Week One.

Hello family and friends!! I've been persuaded by the lovely Jamie Hunter to start a blog of my adventures here in South Africa over the next three and a half months. I don't know how good I'll be at keeping up with it, but I'm going to try my hardest to update you all!

So. Where do I even begin? I'm starting to settle in with a new living situation, new food, new everything. My roommate is Amberly Vergason. She's from Alaska, so she was automatically cool. I live in a cute little chalet with 7 other girls and about 102948 different species of spiders and other creepy crawlies. Seriously. There are bugs everywhere. I can't handle it. The other day I walked in my room, turned on the light, and saw a lizard dash across the wall behind the curtain. I had to go to class, so I couldn't take care of it right away. Even if I did have time to take care of it, I have no idea how I would go about getting a lizard out of my room. For all I know it could still be in there. Gross.

The food. It feels like I never stop eating. We have breakfast at 7:30 am every morning, then morning tea at 10:00, lunch at 1:00, afternoon tea at 4:00, then dinner at 6:00. I basically have class all day every day except Tuesdays. So in between eating I am just sitting. It's a bad situation. I'm going to gain 100 pounds. But as far as exercising, this is one of the greatest places you could do it. The game reserve is right down the road. It is absolutely beautiful and full of animals! I had my first zebra sighting the other morning! I'm also going to be doing a lot of different hikes and things like that with my biology class. We sit through a ridiculously boring lecture for 5 hours on Mondays, but on Thursdays we take field trips to different places in the area. This last Thursday we went on an incredible hike up to a waterfall. There's just so many beautiful places in this country. I love it!

I'm meeting so many great people and forming amazing relationships, and it's only the first week. This is going to be a great semester.