Mama 2010 and Ethiopian Food

Today was so awesome! My advisor picked me up at my hostel, along with some other people in the program, and we headed to the World Cup soccer stadium in Durban. There's a little building right next to the construction site where Mama 2010 works. Unfortunately, she couldn't give us her normal presentation because someone recently stole all of their electronic equipment, but she did tell us a lot about the stadium. It sounds like it's going to be awesome! They're currently working on this big arch that goes across it and supports the roof and they're putting a cable car inside of it so that people can go all the way to the top and get beautiful views of Durban! They're also going to have big shops and restaurants as well. Mama 2010 was so awesome! She talked about how much she loved telling people about the stadium and that she loved us for visiting. AND she gave us some jerseys for free that say "Team Durban" on the front and "2010" on the back. We were all really excited. We also checked out the rugby stadium, which was right across the street, but we couldn't actually go look at the field because the gates were closed.

For lunch, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant. One of the girls in the program is originally from Ethiopia (she's been living in the U.S. since she was little), and she's doing her ISP on the Ethiopian population in Durban. None of us had ever really had Ethiopian food, so she took us to this really cute little restaurant where she spends a lot of her time. It's a little hard to describe what the food looked like. It was basically a bunch of different piles of food- rice,lentils, corn, different meats, lettuce, etc. - served on top of a sort of flat bread or tortilla. It had a much different consistency from a tortilla, but that's the best way I could describe it. Anyway, we all shared the big platter, and to eat it you tore off a piece of the bread and used it to scoop up something from the piles. It was really tasty, and very different from anything I'd eaten before! We also stopped at the oldest house in Durban on the way back to the SIT offices. Although, it was actually only a replica of the oldest house because the original one had apparently burned down....it was still interesting though, and they had some really pretty furniture and an old mail cart.

There's supposed to be a game of ultimate on the beach later today, but I'm not sure if it's still on or not because we had a torrential downpour complete with flash flooding and some hail. It's stopped raining now, though, so hopefully it's still on. I would really love to play again! Tomorrow I'm going on a tour of different art galleries with some other people in the program. It's free and it takes us all over the city to different galleries. It should be fun! Sala kahle!