The past, the recent past, and a little bit of the future

Things have been going well lately.  Zimbabwe Week was earlier this month and went really well.  Since then most of my work duties have involved writing reports of various sizes, which has been good.  Last Friday Michelle Obama was in Gaborone as part of her tour of southern Africa.  She actually visited the office right next door, the Botswana-Baylor Centre of Excellence, which is a big partnership between the US Government and Botswana that deals with pediatric HIV/AIDS.  Of course, any visit from someone in that position means that the Secret Service is everywhere.  They shut down the road early in the morning and had it blocked off by the Botswana Defense Forces.  Secret Service agents spent several hours making sure the road was clear and putting people in the proper position so Michelle could stop in for her twenty minute visit. 

Mrs. Obama arriving.

While she was in town she also hosted a luncheon with a number of prominent women and youth leaders that my boss attended, which is pretty cool.  In other news, this Friday is Sir Seretse Khama Day (founding father, first president, etc.) so I am taking off north to Kasane and Chobe, home of 55,000 elephants and where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton got married (for the second time).  Next week will be my last at my internship.  After that I am going to spend ten days and head to Harare and than on to Mozambique to sit on a beach for a few days.  I'll be back in Botswana briefly and fly out on July 21. 

Cape Town

After Namibia, I spent three days in Gabs taking care of all of my schoolwork for the semester.  Once I finished with that, I headed off to Cape Town with a friend.  We took a bus to Jo'burg and then took an overnight sleepliner bus to Cape Town, which was hands down the most comfortable bus I have ever slept on. 

The nice thing about Cape Town is that you can always see Table Mountain.

We spent our first day wandering around.  These are the Company Gardens.

World Cup stadium on the left.

The next day we headed to Simon's Town to see the penguins.  

Simon's Town has a reasonably attractive setting.

African penguins.

Penguins negotiating a difficult task--in this case, walking. 

Safety first.

In zoos, penguins usually look graceful as they exit the water and smoothly land standing up on the ledge.  In reality, they get washed up on the sandy beach and have to spend several minutes flailing around in the shallow water until they can figure out how to stand.  

They also enjoy waddling on rocks. 

The next day we took the cable car up to the top of Table Mountain, which affords views like this:

Cape Town, from above.

The clouds rolling in. 

We spent one day going on a wine tour in Stellenbosch.  It mostly consisted of us getting disapproving looks from much older and wealthier people as we shamelessly chose to taste only the most expensive wines. 

The vineyards are all gorgeous.

We also spent a lot of our time in the city wandering around and appreciating the small aspects of city life that Gabs is lacking, like coffee shops and used bookstores.  We took the train from Cape Town to Jo'burg, which is 28 hours and involves a lot of views like this one:

 

In other news, my internship is going really well.  We have been organizing a big seminar on Zimbabwe that will be held this week, so that has been eating up most of my time.  Still found the time to make it back to the Rhino Sanctuary last weekend, so it's not too terrible.  More on that later.