Arrived 7/13/09

So here we are. We have spent 2 full days here in Cape Town, well, Rondebosch to be exact. Yesterday it was pouring down rain and pretty cold, so we basically felt at home. We have spent the past 2 days trying to establish ourselves here which has been frustrating. First we got a phone and we were pretty proud of ourselves that we could now communicate with the outside world. We found the phone at a mall. The mall basically looked like an American mall plus some extra stores and better fashion. When we got home, I tried the phone and it didn't work. So we returned to the mall, retracing our steps through the city and then the mall, to find the phone shop. Once the phone was fixed we decided to try to find a place to live. We have a map of the city, but not the suburbs, so we look for places on the internet, find them on the yahoo maps, and then try to draw the maps so we can find them as we drive around. Driving is crazy here. First, its on the other side of the road and the car is stick shift. The hardest part is shifting with your left hand, and our car doesn't like to go in reverse, so we have to try to avoid going in reverse at all times. Next, only about 50% of the streets are signed, so even when we kind of know where we are going, we can't find the right streets. Let's just say that finding our way about has so far been the most frustrating part of the trip. We still need to start a bank account, but we can't do that until we have an address, and we need to buy a car, but we can't do that until we have a bank account. So far, we haven't even made it into the actual city because we have been too busy trying to take care of all of these things. So that's our plan tomorrow. Check out the city. So things should start to get a bit more interesting tomorrow. We got pretty excited today when the clouds broke for a bit and we were able to see Table Mountain. It's much bigger than I thought and I realized that since we will live on the east side of it that we will never see a sunset. It's an ok trade though. Its a beautiful mountain and I could see some sort of antelope like animal on it today. There is supposed to be all sorts of wildlife on the mountain. So officially we go to Cape Town tomorrow!