Fire Drill

First week of classes down!!!! Sorry that I am a week behind on posting but we lost internet for the weekend and then I have  been going non-stop all weekend but here was last week. I have most of my class 3 to 5 times a week unlike at home where I either have them 2-3 times a week. We also have tutorials (discussion groups) that happen once a week also so we spend a lot of time in the classroom. My schedule is classes from 9-3, which leaves the afternoon open to do whatever I am feeling like doing. The walk from Forest Hill is like ascending Mt. Everest! The first 5 mins are flat/downhill but the last 15 mins are a vertical climb. The day that climbing those steps is easy will be the day that I know I am in the best shape of my life!!! But at the same time, Table Mountain is the in the background, so just being in awe of it helps the walk considerably.  I am taking Sex, Love and Taboo in the African Languages (by far my favorite class), Afrikaans (I should have stuck with Spanish), SA history up to 1900 and the Odyssey. In all of my classes we will have different professors teaching us throughout the semester. I am excited to get different perspectives and teaching styles on the same subject. In Afrikaans, we have one teacher for Tuesday and Wednesday and another teacher on Thursday and Friday. This is wonderful because we get to hear two different ways to pronounce words by native speakers but at the same time they didn’t really communicate about how much we covered in just 2 days and started on a harder lesson that we weren’t ready for. BUT I think my favorite thing that happened was the firedrill at 5am Wednesday night. I woke up to sirens and thought it was a fire truck driving by or something like that so I fall back to sleep. A couple of minutes later, I hear banging on our apartment door and a guy yelling something. Half asleep I think to myself, Oh dear God I am going to die; we are having a riot/rally/attack. But then I hear someone yelling FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!!!!!!!! Now I think you have got to be kidding me; there can be no way we are on fire. Then we hear FIRE DRILL FIRE FIRE DRILL. I feel like they should have been saying that the whole time instead of just fire.  So me and my flat mates all go outside to the courtyard and wait in line with all the other students who live in the D block. Granted there are Blocks A-E so it took a while to find ours. Then we stood outside for about 15 mins while everyone else awoke from their slumbers and came outside. Then we waited in a line and told a girl with a clipboard our room # and name and she checked us off and let us go back to bed, 30 mins later. It was the most intense firedrill I have ever been in. The thing I was wondering about was if there is a real fire what alarm goes off because the alarm we heard was being hand cranked my a student in charge of the fire drill??? We didn’t hear any internal alarm!!