The best years of my life (VERY LONG)

dravernor

Netherlands6188 Posts

January 19 2014 14:35 GMT

Warning: Image heavy

also very long

I often feel an intense desire to re-live these college years, even if just for the beautiful surroundings and wonderful people I met. I guess I am writing out this blog to get it off my chest and put it out there why it was so wonderful. It is quite a wall of text, so I won’t be offended if people don’t read it all. I just needed to write it, and have a place I can go back and look at it, and if anyone ever asks why I liked that city so much, I can redirect them to this blog.

Part I: Testing the waters

The sun dawned brightly that Sunday 31st August 2008, streaming right through my window. I was wide awake by that point, staring at the ceiling as I lay in bed, worrying about my upcoming flight and interview. It was a four hour flight with a stop-over. It was also my very first time flying, and I was doing it alone. On the long trip to the airport all I could hear was my heart beating, drowning out the sound of my grandmother’s stories of flying. I was far more nervous of missing my flight or going to the wrong boarding gate in a foreign country and being stranded.
Time for check in – I clutched my art portfolio, declaring the large folder my ‘hand luggage’ for the flight. My parents had gone ahead of me a few days prior (on business) and I was due to fly down and meet them for my university interview. I had only decided I wanted to take this course late in the year, too late for a proper application with masses of pre-prepared portfolio work, and so my parents had generously agreed to take me down there, for a personal interview and to take a look at living options.
The flight took off, everything was on schedule. I remember peering out the plane window and watching the world get smaller and smaller below me, the land was a patchwork of farms and roads and forests. I was relaxed, I didn’t quite feel I was several thousand feet in the air, I was merely looking inside a little glass box, similar to a television that showed what clouds looked like from the top down.
After a small amount of panic and almost missing my second flight, I touched down at my destination where my parents were waiting for me, full of a blissful cheer I so rarely see. They were relaxed for once, and my mother was glowing. We bundled into our hired car (an ancient little VW Golf) and drove back to where we were staying for the week. My eyes were already huge at all the sights to behold upon leaving the airport, but that was nothing compared to what lay ahead of me. The afternoon was spent relaxing and catching up with our distant relatives with whom we were staying, and when 7pm rolled around we went out for dinner.
Now, where I am from, at 6pm it is getting dark, and it is pitch black by 7pm even on the longest summer days. So it absolutely blew my mind that a mere 1500km from my home town the sun could still be shining quite brightly at 7:30 pm and only just starting to dim at 8pm.

The Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa

We went to a dock, known as the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, where we had dinner. There was live entertainment in the little restaurant/bar which overhung the harbor. Ships sailed in and out, music playing, lights on and people full of happiness. Coming from a landlocked country, this was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen; all the reflections on the water, the sound of people enjoying themselves. In my country people just seemed so miserable in comparison, so unsophisticated, so boring. From that moment I knew I would love Cape Town and its creative atmosphere.

The day of my interview arrived and I was a nervous wreck. We took a while to actually find the university because we encountered so many one way streets in the town centre, and after that it was rather tricky finding parking along that main road. We ended up walking five hundred metres or so to get from the car to the building. We met up with the lady my father had been liaising with, a tiny half Indian woman wearing the highest stilettos I had ever seen. She had a smattering of freckles across her nose and bright shining eyes. She took me to meet the director of the department I wished to study in, and we talked a bit about the course and what it would entail. Since I didn’t have my A level results yet (I was yet to write my final exams in high school), I showed him my previous results and my prediction letter from my teachers. I also showed him my art portfolio.

SUCCESS! He accepted me on the spot. He warned me that I had to be hard working to survive the course; it was not something that you could get through on talent alone (this later proved to be true - with a starting class of 35 students, only 20 made it through our first year, and only 12 of us completed third year). He advised that I would have many long nights ahead of me, many crushing deadlines and lengthy exams. This did not worry me, what could be harder than boarding in high school and its endless homework, sport, classes etc? After touring the campus and meeting my future lecturers, collected some papers etc we went out for a seafood lunch. This was yet another thing unavailable to me in my landlocked country, a rare treat for sure. As I sat up there on the balcony overlooking the town, I marveled yet again that this was to become my home town soon, that I was soon to become a part of this buzz. I remember observing a pair of white girls walking down the road and meeting with a black girl. They all embraced and chattered excitedly before going inside one of the hundreds of cafes that lined the street. I felt overcome with a desire to be part of this world, where people could intermingle, where you could walk the streets (relatively) safely, where you could use public transport without fearing for your life.

Street art in central Cape Town city, along Kloof Street

That night was the first time in my life I got drunk. Not only had I been accepted into the university of my choice, but it was the eve of my 18th birthday. We went out for a celebratory dinner and drinks with family friends and my father kept ordering another round of drinks for everyone.
We flew home together the next day.

Part II:Starting life in a new city

My life in Cape Town began in February 2009, I packed my bags and flew down with my mother. The plan was for me to stay with my mother’s relative for the first six months (at least) of my stay there, until I had made new friends and found a place to move in. Alas, this didn’t quite work out the way we intended. My mother and I quickly worked out a bus route to and from uni, even though it involved walking eighteen blocks from the closest bus stop, all the way up one of the most famous streets in Cape Town (Long Street). This street was known for its night life – it consisted mostly of bars and night clubs, a few restaurants and clothing shops, a book shop, an alternative clothing store, a few backpackers etc.

Perspective

Long Street

My base classroom in which most of my lectures took place was on the very top floor, 6 flights of stairs up. From that stuffy little room we had a beautiful view of the whole city. The cars that ceaselessly drove up and down, the exciting buzz of city life, it all seemed too good to be true. The early months of the year were unbearably hot, 40+ degrees Celcius most days. The searing heat and the general dry-ness caused many fires on the surrounding mountains, which required helicopters to carry sea water over to douse them.
A bit of a hermit by nature, it took a bit of encouraging to get me out the house on weekends. But I found entertainment in visiting the Waterfront. I would catch a bus down there, buy an ice-cream and wander around, looking at the shops, watching the boats come and go, riding the Ferris wheel, watching the various bands or solo performers doing their bit in the amphitheater. There were an abundance of seagulls and penguins and seals in the area, I assume they hung around for the left overs that the restaurants tossed into to water at the end of the day. At least, the seagulls were definitely there for that reason.

Where I am from, I was alienated to a degree for being different. I had my close friends that I got on with well, but I was never one of the popular kids. I wasn’t one of the people who were invited out of boarding school on the weekends to drink and take drugs, sleep around. I was one of the people that was gossiped about because I wore baggy clothes and skated around the school on the weekends, because I didn’t listen to hip hop and rap, because I didn’t attend rave parties in the holidays. Basically, I wasn’t popular because I was different. Suddenly coming to Cape Town and EVERYONE was different. In my class there were a few druggies with long hair and stoned faces, skater boys with their caps on backwards and their skateboards under their arms wherever they went, a ‘goth’ girl with a studded collar around her neck and dressed entirely in black (aside from her long blond hair), a boy who wanted very much to be a pirate – complete with eye patch and hat on some days, an overweight youngster in the tightest, loudest skinny jeans I have ever seen, a non-english speaking Chinese boy, a frizzy-haired, scooter riding, Iggy Pop loving hippy girl, a Rizzo (from Grease) look-alike with a keen obsession with the Beatles and German literature, and many more. The diversity of people overwhelmed me. I knew I would come to know these interesting individuals better over the course of the coming years, and so I wrote down my initial impressions of them in my homework diary. I look back on that and laugh because of how much my perception of them changed as I came to know them and they became my dearest allies, and the people I spent many long nights toiling side by side with, our eyes burning from the computer screens. And yet our sense of humour never faltered, even at 3am when a computer crashed mid-render and several hours of output had to be restarted. We would all take a LAN break and play half an hour of COD or Blur or even Quake Arena in between classes, where Alex’s girly screams as she got fragged would draw a passing lecturer’s attention and we would be reprimanded.

Learning to model in Maya

Inter-department foosball competition

First time using OS X and I had no idea what I was doing, even the lecturer couldn’t fix it.

Part III:Cape Town is the most beautiful

As I made friends I started to become more social after hours. Cape Town opened me up to a huge range of leisure activities – I would often go ice skating at the rink with Kirrin and Alex, we climbed Table Mountain for Georgie’s birthday and ate squished cake at the top, swam in the dirty quarry water, got sun burnt. We hiked up Signal Hill (a smaller hill near Table Mountain) during a thunderstorm and hid in a cave until it was safer to climb down again. Kirrin and Georgie and Alex took me to Boulders Beach, where we swam with penguins and roasted our skin by lying on rocks in the sun for hours on end. We dipped our toes in the icy Llandudno and Camps Bay waters, but it was far too cold for me to actually swim in there.
When time came to move out I moved to the southern suburbs of Cape Town, to a beautiful little coastal suburb called Muizenberg. I lived in a glammed up neighbourhood called Marina da Gama, where the rich lived on one side of the lakes and the smaller cottages cluttered the other section. I lived in one of the smaller buildings, a two bedroom shared house. Whilst it was lovely living with a friend with whom I could LAN, who had a dog I could walk, and who lived within walking distance of the shops, his university schedule didn’t quite fit mine. I had to be at uni every day, between 7am and 5pm. The train ride between my new residence and town was exactly an hour long. I then had to walk twenty minutes from the station to college, and an hour and five minutes from train station to the house. That meant I was travelling almost 5 hours of every day, which wasn’t ideal. I had many dangerous encounters in the six months I lived there (including being dropped in a dangerous shanty town, almost being kidnapped, being cornered by a hostile, knife-wielding man and coming across newspaper articles claiming monstrous creatures were on the loose + Show Spoiler +

before finding a more suitable residence in town, which was ten minutes walk from my classroom.

Early morning view down the road in Muizenberg

Crossing into the richer part of Marina da Gama

The little lakes that riddled the neighbourhood and housed many hungry ducks

Just near the Muizenberg train station

Part IV:Moving back into the city

Yay! Moving back into the city meant I was once again in the heart of Cape Town. I lived right below Table Mountain in a shared res. A corridor with eight rooms, seven residents. The eighth room was converted into a shared kitchen in which everyone left their appliances for others to use. There was a big bathroom with stalls with showers and bathtubs, toilets and basins. It was two flights up, so I could watch the traffic hum back and forth, day and night. The shops were directly across from my bedroom, so grocery shopping was quick and convenient, and there was a pool on the property. Being entirely on my own now and having full control of my bank account, I was suddenly responsible for paying all my own bills and budgeting accordingly. I didn’t find any problems with this, infact I discovered I wasn’t much of a spendthrift at all, tending to be more economical and frugal than most people I met. Living in such close proximity with six other people turned out to be a wonderful thing. We became very close friends and most evenings we would crowd into someone's room and watch series or movies together and smoke flavoured shisha. The little family of people I grew to love consisted of a chef, a design student, a hipster vegan photographer with his pet rats, fish and spiders, an almost middle aged gay video store clerk (who once won the lottery and blew all his money on drugs but had since come clean), an ex animator from my college and his girlfriend and one of my classmates who later went on to lecture at the uni with me.

As spoiled above, after graduating I spent the interim period of my student visa validity looking for a job down there and part time lecturing at the university. I was in charge of the first years, I had to show them around, run their introductory courses, take their life drawing sessions etc. They seemed like a good bunch and the ones who made it through to year three have done well so far. It never ceases to amaze me how many different cultures that university draws.

I recall an incident where a lecturer caught a girl in the class above me downloading 'Dancing with the Stars' and called her parents to inform them that she had been 'pirating inappropriate content'. Her parents rushed straight down to try and explain that she was't 'that sort of girl', heh.

Walking down the boulevard in Sea Point

View from my room

And so, after all this, two years after graduating uni and moving away, I can say that my experiences there have been so amazing that I would do almost anything to move back to that beautiful city, with its wonderful, vibrant people and constant artistic energy, its lovely hot summers and blustery wet winters, its traffic and its wildlife.
If you ever get a chance to visit, I recommend it.
Thanks for reading this far. I have so much more to say, but maybe I will write it in a diary or something.

Bonus pics
+ Show Spoiler +

Winter:

fenner

United Kingdom163 Posts

January 19 2014 14:55 GMT

Sounds like you've had a wide range of experiences through those years. I've always felt completely safe so it's scary to hear about all the dangerous encounters you've been involved in.

Targe

United Kingdom14103 Posts

January 19 2014 14:58 GMT

when i was at school it was a common trick to do that zoom in thing on someones computer if they left it for a minute (of course at the beginning no one knew how to get it back too)

BigFan

TLADT24920 Posts

January 19 2014 16:49 GMT

That sun going down picture is amazing, same with a lot of these other ones. I read part of the blog, will read the rest later but so far, I'm enjoying the read. Will give a much better comment once I get through it

NeThZOR

South Africa7387 Posts

January 19 2014 22:40 GMT

WTF you lived in Cape Town?! You are truly one lucky person. That city is arguably the most beautiful one in our country. Glad you enjoyed it.

You mention it to be 1500 km from your home town, so where are you from? Namibia by any chance?

lichter

1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts

January 19 2014 22:44 GMT

I just looked at the pictures

MysteryMeat1

United States3292 Posts

January 19 2014 22:44 GMT

Woah, nice blog tamuel!!! So jealous of your pics, though my campus is pretty as well. Wish you all the best. See you in irc!

TheEmulator

28092 Posts

January 20 2014 06:40 GMT

Great blog Dravernor

My uncle went to Cape Town once, and he said it was amazing.

dravernor

Netherlands6188 Posts

January 20 2014 16:24 GMT

On January 19 2014 23:55 fenner wrote:
Sounds like you've had a wide range of experiences through those years. I've always felt completely safe so it's scary to hear about all the dangerous encounters you've been involved in.

Thanks fenner :3 it isn't so bad really. I should have been more careful, but I came out unscathed and with all my possessions!

On January 20 2014 07:40 NeThZOR wrote:
WTF you lived in Cape Town?! You are truly one lucky person. That city is arguably the most beautiful one in our country. Glad you enjoyed it.

You mention it to be 1500 km from your home town, so where are you from? Namibia by any chance?

Okay I just googled and I was wrong, apparently I live 2511km from Cape Town, not sure why I thought it was less. Perhaps I believed it was from the Zimbabwe border rather than my hometown of Harare. But yeah, Cape Town is by far one of the most beautiful places I have been. A close second would have to be certain coastal areas of Mozambique. I am a sucker for being near water

Where are you from? It is nice to see so many Southern Africans on TL.

On January 20 2014 07:44 lichter wrote:
I just looked at the pictures

A true man of his word.

On January 20 2014 07:44 MysteryMeat1 wrote:
Woah, nice blog tamuel!!! So jealous of your pics, though my campus is pretty as well. Wish you all the best. See you in irc!

Thanks Samzyn!

On January 20 2014 15:40 TheEmulator wrote:
Great blog Dravernor

My uncle went to Cape Town once, and he said it was amazing.

Thanks Emu, if you ever get a chance to go yourself, don't hold back! so much to do and see and the weather is lovely!

Sn0_Man

Tebellong44238 Posts

January 20 2014 16:54 GMT

#10

Cape Town is pretty awesome though I never really got to spend as much time there as I wanted (our beach holidays were in Durban lol).

One of the few things I remember well was the top of Table Mountain.

NeThZOR

South Africa7387 Posts

January 20 2014 18:25 GMT

#11

I live quite near to Durban, in a small town called Ladysmith. My studying location is much nearer to Durban, which is Pietermaritzburg. Are you really from Lesotho Sno?

Sn0_Man

Tebellong44238 Posts

January 20 2014 18:48 GMT

#12

Was born there and lived ~6 years there. Don't live there atm.

Travelled through Pietermaritzburg on the way to Durban every time we went though. Heard of Ladysmith as well and I'm sure I've visted it but no memories lol.

Marcinko

South Africa1014 Posts

January 21 2014 07:11 GMT

#13

You lucky bastard

Living in Cape Town is a dream. I on the other hand live in Secunda in Mpumalanga, the complete opposite from where you live. On the plus side I am flying to Cape Town on Thursday to come watch Lamb of God perform.

Go Stormers!!

dravernor

Netherlands6188 Posts

January 21 2014 19:08 GMT

#14

On January 21 2014 01:54 Sn0_Man wrote:
Cape Town is pretty awesome though I never really got to spend as much time there as I wanted (our beach holidays were in Durban lol).

One of the few things I remember well was the top of Table Mountain.

How did you get up there? Cable car?

On January 21 2014 03:25 NeThZOR wrote:
I live quite near to Durban, in a small town called Ladysmith. My studying location is much nearer to Durban, which is Pietermaritzburg. Are you really from Lesotho Sno?

The very last time I was in SA we stayed overnight in Pietermaritzburg, I have some family there.

but still, not as nice as Cape Town

On January 21 2014 16:11 Marcinko wrote:
You lucky bastard

Nopenopenopenope get out! My friend has been teasing me about going to see Lamb of God, it is his favourite band and he is heading down from East London on bus just to go watch! Can't say my South African blood runs too thick in the rugby department, I am more of a British football fan.

Sn0_Man

Tebellong44238 Posts

January 21 2014 19:16 GMT

#15

Yeah took the noob route

My excuse is I was 12 and we did it as a family aka with my 8yr old sis etc >_>

Marcinko

South Africa1014 Posts

January 22 2014 14:23 GMT

#16

On January 21 2014 16:11 Marcinko wrote:
You lucky bastard

Lamb of God is my brother in law's favorite band, so I'm flying to go watch. Not going to drive 1500km

On the Football front, you're on your own, I know nothing about it, only that Manchester is apparently sucking this season.

Awesome photos by the way.