Austin to Africa. : In and around Gabz!

Hi all,

I realize I've seriously been slacking on keeping up with my blog but to be fair, the daily time frame for me to write is so small and I have been choosing to hang out with friends or sleeping. Oh, also, our weekly power outage cut the internet for about 12 hours so Wednesday doesn't really count. Speaking of, we're having another scheduled power outage on Saturday from 7 am to 6 pm. That should be fun! Mondays are water cuts 6 pm to 10 pm for the part of the city I'm staying in.

Anyway, I guess I'll start with last weekend since that's where I left off (oops). Well, my group and I went on a "scavenger hunt" of the city, Gaborone (pronounced Hab-uh-ro-nae). It was awesome and also so tiring! Gabz is huge and so varied in what you'll find. The best/worst part about four tourists walking around in the city is the random attention. Sometimes, you'll get strangers (men and women) just come up to you and tell you how beautiful you are or they'll say "Hello. I love you!" or they'll try to take pictures of you/with you. It's definitely an interesting city. Lolz. Let's be honest though, the attention gets old because people also assume you have money... so you have to be careful to keep your things close, especially at popular places, like the mall or the bus rink.

Public transportation is also...interesting. People mainly use taxis and combis. To the left you'll see the front of a combi and I'll be sure and get a better picture in one of these days for full effect. They're 16 seater white vans that have routes and stop when requested. Oh, these routes aren't really listed anywhere either...you just know or ask a driver. They're pretty cheap but also relatively sketch at night. The ones with blue license plates are "safer" but hey, they get you where you want to go! One thing that sucks though is that when you want to leave somewhere in the morning from the bus rink, you have to wait for the 16 seater van to fill up before it leaves, and it can make you late to your destination. There's no set time for when a combi will arrive or if it will...it just does. The best part of the taxis is that you never really know what you'll hear until you get in the car... I've heard music from gospel African to "Call Me Maybe" there's no telling what's next!

Okay, so back to the scavenger hunt...my group also went into a few places we weren't supposed to get into... such as inside parliament (hey, who's fault is it if you have virtually non-existent security in a government building AND you leave the doors unlocked? Speaking of security, there is an embassy row with different government buildings like the embassy buildings for Zimbabwe and Canada... and then there's the United States embassy. So intense. You can't even take a picture of the parking lot they own. (If you try to take a picture of the US embassy, game over).

The coolest place we saw that we weren't supposed to be able to see was inside the high commission courts. We got to go inside because we're American and it was Sunday so the courts were vacant. Now, we actually got to go inside the courtrooms and all. We even saw the cells where those who are accused of committing murder and treason are detained before being seen by a judge. I'm talking maximum security. I saw the scuff marks of people who resisted their court appeals. It was intense and old school.

Here are some visuals to fill in the gaps! Enjoy!