DURBAN!!!

Thursday morning we left for Durban, South Africa’s 3rd largest city. The whole group took a large coach bus for the 10 minute ride to the airport (we thought it was a bit much, but I suppose it was necessary to fit our luggage in). The airport security was extremely lax compared to the states- they really didn’t care about liquids and my water bottle didn’t even go through the metal detectors- they just had me open it up, put it on top of the scanning machine, and pick it up again once I walked through the metal detector. Several guys also made the metal detectors go off, but they just waved them by. I found an international Newsweek in PE’s tiny airport and bought it. It looked really thin to me- obviously there weren’t many ads, but I wonder if anything else was left out of it. On the front cover of it the prices across Africa/Middle East were listed- it costs 40,000 of Iran’s currency and 26 Rand (approx. $2.60) to purchase it. The US special reserves can get it for $3.25. I figured it might help me see what’s been going on in the world since I left home. With the lack of radio (let alone service) to listen to NPR every morning, I’ve really been out of the loop on MN, US, and international news. I should really start watching the tv news or something here, but I’ve worked so hard to get out of the habit of watching tv it’s difficult to remember to do so. I know I could also look up online news sites, but I never really did so back home so it’s a pain to remember to do it, and it doesn’t help that I have to pay for internet use. We get a South African newspaper once a week here, but they cover mostly national news.
The air hostess (Kahlula airlines, I believe) making the safety announcements on the plane was the funniest I’ve ever had- she cracked several jokes (ex. your life jacket has a light on it- so you can continue to peacefully read your novel upon descending into the water; In case of a water landing, which probably won’t be necessary since we’re flying no where near the Hudson River; there are many ways to leave a lover, but only 8 ways to leave this plane), and had our whole group laughing. At just over an hour, the flight was quite short. When we arrived in Durban we quickly noticed the city’s higher humidity & more tropical feel- palm trees dot the landscape and there seemed to be many bright flowers. The city definitely has a more urban feel with skyscrapers and is very hilly (the walk to grocery store & most restaurants is 10 minutes, all downhill, but coming back is tougher!).
Our first stop was a Hare Krishna temple- “The Temple of Understanding” (I believe one of the largest outside of India and the states). Before we went in we had a chance to grab some lunch and I got a few samousas in a nearby mall- my first Indian food in South Africa! We sat down to eat in a small park named after Gandhi. While we sitting at a table a young person around our age from the area came up and chatted to us. I thought it was a little random, but he was nice. Now that I think about it, lots of random people strike up conversations with groups or individuals of us. I think most of it is just friendliness (and let me tell you, they put Minnesoat nice to shame- this is way more than a “Hi, how are you?”, then walk away) but I’m sure they see us as an opportunity for money as well.
When we arrived at the Hare Krishna temple we had to walk over a bridge over a small moat to get to the entrance. We later learned that this was to show that the temple was present in the material world, but really in the spiritual world as well. We had take off our shoes and leave them at the entrance. If any of you have seen Slumdog Millionaire (great movie- you should see f if you haven’t- it just won the Oscar for best picture for 2008), it reminded me of the part where the main character and his friend steal the shoes of the visitors to the Taj Mahal and sell them to make a profit. Along this vein, one of the girls conceived a plan to hide one of the guy’s Birkenstocks inside of a couple bags so they wouldn’t be at the entrance when he returned (we returned them to him soon after he noticed they were missing, but it was funny to see his utter confusion & minor freak out). The temple itseft was circular and just had one bench along the outside wall. It had lots of mirrors and windows so was very light-filled. On the ceiling there were various depictions of the life of Krishna (the holy being followers of the Hare Krishna movement believe in/pray to/ worship) and there was a curtained off area where statues of Krishna and Hare (not sure on the spelling, but the female equivalent of Krishna) were. Several times throughout the day the curtain is pulled back and someone comes out to offer flowers and incencse to them. This happened once while we were there and some of the worshippers would get closer to this part of the temple and kneel on the ground before them in prayer. Our guide (I think someone who is studying Hare Krishna (or possibly someone like a Catholic monk, I wasn’t entirely sure) told us lots about the history of the movement (Krishna came to India several thousand years ago, and then the movement had a resurgence in the 20th century in India and America). Our guide called it a movement since followers of it could still be their other religion- according to him you could be a Christian Hare Krishnan (I’m not too sure what the Christian religion you were a part of would say, but . . .). He also told us that the temple was designed to look like a Lotus flower from above.
After touring the temple we had a performance by an Indian/African fusion dance group. They performed in an outdoor ampitheatre on the grounds of the temple. Some of the group members who performed had experience Xhosa dancing and were new to the Indian dancing, while others had a more extensive Indian dance background. The head woman of the group had choreographed and performed a dance with a group at Mandela’s inauguration, which was really sweet. She told us about how at the time, many Indians were disappointed/angry that the dance was not traditional Indian dance, since she had been chosen to represent South Africa’s Indian heritage. She, however, thought that her fusion work was completely relevant to the new South Africa and the vision Mandela had for South Africa. Besides perforning some of their pieces, the dancers taught us some of the hand gestures they use in their work and how to move our heads side to side like Indian dancers. Near the end of the performance the sides of a rainbow appered in front of us, almost framing the temple and the dancers. It was a perfect addition to the early evening atmosphere. Afterwards we got to meet and chat with the head woman and some of the dancers. Overall the whole experience was qutie unique and one of my favorite things we saw/did in Durban. For dinner the whole group went to an Indian restaurant and had a buffet. Despite the server’s warnings, none of the food was too spicy (at least to me), and everything tasted good.
Friday morning we began with a walking tour of the city. We visited a large mosque (it used to be largest in southern hemisphere, now I believe there’s one bigger somewhere else, but no idea where), the city’s Cathedral, and the Indian & African markets. Our guide at the mosque was a convert to Islam from Christianity (I belive he was a Baptist preacher) and his comparisons of things in Islam to Christianity helped us to understand Islam. I didn’t know that while Muslims have collections at their prayer services, the money they collect isn’t for the mosque. The mosque instead supports itself through owning & renting out shop spaces around it. As a result, the mosque is surrounded by shops and you have to go through litle alleyways to get to it. I thought it was really interesting that the Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral were replicas of the ones in Sacre Coeur in Paris- I’d seen the real ones just over a month ago! The Indian market basically consisted of tons of little shops selling all sorts of artwork, spices, jewelry, and clothing. In the African market we stopped and chatted to one of the vendors of traditional medicines. He showed us which wood mixtures are used to cure/fix such things as unemployment and bad luck. The market was packed with people and the strong scents of everything made the trip a bit overwhelming, but it was interesting to see how some people still conduct business.
We had the afternoon free, so many of us decided to go shopping in the markets (but not in the Afrian traditional healer’s one!). I looked for a cheap, cute skirt that’d fit me (many of them were way too long for me!), but had no luck. Lots of people got dresses & South African flags though. That evening we headed over to the BAT centre for some jazz music. The centre was right on the waterfront in the harbour and was a lovely background for the music (especially as the sun was setting). The experience would have been really nice, but most of the group tried to get dinner. Now I know that a group of 30 is a little large for a server (and kitchen), but it shouldn’t take 2 hours to get our food and drinks out. When we left at 8pm (we’d arrived at 6pm), a couple of us still hadn’t got the drinks we ordered when we first arrived. I’m starting to get used to the slower pace of service here (I’m not sure if it’s just a cultural thing and waiters think that people really like to have converstations while they eat, or everything at every restaurant is made entirely from scratch when it’s ordered, or the chefs are just slow, or something else entirely), but even taking that into consideration, this was slow.
Saturday morning I woke up early to go on a boat tour of the harbour. We were supposed to get out to the shark nets (Durban’s beaches are only shark- free because crews check them every morning and kill any sharks they find), but the sea was too choppy so we couldn’t go into the true open water. We saw the “air traffic control for the ships”, as one of the girls in my group described it, and learned about some of the workings of the port. We also left the harbour proper for a bit and got closer to the shore where we saw some fishermen in kayaks (well, actually sitting on top of kayaks). I was quite impressed by their balance on their kayaks- they were just riding out the large waves and holding on to their poles. We witnessed one of them catch a large fish and something that looked like a baby shark- it had a fin that stuck up like a shark on its back.
After the bus with the rest of the group picked us up (we could only go in small groups on the boat tours, so some people went on Friday morning and some on Sunday), we headed off to the KwaMuhle museum. The first room was about the Durban system- Durban’s pre-apartheid laws restricting the movement of non-whites. It was interesting/slightly scary to learn about one of the systems the creators of apartheid looked to when planning apartheid. Similar to the apartheid laws, the Durban system required blacks to have pass books listing off all their personal information (name, age, job information with weekly signatures by their boss stating they still had a job, among other things). They had a huge (larger than a person) replicate of a pass book we could look through and see for ourselves what they looked like. The second room contained information about the historically Indian section of Durban (before they were forced out under the apartheid laws). The last room we went to had a travelling exhibit about a specific case from the TRC (truth & reconciliation committee). The short exhibit focused on the story of a member of the ANC’s MK (armed wing) that planted a bomb outside a shopping mall (supposedly he had been unable to plant device in original more government/state target- a South African airways office). He was sentenced to death and killed while the apartheid government was still in power, but some of the families of the victims came forward in the course of TRC proceedings. The father of a child killed came forward and forgave the perpetrators completely, which I thought was pretty amazing.
We had the afternoon free again, so after eating lunch at a nearby restaurant (same slow service as most restaurants in South Africa, but delicious pizza), I went on my first scuba dive as a certified scuba diver. When we arrived at the dive centre in a mall on the shore we learned that we would have to go in a large aquarium tank at a marine world complex next door since the ocean was too choppy to go diving in. An hour before our dive we came back and sorted out our attire and equipment. As we were preparing to enter the tank (it was supposed to simulate open water, so it didn’t have a roof on it), a couple visitors asked us what we were going in to feed, which I thought was a bit funny (we explained we were just going to scuba dive around with the fish in the tank and they didn’t know that you could do that). In the tank we saw tons of rays and different types of cool tropical fish. We also waved at the people looking through the big windows into the tank. The half an hour went by really quickly. Jenny had brought her under water camera along, so we took some pictures of us and the fish.
That evening we went to the Bolshoi ballet. They were in Durban for 1 night performing excerpts of famous ballets (Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote) in a performance called “The Stars of the Bolshoi ballet”. The excerpts showed several examples of some of the really challenging stuff in ballet- lots of twirls, but some lyrical stuff too. There was also some stuff I wasn’t as familiar with- something called Ascending Mount Fuji & a modern piece where a woman dressed half like a woman, half like a man (split in half vertically) with the woman and man interacting- she’d play one, and then do a 180 degree turn and then play the other.
Early Sunday morning I woke up to go to mass at a church down the street. At 7am, I believe it might have been the earliest mass I have ever attended. I was a little disappointed that there was almost no singing (the priest had to ask the congregation’s permission to sing a couple verses of the closing hymn from the night before), but at least it got done quickly. Later in the morning some of the group headed off to New Germany Nature Reserve. A staff member introduced us to her young female Blue Daika (her mother was killed, so she was raised in captivity by the lady). I’d never heard of a Blue Daika before- the only deer-like species to have horns on both sexes (usually only males have horns)- they’re so small (about the size of a small-medium sized dog) the females need them to protect themselves. We went on a hike through the reserve, but didn’t see any wildlife (it was the middle of the day and we’d been told most of the animals were sleeping/resting in the shade). We did see lots of pretty flowers though and it was nice to get away from the city for a bit & just walk. When we returned to the small interpretation centre, the worker did a snake demonstration for us. I got to hold the python for a bit and then we watched it be fed a mouse (from behind the glass case). We also explored the aviary as well and saw some cool looking birds.
That evening we went to a one man show in a local casino- “Chili Boy”. The audience was mostly Indian, which was quite a change from almost entirely white audience of Bolshoi. Throughout the show there were lots of inside jokes for the Indian population (most of our group sat with puzzled looks on our faces, but a couple guys decided from the start just to laugh whenever the people around them were, so they laughed lots!), but I could follow the jist of the story- an Indian old woman gets reincarnated in a young teenage white boy. The plot had lots of comedy- the boy starts wanting to wear a sari, cooking Indian food, and eventually wants to return to see her son & grandson in Durban. The story was told mostly through the eyes of the characters around the boy (with the help of lots of crazy accents- the boy’s mom was hilarious! and a few key props). After the show we had a bit of free time to walk around casino. At one point I was walking in a group with 3 other girls and a casino worker came up and pointed at Laura and I and asked us how old we were (you only have to be 18 to gamble, and we weren’t even in the gambling part of the casino!). Melissa quickly told her we were all 20 or 21 and the lady backed down, but still! I know we both look a little younger than we are (I think it’s partly the height bit, at least for me, and Laura definitely looks young- she’s been carded at places where we go out and the age limit is only 16). I tried my hand at gambling (the 1-5 rand slot machines!) and actually won 35 rand- (the 10 rand I spent to get it already deducted from winnings) $3.50!
Monday morning we woke up the earliest time yet (5:15am) to finish packing and get on the bus to the airport. On the plane back to PE everyone slept (one person who was awake got some quality pictures of us all sleeping), bus back to our flats. We didn’t have class in the afternoon- our music had been cancelled because originally we were supposed to come back Monday afternoon, but our flight got changed. I spent the rest of my day unpacking, grocery shopping, and doing some homework. When I checked my e-mail for the first time in 5 days I had a nice surprise- I’d gotten an e-mail from the co-ordinator of the Eastern Cape Philharmonic Orchestra (ECPO). A few weeks ago I had inquired to the music department at NMMU if there were any music groups I could join and play percussion. Apart from a few jazz bands (strong kit skills a must!), the only group they could think of was the ECPO (not quite prestigous as it sounds- I think it’s more like a community orchestra, but you do usually need to audition to get in). I contacted the co-ordinator of it and she told me they had everything sorted out for the concert that weekend (the double bass player in our group was playing for it) and already had a timp player lined up for the Mozart concert in March, but asked me if I would be around for the end of May. Since I’m leaving the country on the 21st (2 days before the concert!), she said they couldn’t use me at all, but if she heard of something that needed a percussionist, she’d let me know. The e-mail I got asked if I would be available to play for the March concert (now less than two weeks away)- the timp player they had lined up was now unavailable. I looked over the music on Tuesday when I was on campus (they didn’t look too bad) and told her that I’d be happy to cover the parts.
Tuesday we were back volunteering. The kids were really excited to see us after a full week and they had fun making the paper plate shakers we’d planned for the day. I worked with Siya on not throwing things inside and on his fine motor skills (picking small objects up, putting them in a bucket, then dumping the bucket out and repeating).

Thanks for reading!