Friday September 26th This morning we pulled into Cape Town, South Africa!! We were blessed once again with great weather for pulling into port. Terribly choppy seas delayed us getting in by a few hours, not to mention made last night nearly impossible to sleep with everything in the room falling over and drawers flying open. The pilot met us in the harbor at 7:00 rather than the 5:00 scheduled time. Our diplomatic briefing was scheduled for 9:00 but was cancelled because the ambassadors got to the port earlier that morning when they were supposed to and were misinformed of our arrival time and left. So, at 9:30 am we were allowed off the ship in Cape Town. Immediately after departing the ship, BAM Table Mountain was starring us right in the face. The weather had broken and we had partly cloudy skies, the makings of a great first day. I had seen pictures of the mountain, but they do not do it justice. It is very surreal looking at it, making it hard to believe I am actually here! I had an FDP at 2:00 to go visit a township and a museum, so a group of my friends who were going on the same trip and I decided to wonder. We walked all the way into town, a good 20 min walk to try and find St. Georges Cathedral. This is home to archbishop Desmond Tutu. I was going to use it for my architecture class, but when we got there it was closed until later in the day. So we turned around and headed back to the ship. On the way back, we stopped to look at paintings in the street and the vendor asked where we were from, we said Canada just to see what his reaction towards America was. Sure enough he said he hated America, it was the first time I had ever felt ashamed to be American just to have people have such hatred for it. Ashamed is a strong word, but it is hard to be hated where ever we go without people giving us a chance.Our township tour got started a bit later than expected because they sold more spots than they had on the busses. Once it was all figured out we were off. We had a South African man as a tour guide, giving us a history of District Six, a district formally home to 35,00 blacks during the apartheid that were forcibly removed from the area in an effort the make Cape Town all white. They entire district was bulldozed to the ground. There is a museum dedicated to the district and that was our first stop. The museum was very interesting and had great artifacts and photos. We were told before going into the museum not to take flash photography and a woman working yelled at students for forgetting to take the flash off. She also made the comment "These must be American students..." We didn't linger for too long and continued onto the Langa Township. The busses dropped us off at the community center within the township. Immediately little kids came running over to the bus. Lucky for me, I brought a booklet of stickers and you should have seen the smiles on their faces. We had a quick tour of the center and then started off on our walking tour. The part of the township we walked through was not what I had expected, it was a lot nicer. Don't get me wrong, it was still a very poor area but did not have the thousands of shacks built out of aluminum sheets of metal. We got to see the office where the identity cards were given out during the apartheid, and these cards had to be renewed every 3 months. The citizens had to carry them everywhere or else would be arrested. We walked down a street with houses on both sides. The houses were very small with only a few small rooms. I handed out more stickers to kids along the side of the street. We walked past a house with a cow in the front yard with a crowd of men standing around it. I went to take a picture of it but one of the other SAS kids stopped me and said not to take pictures because it was religious. They were slaughtering the cow in honor of a dead grandfather. We did not see the actual slaughtering but they were preparing for it. At the end of this street was apartment complex like homes.I made the mistake of giving out more stickers. Before I knew it I had kids everywhere. They surrounded me and were grabbing for the stickers. It was a tiny mob and another SAS kid came over to help and I slipped him the stickers and he hid them. I was about ready to just throw the booklet because there was no way I was getting out of there without someone else coming to bail me out. It was chaos. During all of this we lost our tour group. It was not a problem because we joined up with one of the other buses. This was about the end of our tour. We met the busses and drive through other parts of the township and I felt like I was at a zoo looking at animals. We saw the worst parts of it, shacks and homeless. There is 250,000 people currently living in the township, so it is huge. It was a good experience to see it =, but on my last day in Cape Town I am doing a trip called "Operation Hunger" which will take us to many different townships and show us how they are battling malnutrition, which should be very interesting. So needless to say, I will be getting other chances to see more townships just like this one.