Made it to Cape Town!

2 hour flight to Portland + 9 hour flight to Amsterdam + 11 hour flight to Cape Town and I'm here!  With free, very spotty wi-fi in our hostel, so I'm going to quickly write something and then get it posted.  The back to back flights were actually not that bad, though I was exhausted when we got here.  I watched something like 7 movies and 5 TV episodes to pass the time.

Anyway, today we (5 students from OSU, one of their friends, and me) basically did a LOT of walking: exploring some parks and squares and the waterfront (which basically felt like Pier 39 in San Francisco). It's pretty hot and somewhat humid and I think I gained a few freckles.

A couple of observations:

• Pigeons are very abundant and content (i.e. fat) here.
• It doesn't really feel like a foreign country- everyone I have to interact with speaks english, fashion seems similar enough, and I could easily be in some American big city.
• Except that there aren't lots of obese people, meaning it couldn't really be America.
• The exchange rate makes it such that everything sounds expensive (30 rand for a small sandwich, for example) and I haven't quite wrapped my head around the conversion (somewhere around 8:1 rand:US$- I think) so I'm never completely sure if I'm paying a lot or a little for food (since food's the only thing I've bought so far).

We're going to Simon's Town tomorrow meaning penguins!! I'm super excited for that, of course.