A Day in the Life

During the course of this blog I have made decisions to write it in a topical manner rather than addressing day to day events as I found the former more informative and more conducive to my writing style. As a consequence however, there is little perspective in this blog as to my daily life, such is the purpose of this particular post. I hope to walk the reader through a typical weekday in my life, in Botswana.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I woke up around 7:10am to the sound of my alarm clock. *sidebar* The clock is one item that I am thrilled I included. It was a gift years ago and I assumed I would never use it, but the battery operated nature made it ideal when the power often went out overnight, and the thermometer on it was an interesting distraction.*sidebar*

(My morning view)

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I had four classes, but a day scarcely went by that one of them wasn't canceled. The first class of the day was at 8am, Population Studies. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my first class met at 1pm so the alarm clock wasn't quite so prominent a feature of these days.

(Population Studies Classroom)

Population Studies wasn't an exciting or all-together involved class, so fortunately I didn't need excitement to wake up. We agreed on the first day of class that class would start at 8:10 instead of 8 but because the classroom was too small for our class if you didn't get to the class early you wouldn't get a seat and you'd have to find a chair elsewhere. This sometimes took as much as 20 minutes. Population Studies always got out promptly at 8:50 and then I was off to Archaeology.

(My Archaeology Classroom)

Archaeology usually began a few minutes before 9am unless the professor was late, which was quite common actually. Two interesting notes about this room (Called the Arc Lab) on the left side of the picture above you see carboard boxes. One time the teacher shuffled the boxes for about three minutes finally pulling out of a particularly disorganized box a rock. He went on to tell us that the rock was actually a 20,000 year old hand axe. I looked around to see if any one else was stunned, they weren't but I had never seen something that old outside of a museum and here it was in a disorganized pile totally ungaurded. On the right side of the picture you can see some pots. Those date to between 500 and 15,000 years old. Archaeology ran to about 10, even though it was supposed to end at 8:50 and I had to scurry out to get to Sociology on time.

(This is the courtyard of the Social Sciences Block. Sociology, Economics, Population Studies, and Setswana all met in this courtyard)

Sociology was always an interesting class and it was also my first class of the day with other internationals so it was a fun time to ask each other about what had happened the night before or on someone's trip to who-knows-where, or just to gossip. Maaike, Megin, Eli, and Arnhild were in the class along with some of the other Americans. Sociology always got out on time and finally I had a break.
I was often starving so I would go to the convience store or to "North Gate" to get food. The conveince store has packaged food and some hot food but the hot food is suspect except for the "chips" (basically homemade french fries). The chips were my normal choice, I would add ketchup, salt and vinegar for a messy but delicious treat. I could also go to "North Gate."

(North gate is just in front of the National Stadium)

"North Gate" refers to a bunch of vendors who daily setup stalls just outside of the northern gate of the UNiversity. There you could get either a hot dog or a try of selected more typical items like beef, chicken, rolls, or pop-pop (palachi/corn-meal is a speciality). I was intimdated by the choices of the vendors with a variety because one time I tried it out and was choosing my food and got yelled at because I had taken "too many meats, one meat, two starches, thats all you get." The experience scared me (kinda, :-p). From then on I always went with hot-dogs. For a little less than $1 you can get a bratwurst (they call them Boerwurst) with onions ketchup, chilli sauce (something like sweet salsa mixed with relish) and masturd (yes thats how they spell it). They are amazing! I always went to the same vendor. He had the big yellow box you can see in the photo above. He was the only guy with onions, and we became friends.
At 1pm I had Economics. Econ was canclled regularly. When we did have it usually only lasted about 20minutes. Fortunately I had the class with Arnhild and Matt which made the class pretty fun overall, although I didn't learn too much.

(My Setswana Classroom)

On Tuedays and Thursdays I only had Setswana from 1 until 3 but it usually got out around 2:30. It was a really fun class and it was only the American so we had a lot of fun.

(The basketball hoops at the courts at UB)

Other than classes every Monday at 8, and Thursday at 7:30 between 6 and 26 international students walked over to the sports courts an played sports. We played a mixture of volleyball, soccer (although we called it football, silly Europeans) and basketball. It was really funny, everyone thought I was SO good at basketball, ah the glory of being an American.

That's all I can think of for now,
Hope all is well,
Love,
Tommy