The Zoology Nerd is a Terrible Blogger

Sanibona imideni nobagane! (Hello family and friends!) Sorry I've been so lax about updating this thing. Now that I'm in the swing of things, it doesn't seem so exciting to write about. But I'll try for your sake. :)

Today marks the start of Easter vacation. I keep saying spring break, but it’s not spring here, so I get funny looks if I say that. Most of the international people already left, but another girl and I had late classes, and the flights were really expensive since we waited so long to book, so we are leaving on Saturday (which also happens to be my 22nd birthday!). We’re all meeting up in Cape Town, where we’ll stay for a week. I’m not sure what we’re going to see there yet.

Meanwhile, my classes are going fine. Evolutionary Animal Physiology is usually the most interesting. The labs have consisted of: dissecting and disemboweling a monkey (along with a rat and a rabbit); looking at a cow’s stomach, taken out of a dead cow; looking at a cow’s stomach, when it was still inside a living cow; taking samples from aforementioned live stomach and looking at the contents under a microscope; and measuring the metabolism of a cockroach. For the cockroach one, I was one of the brave souls to put my hand in the jar and grab the cockroaches. I’m trying to get over how creeped out I am by them. By the end of it, though, my hand was trembling from anxiety. The cockroaches we used were actually American cockroaches. I could almost hear them singing the national anthem as they were being stuffed into beakers. (Don’t worry, no cockroaches were harmed.) Animal Health is interesting too, because we go out to a farm and examine the animals. So far we’ve examined sheep and vaccinated chickens. I kind of cringed as I was plunging the needle into the chicken, but it was interesting nonetheless.

The big excitement here this week was that the students organized a strike to protest the housing office. Apparently they assigned too few rooms to too many students, so there are a lot of people who were promised housing and now have nowhere to live. There’s been talk that they’re going to force students to share rooms, which would be really hard because the rooms are tiny. They get really excited about protesting here. They dance, sing, chant, etc. They also would run into classrooms and force people to not attend lecture. If they were taking a test, they would tear up the test. This week, they were striking for a second time, because after they protested the first time, the administration made promises with certain deadlines that were not met. Since a lot of teachers were holding tests this week because it’s the week before break, a lot of students looked at the protest as sent from heaven, because a lot of tests were canceled. Out of three, only one of mine was. Bummer. I walked with the strikers a bit. I didn’t have my camera, but a friend of mine did, so maybe I’ll get pictures from her.

Speaking of pictures, I uploaded a lot today on flickr.com. Go here to see them. Enjoy!