Random Adventures

The rest of my week has been filled with a lot of random adventures. Tuesday wasn't too exciting, I spent a lot of my time at the internet cafe researching for my ISP, we decided to buy a used movie at this movie rental place about a block away from our hostel, and it was one of the most bizarre movies I have ever seen. I think it was called "Edmond" or something. It was just so weird. I also realized that day that the cleaning lady threw out the papers I had saved about the U.S. election that my friend and I were in. It was a very sad realization.

Anyway, on Wednesday, I finally had interview for my project. I met with a woman who works for a paper in Durban who has been covering World Cup stories for the past 3 years, pretty much since South Africa got the bid. I got a lot of really useful information from her, and some more contacts for potential interviews, so it was really exciting. The newspaper building itself was a little strange, I thought. Basically, all the newspapers that are printed here all come from this same building, and a lot of people from different papers work side-by-side. I also tried to get a back-order issue of the paper that the cleaning lady threw away. I got what I thought was the right copy (it had the same cover story and everything), but when I opened it up, the article wasn't in there. I think the woman at the kiosk gave me the earlier edition of the paper instead of the later one...oh, well.

On Thursday, I met with a man who heads the KZN offices of the Tourism Enterprise Partnership, which works on bulding up small businesses and helping people who have been historically disadvantaged. They're trying to get more businesses, especially in the tourism industry to be prepared for 2010 and he seemed really positive. I also later went to a B&B Association meeting and talked to some women about their opinions, but they were really not happy about the FIFA regulations and things like that. There's an organization called MATCH that does ticketing and accomodation for big FIFA events and they basically buy out big blocks of hotel rooms to sell for the World Cup. For this World Cup, they're also buying B&B rooms in effort to help small businesses/tourism industries, but the women I talked to didn't like it because there were fixed rates involved and MATCH could cancel any time up to 15 days before the tournament. It was kinda funny to see two drastically different views back-to-back. It was an interesting day, and I felt very productive.

Today one of the guys in the hostel who works in a surf shop here was going to give my friend Adina and me a surfing lesson, but sadly, the weather did not cooperate. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction and there were basically no waves. We ended up going back to the Victoria Street Market and the bead market, and wandering around Durban for a while. It was a pretty random adventure because we didn't really know what to do. After an early lunch, we decided to head back to Florida road, and we went to an art gallery and checked out some stuff at a store close by. Then we walked down the road back toward the hostel. We stopped in a church along the way, because my mom told me that my Grandmother wanted to know what churches were like in South Africa. I hadn't really been in many aside from the half church/half house down the street from my house in Cato Manor. Anyway, we wandered in, and this old woman let us go inside and see . They had these two buckets on either side of the altar that had different color flags in them. We asked what they were for and she said that they danced around with them at their sunday services. She also told us that we needed to learn more about Jesus and that if we didn't we would never get into Heaven (I told her I'm not very good about going to church, and my friend is Jewish). I kinda wanna go to this Church on Sunday to see the flag-dancing spectacle. I think it would be rather interesting. We'll see what happens. Sala Kahle!