tonight we went for valentines dinner with the girls (and a couple guys). we went to a fancy south african game restaurant called khaya-nyana. i ate crocodile and springbok. we wanted to order the warthog ribs, but the warthog was diseased. kinda makes you wanna go veg right there! springbok is a native type of antelope that the national rugby team is named after. it came attached to a giant bone. femur? they were both amazing but crocodile is like my new favorite meat. i would like to add that this was a very fancy meal at a restaurant that had leather-bound menus, zebra print cloth napkins, and when you asked what for example an eland was, they pointed it's head out on the wall. and we got it all, plus a lot of bottles of the house wines for 135R per person. This equals roughly $24. fantastic.

then afterwards we went bar hopping on long street. it sucked though because all the semester at sea kids were in town so the place was jammed with americans. even though we've been here for 2 weeks we feel so much more adapted than the other americans and we didn't want to hang with them. also the bartender pissed me off because he took 10 R of my change and put in straight in the tip jar. so i confronted him and he said that if he didn't do it then he wouldn't get tipped. so i got mad and demanded my money back and told him that maybe if he was nice and fun and didn't cheat people then they would tip him automatically. i still didn't get all my money back. asshole. also, at dinner these random south african guys came up to our table saying they were on a scavenger hunt and needed two girls to kiss them and they needed photo documentation of it and if they won they would win champagne. so me and this girl sarah volunteered. it was awkward. but i have officially kissed a south african man (who was kind of a hottie). plus we saw the big list of their scavenger hunt tasks, and honestly if it wasn't legit then they put way too much effort into scamming us. mom and dad, i'm sure you're glad to know that your daughter is the one in the group who can't turn down a dare.

i went to my first african dance class today. we didn't dance. but it's gonna be pretty intense. it's a 3 credit dance class. i'm excited though. i think i'll learn a lot as well as get good exercise. also, i'm gonna join the gym in the next couple days because this whole lifestyle of eating a lot and drinking a lot and then relying on gastrointestinal upsets to keep it balanced cannot last forever.

last night we went out to "obz" which is local speak for the bar neighborhood of observatory. we went the cool runnings in this location and it was awesome (probably because all vodka and brandy drinks, plus select beers were 6R). it seemed really segregated though. i got kinda weirded out. We tried to go dancing and it was like "um, what are the white girls doing on the dance floor?" people wouldn't come near us and they were looking at us like aliens. so we decided to just go back to the white kid room and to try to break the barrier another day. it's also strange because while the segregation everywhere and the hyper-consciousness of race is hard to get used to, the race relations are sooo similar to the u.s. lots of people think they're very clever when they start discussions comparing race politics here and at home. frankly, it's been 2 weeks and i'm a little sick of it.