Trekking and Southafrican party!

Hello!

This is Elida, one of the workcamp leaders writing!
Sonia and I arrived last monday evening to Cape Town and have been warmly welcomed to South Africa in all possible ways!
The team consists of so many wonderful and crazy people that I really appreciate! We've had a lot of meetings and they were all very constructive. I'm so impressed about how focused the organization is and the way they put their heart into what they are doing :-)
This week we've planned the adventure playground and the different objects that are gonna be built on it. The workcamp will start on monday and we're all very excited about it!!!

Today we had the day off from workcamp planning so we decided to go for a hike in the mountains! I was very excited about it but already at breakfast my overwhelmed feelings about the hike started to faint away gradually. The first topic at the table was namely muggers! Aparently namibian gangs operate in the mountains where they hide and wait until the tourists pass by... Michele had an electric gun that she was willing to loan us for the hike and just the thought that we might come into a situation where that thing might be needed was horrifying! Then we went on to decide how much money we were gonna bring to give to the people that might attack us. 200 rand...? would that be fine or was it too generous to the muggers? Michele clearly instructed us that 5 or 10 rand was good enough!
Sonia also decided to put in her smallest memory card in her camera, IN CASE it would get stolen by a mugger.
Fine then...the weather was wonderful. Our first sunny day since our arrival. Sonia was happy and Jasmine was in a good mood too. What could go wrong? But the potential horrors didn't stop yet! In the car up to the mountains Michele told us about all the different snakes that ALSO operates in the mountains. The really dangerous one is a kind of Cobra-snake which is yellow. But then there's also the Puffdaddy, the lazy and fat snake that you might step upon because it is too lazy to bother moving away from a sunny spot!
MMMMmm wonderful!
Michele left us at the beginning of the rout and we started walking.
No snakes and no muggers, luckily! But beautiful nature with a waterfall, and you could see down to the beach and the white sand next to it. Amazing!!!!

We've already got an idea about the southafrican way of living. Party party party! The second day we drank a lot of wine and sang kareoke until late! And since then the kareoke has been part of almost all evenings! Wicked! Last night we had a brei, a barbecue which Gerry and Michele organized at our house. A lot of relatives turned up and I was playing the swedish game "Fia med knuff" with the children! We were singing kareoke again (off course) and dancing a lot. They think I should start dancing ballet :-) I wonder why.. was it maybe because of the "rocking penquin with big boobs-move" that I did?!!! Gerry laughed so much when I did that one, I'll never forget that!
After that we did all the social evening games that we could think off and sang "sma grodorna sma grodorna" for the third time since we arrived..

Tomorrow we might do some surfing!!!! Cool, I've only tried that a few times before!
Apparently Cape Town has a lot of sharks. They have guards that sit in the mountains with spectaculars only looking out for sharks that move closer to the beach..! We'll see how we get along with the sharks tomorrow :-)
Earlier today when we went down to the harbour to buy fish for the brei, we saw seals in the water...they were huge and so close! I was so excited that I just screamed aloud!!!!
Cape Town with it's overwhelming nature, animals and people feels all like a part of a fantasy country that I dreamed about when I was a child! Seels...wow!!!

Now I'm going to bed (hopefully) not much time for sleeping here really!
Greetings from Elida