Cape Town: Bird’s Eye View
After 7 hours on a bus and roughly 19 hours in the air, we arrived bleary eyed to our home for the next month. The bus ride from the airport to the city is usually filled with trepidation and excitement, and this ride was no different. We all sat, faces pressed against the windows, trying to soak up the first sights of Cape Town. Our bus stopped at a beautiful location, and we were all amazed that we’d be living there.
Our apartments are situated in between Table mountain and the ocean, so it was safe to say that everyone was in pure awe at the luck that we had found ourselves in. Even luckier still, we got to hike the mountain the next day. While South Africa was currently experiencing the winter season, the day of our hike was nothing but pure sunny skies and 70 degree weather. Our group of 45 students hiked for roughly two hours (enough time to leisurely climb up while also stopping to soak up the view).
I struggle to find the words to describe the view once we got to the top. There are only a handful of times that I’ve seen a view that has made me wish I didn’t have to blink. I was torn between staring out at the never ending blue ocean or the rolling textured mountains. If you went around the other side, you could stare out at the city, the industrial cranes that looked like giant metal giraffes, and the clusters of buildings and housing structures. I was fortunate enough to have this as my first impression of Cape Town.
The next day we got right to work and headed over to TSiBA, the business school we would be partnering with for two weeks of our stay. We would be working with students at that school to come up with innovative business solutions for local entrepreneurs. These students were also local, and would be able to offer us a unique view into life in the townships in the area. First day of school jitters were resurfacing that morning, but we could not have been more welcomed. Sammie and Freedom were the class leaders at TSiBA and they led us in song and dance as icebreakers. They had huge personalities, bubbling with warmth and laughter, and it was truly infectious.
We were broken up into groups, two TSiBA students and two Northeastern students, and were also assigned an entrepreneur to consult. Our entrepreneur, Bathembu, is based in the Khayelitsha township and sells Afval (a delicacy in South Africa comprised of sheep intestines, heart, head, tripe, and lungs). We’d be working with him to create a marketing plan and ultimately a plan to apply for funding so that he could consider opening up a shop in his community.
It has only been two days in South Africa and we’ve already met incredible people and hiked one of the new seven natural wonders of the world – If this is how we started our trip off, I can only imagine what is in store for us in the next month!
