Culture Shock!

Sorry for not posting in a few days but since thursday its been caraaaazy busy going from place to place.

Thursday was the big "drop-off" day and we split up into groups of 3 for different categories and had to go out into Kampala and found out certain information. My group was entertainment, the national theatre, dance halls, cinema, and restaurants. I was super pumped to go to the National Theatre after seeing the movie "War Dance". Hopefully I can go see a bunch of shows since they're sooo inexpensive and the Uganda Contemporary Ballet performs every 2nd to last wednesday of the month. My friend Margie and I (who! very randomly knows one of Bradfords best friends, David Jensen, sooooo random) but we made a friend who is a student at Makerere University as a music student and he invited our group to basically start up an exchange program type thing with his dance and drum troupe which would be increddible. He also is a teacher for a kids dance and drum group called Children of Uganda (i believe) and they are apparently coming to NYC next fall to perform all over the city! There is also a really big festival of the arts coming up that is free and there's a film festival coming up in the end of October. We also found out that AT the University you can get a gym membership and workout, take aerobics classes, and dance classes so that's very good news.

The funniest thing though about Ugandans that we discovered are the following...

1. THey give extremely vague directions such as...  "So what restaurant would you recommend?" "There are some good ones on Jinja Road" "Oh really? Where and what's the name?" "Oh you just go this way" and then they make a very twisted arm motion and you have really no idea what direction they are referring to ahha. There was one man we spoke to on how to get to the National Theatre who gave us the right directions except we discovered finally that when he told us left, he really meant right. It's also funny to just ask different people how to get to the same place and they all tell you different ways...of course, vaguely.

2. Everything takes muuuuuch longer than you think it's going to. For example, you can't just say hello in passing, you have to commit to like a 10-15 minute conversation with a stranger about various things. It is definitely true that Ugandans are such friendly hospitable people, but they are definitely on what we refer to as "Africa Time." One night our dinner at the hotel was supposed to start at 7 and it didn't get put out til 9:45 haha whoopsiee. I was fine though cause I just had someone awesome Skippy Peanut Butter. Another time for lunch we got the restaurant at 11:45 and were told the buffet would be ready soon, which translated as not ready til 1:15.

We found a good movie theatre, some dance halls, but not very restaurants since people never really told us a specific place they liked, whereas if you were in the U.S. someone would give you like 3 specific restaurants and then tell you exactly how to get there on a map, but again that's not reallllyyy fair to compare to Kampala since many of the roads just don't have names...they're really big into landmark directions with funny hand motions.

There were some other great stories that other SIT kids had on their "drop-off" experience. Two people, Erin and Jack, had to go around to the various markets and compare their prices and goods and what not. Jack found this cool watches being sold and the salesmen tried and tried and tried to sell him this one "automatic watch". Apparently Jack pointed out that the hand on the clock was moving and the main replied "oh! well you have to start walking away and THEN it starts working" Of course, Jack and everyone else who heard this story just assumed it was a trick to get him to buy a broken watch, but later someone told us that there is such a thing as automatic watches that start working once you move them around haha

Two other guys, Shreyas and Tim, had to go to the Police Stations and Hospitals and ooooh my lord their trip to the Central Ugandan Police Station is one of the most ridiculous stories I've ever heard. I probably won't remember everything so it might not be as good, but I'll try my best to re-tell it. THey went to the police station and just from the beginning all the police men were just very suspicious of htem being there 1. because they're these random white dudes all dressed up because guys always have to wear button up collared shirts in Uganda. But basically they just go trapsing around the police station trying to find the information desk. They get sent up to the top top floor which apparently ended up being a restricted area and the policemen up there didn't know how they got up there so they of course asked who they were and they said "SIT students" and they policemen just got even more suspiscious cause they had aaaabsotutely no idea what SIT was, so then they asked for I.D. and Tim didn't have any I.D. on him except his medical bracelet so he tried using that but that was just a joke and Shreyas had his Driver liscense but the policement came back over to him with and said "ok, it does say you're from the United States, but then right next to that it also says Georgia" which he clearly took as the COUNTRY Georgia not that state so they just weren't getting anywhere. Eventually after a huge crowd of Ugandan policemen had gathered they left and its a much longer story, but still just funny.

Yesterday, saturday, we went to the source of the Nile in Jinja, but I'll talk more about that once I upload pictures from it.