Some Add-Ons

After we re-entered South Africa from Botswana our driver pulled into a small shop at the side of the road for some local meat. This place received all the meat from animals shot by trophy hunters in the area and turned it into biltong, droewors, and boerewors. Similar to beef jerky, biltong is dried meat with some spices; droewors is a very fatty dried sausage (very tasty); and boerewors is a large sausage often spiced with cloves and nutmeg. I excitedly perused the entire shop tasting every available product. We bought eland, springbok and warthog droewors, and eland and wildebeast biltong. Apparently pleased with my enthusiasm the clerk opened a package or hippo and giraffe biltong and gave me two small bags for free. Hippo is really mild and very similar to beef but giraffe is really chewy and tastes like a herb garden (sage mostly). Rhino biltong was sold out. I was very excited to try hippo boerewors but we had no way of keeping it until we reached a suitable cooking venue. Maybe next time.

I received an email from Joanna (another UBC student who was supposed to go to Zimbabwe with me but came to Cape Town instead) and I thought her description of the university was quite fitting:

Managed to see the original exchange destination -the University of Zimbabwe. The Uni was in shambles. The building I would have taken my lectures in was covered in rust, dust, and broken glass. Goats grazed the sports field. Just for kicks, I went to the library in search of any book published in the past decade- and felt like I walked into a used book sale in a church basement. When I walked onto the campus, I couldn't help but breath a sigh of relief that the exchange hadn't worked out. By the time I left, I wished it had. UBC revoked the exchange on the basis of safety concerns. Yet, the people of Zimbabwe are so incredibly friendly, and Harare was much safer in comparison to Cape Town. I suppose they were just worried that I may have staged a coup against Mugabe.