1/29/2010

Today started out with breakfast at 8, followed by a lecture at 9. Well, not so much a lecture as an introduction to what we would be doing for the next few months. Yes, months. It’s starting to hit me as well. I have 5 lecturers and 3 TA’s. I haven’t met two of the lecturers, which means that out of the 6 I do know, 4 are south African, and the other two are American, and just happen to be girls. There’s Laurence, who is the program director; Alan, who is a field biologist and entomologist, teaching our ecology class (and also isn’t truly south African, as he is from Zimbabwe); Melissa, who teaches our conservation course and is from new jersey; Jenneca, who went on this trip a few years back, and is very interested in primates; Graeme, who has spent his whole life in the savanna and never wears shoes; and Dax, who is a herpetologist and also went on this program a few years back.
This afternoon we went on our first game drive/bird hide. A game drive is when you jump in the back of a pickup, or “bucky” as the south Africans call it. We then drive around the park, looking for birds and big game. A bird hide is a little hut in the wild where you can go look for rare (or common) birds. We spent a few hours out driving around, stopping whenever we saw something cool. Since it’s the rainy season here, there are tons of puddles everywhere, and the river by the reserve is flooded. So far I have seen giraffe, zebra, roan, duiker, and ostrich, as well as numerous birds. After the drive, we came back for dinner. I have decided that I want to learn a new word or phrase every day in Shangaan (our cooks speak it, and are very friendly), and I started today. Today my word was Thank you, which is N’kome.