20 March 2009 (Day 4)

My kids had a field trip today! It was very different from an American field trip. We went to a park near school, but near school is actually about a mile away. And we walked. With 80 four- and five-year-old children. 8 adults. On roads without sidewalks.

When we got to the park it was (can you guess?) beautiful. There were palm trees, and the mountains were in the background and there was a little vine covered path with benches. The kids played all morning. No real educational learning objective, just play. We brought some cricket sticks and a rugby ball, but other than that there were some swings, a spinning wheel type thing, a jungle gym, and a slide. And tortoises! There were two tortoises. One had a cracked shell, which was really sad.
I took a bunch of pictures of my kids, again. One boy, Zicklin, had a little cookie stick in his hand and he said, “Look at me, I’m like Harry Potter!” and then did a move with the “wand.” So I took a video of him, and showed it to him. Then when Uzayr saw the video, he wanted to take one of him dancing, so I have another video of Uzayr dancing that Zicklin then moves through, and Jayren does a little move, too. Very cute.

Going home was another serious moment of culture shock for me. We didn’t walk back to school, they had called a “taxi” (one of those 12 person vans). My teacher had also driven her Ford Ranger. We fit 25 little Grade R students into the back of my teacher’s Ford Ranger!!! The rest of the 80 students and 6 teachers were split among two trips in the taxi. It was insane. Not only was it something you couldn’t do in the states, but it was something you could never DREAM of doing with students. It was definitely a crazy experience, and I took several pictures of that, too.
Friday was the beginning of our beach house weekend. We rented a house on Pringle Bay for the weekend, and left right from school. First we went to the grocery store. We had split into groups of 3 and had taken on one meal per group to provide for the weekend. Heather, Sara, and I were pizza. We had to find pizza crusts, which interestingly are sold frozen here, with the sauce already on them. We also bought veggies, peppered salami (no pepperoni that we could find) and a bunch of mozzarella cheese, and some bread to make cheese bread. Heather and I also picked up some snack type foods that we’re going to bust into after school this coming week. AND we decided we wanted to make guacamole. I couldn’t find jalapenos or limes, so I got green chilies and lemon, and there were only yellow onions (I prefer red for guacamole), but the end (I am writing all of the weekend stuff Sunday night) result was all eaten up. People obviously haven’t had my amazing guac before, so they didn’t know what they were missing out on.

After the grocery store we ran to our houses to pick up our weekend bags, which we’d packed the night before. Unfortunately, Sandy didn’t tell us until that morning that we would need to bring our own bedding to the beach house. Laeti (the maid) wasn’t working, and Phoebe wasn’t home so Heather and I had to find bedding ourselves, which can be hard in a house that isn’t your own! Luckily, we found things easily enough and managed to throw together some bags with bedding before rushing back to the van. When we got to the van, though, Heather and I couldn’t remember if we had shut the cupboard door with the linens. It wouldn’t have been a huge deal, except that Lotz (the dog, I have no clue how to spell his name but that is when Genove told me—it sounds like Loots) is only a year old and happens to be gigantic and energetic. We haven’t seen him actually harm property yet (though he did try to eat one of Heather’s sandals), but we didn’t want to find out the hard way if he would. So we had to have the van drive us back to our house and run in. Good thing we did, because the cupboard was definitely open.

We hit the road with a planned stop. Jeff wanted to run into a shop to get a leash for the surfboard he borrowed from his roommate. When he went in, he found out that they were sold out! So then we had to make an extra stop at Somerset Mall. Yes, I stopped at Somerset Mall in South Africa. Obviously I took a picture.
It took about an hour to get to Pringle Bay. The drive was incredible, we were surrounded by mountains and driving right along the ocean. I sound like a broken record, but it really was beautiful. We got to the house with about an hour until sunset, so most of us headed for the beach. We walked down to the water and dipped our feet into the Atlantic—it was freeeezing. Painfully cold, actually. After that, Jeff headed for a mountain to watch the sunset, and the rest of us settled into a dune. I wish I had grabbed my camera, but I know a picture could never have fully captured it. That sunset was one of, if not THE, best I’ve ever seen. Absolutely breathtaking.

After that we headed inside and the group cooking dinner got started. It wasn’t until it was fully dark that people started to worry about Jeff. He had planned on climbing up to see the sunset, so we knew he wouldn’t be back until after dark, plus he’s definitely experienced, but when you get a group of teachers together the collective worrying just starts to kick in. A few of us went out to the beach to wave flashlights around to try and signal to him, and also to see if we could see his light coming down the mountain. Nothing. We were all sitting down to dinner, when suddenly there was Jeff at the door with a bundle of sticks around his neck. He was proud as a peacock, and just wanted to know if we could have a bonfire.
We ended up skipping the bonfire that night; it was really windy and already dark by the time Jeff was home. Instead, after dinner we broke up into groups and played Euchre (not me), Balderdash, and Spongebob Uno (with the good old “Super Absorbency” card. I also spent a decent amount of time on the upper deck looking at the stars. I’ve never seen stars so clearly before. The Milky Way was super bright, and I saw THREE shooting stars! It was great.