscreen and sitting entirely in the shade, my skin was very offended I had decided to move to this continent.  That being said, there were white fluffy sand, colored umbrellas, beautiful and tan, beachy South Africans everywhere, so I told my skin to shut up.  My particular favorite of all my people-watching specimen was a 50-something woman in a hot pink bikini who was so freckled she passed it off as a deep tan.  She had a lower back tattoo that said “Brooklyn Forever” in swirly writing, some Chinese characters on her back, a ring of thorns around her bicep, and a kiss mark on her lower right hip.  Her small white lap dog came over and chilled on my towel while she drank some alcoholic beverage and told her four-year-old daughter to move out of her tanning chair because “I’m an ádult” (only self-important people say adult as aaaaadult).  She also told her friend to “stay on the hunt”, when a 20 year old lifeguard passed and they both obviously checked him out, even though they were both wearing wedding rings and surrounded by their own children.  From eavesdropping on their conversations I learned her name was Lisa, which fits all too well.   I hang out with my new friends and learn lots of cool information.  For example, Natalia has breast implants her boyfriend paid for as a present to her 5 months ago and is very happy to talk about them as a point of braggadocio (as it turns out, two americans in this volunteer hostel also have breast implants”.  Ella has four tattoos, one of which is very large on her forearm that says “There is no progress without struggle”.  She says she almost ran to the tattoo parlor on her 18th birthday to get it— but now she thinks it’s cliche.  Jonna is amazed at my ability to recite facts I learned from various podcasts I listened during my unintentional all-nighter to Cape Town.  For example, your likelihood of getting cancer increases by 40% if you average less than 7 hours of sleep per night over your lifetime.  Cassie and her sister Ashley end up joining us.  By that time I was entirely exhausted.  My face was telling me it was time to get out of the sun even though I was in the shade, with a hat and sunscreen on.  And, again, I was entirely exhausted so interaction with new people was a strain I was really not feeling.   Finally, we call and uber and go back to the hostel. I cannot get the idea of the host family off of my mind as I am moving there tomorrow and have exactly no information on who they are, where they live, what the conditions will be, how many people live there, etc.. I decide the best way to ease my anxiety is to get something done.  So, I go to the drug store down the street, Click-It.  I buy around 10 items and when I’m checking out, the cashier does something very odd.  He looks at me, smiles, and says “when you leave the alarm by the door might go off, just keep walking”.  I kind of smile and then process what he’s really said, then process the fact that him and his female co-worker at the other register just smiled at each other clearly in regards to what he has just said.  “Why” I ask.  “Because I am not going to scan all the items they want me to scan.  Don’t worry about it.  Just keep walking”.  At this point I’m like WHAT THE FÜCK IS GOING ON PART 2.  Is he saying he is giving me some of my items for free? What on earth is happening.  Well, then I go to pay with my Charles Schwab card that is supposed to be perfect and seamless to use and it’s DECLINED.  So I pay with Wells Fargo and the world starts turning again.  Right after I pick up my bag he reminds me “dont forget: DO NOT stop walking”. And Im like “Dude I just wanted my leave-in conditioner, I don’t need Mission-Impossible”  But, whatever, I’m only 95% sure I can understand the gist of what he is saying because I am still having trouble understanding South African English accents. I scurry home, through the accusatorially beeping metal detector with my newly aquired, and possibly partially stolen goods and take my brief, bucket shower.  Now, I am hiding in my top bunk, trying to collect myself and hide from human interaction because honestly, I’m getting close to being at wits-end.  I am too overwhelmed to edit this so #nofilter yay I completed my first blog post.  Happy First Day In South Africa, Bitches.

xoxo Q