Vacation Has Come to an End....

Well I experienced my last day of being able to explore and have loads of free time around campus today. Tomorrow we start classes and I know it kind of sounds nerdy but I am kind of excited for our classes to start. I will most likely take this statement back when I am having to experience 8 hours of classes and tons of papers but either way I am excited to learn. I am taking three required classes and two electives. We have to take history and culture of South Africa, Intercultural communications, Intro to Zulu, Global Culture classes and then my electives are Intro to Art and Life and Teachings of Jesus. I just cannot wait to dig deep into learning more about the history and culture of SA. Besides having class tomorrow, today consisted of getting up for breakfast and going to a SA church. We were able to choose between four different churches in which I choose my program directors church. I have to say it was quite an experience and much different than churches in America. The people are very much relaxed and there really is not much structure. It is so relaxed that children are provided with coloring books at the front of the church in which they constantly walk back and forth throughout the church service. Other differences is that it was a very charismatic church in which I have never experienced much of that. As much as it was very foreign to me I enjoyed being able to see God work through people throughout the service. One other rather different fact is that the service was two hours long! The people were incredible in greeting us and making us feel welcome. I even got to talk to some college age students after the service in which they invited us to come and hang out with them in the future. It is so fascinating to me to make friendships in other countries and I cannot wait to see what this semester unfolds. I will be checking out the rest of the churches and hopefully being able to settle on one and then hopefully being able to get connected as best as possible. After we came back from church we were greeted with the rain of course. It has been raining non-stop here and I am wondering when the beautiful sunshine will be out. Oh of course I almost forgot to mention that this morning I woke up to an obnoxious noise that sounded like a dying duck. Everyone in my chalet woke up to it also and found out it is a rather odd looking bird. We are all hoping that this will not be are alarm clock for the rest of the semester. As I was woken up we decided to open are windows and then fell back asleep. Everyone has told us that monkeys will climb through your windows and destroy your stuff. I woke up and had this urged to close the windows, well good thing I did because we were greeted with an entire family of monkeys right outside our windows. It was an awesome sight to see and I could not believe how lucky I am to be here. Later on a group of us decided we were going to go and try to find some zebras on the game reserve. Of course it was raining and I was a part of the group that went on the wrong trail. So even though it was beautiful, we sadly did not spot any zebra today. I am on a quest tomorrow morning to spot some. I will let you know how that goes. Well its only 9 o'clock here and I am exhausted. So I am off to bed.