Happy Easter everyone! I hope you had a great day celebrating with friends and family. I woke up this morning and headed to church in Obs today. We went to Jubilee Church, which was a fun experience. I really liked the music, but the teaching was not the best. To complicate matters, there was a really uncomfortable alter call at the end. I’ve been a Christian for most of my life and the way it was carried out would have made me uncomfortable if I were becoming a Christian for the first time. I think I may try out a new church next time. Something really great about the church was how multi-cultural it was. There were people of all colors and descents there and it was lively with dancing and clapping and shouting. Though the message and alter call weren’t great, they did spur some great conversations within the people who went to church. Because it was Easter, a bunch of people from our group who either don’t have a strong faith or are actually practice a different religion came along. Five of us ended up going out to brunch at a local cafe and ended up talking for over an hour about issues of faith. It was really interesting and I think we’re going to try to do this every week. Explore different churches and then debrief and discuss.
This afternoon we went for a different type of adventure. We decided to hike up Table Mountain and then down to a concert at the Kierstenbosch Botanical Gardens. It was a rather impromptu trip, so we started hiking at around 3 pm. By this time we couldn’t make it to top of the mountain where the cable car is, so we decided on a route up Skeleton Gorge and down Nursery Ravine. This took us about 90% of the way to the top of the mountain, but about a 2 hour hike from the location on the top of the mountain where the cable car arrives. Our hike up took around an hour and 15 minutes and we were moving at a rather fast pace. It was quite a strenuous trail including mostly switchbacks and scrambling. It even had a few ladders to get up steep sections. At the top we had such incredible views of the suburbs of Cape Town and the townships. You could see for miles. It was definitely worth the hike.
As we started to head down, one of my roommates knee began to give him problems. He has a torn meniscus and wasn’t having any trouble on the way up, but as we started going down his knee started to flare up. We hadn’t anticipated slowing down our pace and so we didn’t budget much extra time before sundown. We looked through our stuff and in our group of 8 we had 2 flashlights. We decided to send half of our group down quickly so that we could share the 2 flashlights among only four people. I stayed behind to help my roommate down the mountain. We fought through the wind and the steep stairs down the mountain and we ended up making it down in plenty of time for the sunlight. Even though the sun set on the other side of the mountain we still had plenty of time. We made it for the second half of the concert at the gardens and just relaxed after our ordeal on the mountain. I guess we should have been a little more prepared, but it was amazing how quickly we could make a plan and execute it. This experience made me feel a little more confident in my ability to keep my cool in tough circumstances and problem solve. I guess the moral of the story is not to try to climb a mountain with a torn meniscus.
After the concert we headed back to the house where our RA had cooked a great Easter dinner for all of us. She cooked all day and made quite an impressive meal. We all filled up and now I’m just relaxing before I go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll tour the city with a guide who can tell us the history and then hopefully we’ll take the Cable Car up to Table Mountain. (If the wind is too strong like it was today the cable car doesn’t run). We start classes on Tuesday so I should get into more of a routine then. I’ll update you tomorrow on what we end up doing!
Tim
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