Woke up early to go for a run with Boitumelo, but since we were all so exhausted the night before (except for the three that went to a club with Boitumelo), no one was awake enough to do anything. Since we hadn’t heard from her yet, Olivia and I both went back to sleep. When we finally made it out around 9:30, it was overcast, drizzly, and cold! We walked all the way across the campus to the UB track, but it was closed because they had some kind of junior Olympics right before we came, and it needed to be resurfaced. We jogged back to the dorms, and a few girls went inside to warm up. Olivia, Estevana and I kept going a little ways, but when Olivia and I decided to take the long way around, Estevana went in too. They were smart – after jogging up to the North gate, thinking that it would loop back around to the dorms, we spent the next 30 minutes wandering around trying to find our way back. Yes, my complete lack of a sense of direction is still intact.
Showered, ate breakfast, took a nap. So productive.
Two new girls from Rice arrived, and we spent a fair number of extremely confusing minutes trying to figure out how they were involved with our program.
Bundled most of us into a combi van and headed to Game City on the other side of town (that’s right, another mall). Shopped for some jeans, but the cheapest pair was still around $50, so we gave up on that. Also, everything started closing at 4 pm, even though we weren’t meeting back up with the rest of the group until 5. We settled on buying more food instead.
So about that… as we wandered through the grocery store accumulating more and more stuff (sweetener, washing powder – they don’t have liquid detergent here, tea, ramen noodles – a college student’s staple the world over), we realized that we really should have gotten a cart. We happened to be passing a girl in what appeared to be a uniform, pushing an empty cart. Like the way people who work in a grocery store push empty carts to put them away. So we asked if we could have the cart, and after staring at us for a minute or two, she grudgingly gave it up to us. Five minutes later, in the pasta/rice aisle, the girl went by with another cart… filled with groceries. Yeah, we stole some poor girl’s grocery cart. We’re those people. Those stupid American people, to be exact.
Feeling exceptionally mortified, we headed back to campus and got ready for dinner. By which I mean we had two hours to kill, and we were all starving, so we decided to open a bottle of wine while we waited. How many college girls does it take to open a bottle of wine, you ask? As it happens, this incredible feat is not as straightforward as it seems when your corkscrew is part of a can opener that cost 10 pula. In our case, it took four of us, plus a refrigerator, a knife, a nail file, and a good 45 minutes. Pictures to follow.
Ride in what we had basically commandeered as the group combi to dinner at Fego, a very nice restaurant that was very far away from campus. Eminem and Lil Wayne kept us entertained at a bone-jarringly high volume along the way.
We arrived at with 5 minutes till the kitchen closed. Again, we were those people. But the pesto pasta was delicious.
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