Ryan's home stay

The Homestay weekend was one of the events on this trip that I had known little about. I was apprehensive about it at first. Before the weekend we were told very little. We knew only that we would be staying in Ocean view with a family. When Chantel came to talk with us about it, she told us to not expect anything too fancy from our host families. This is all I had to go with. However when I walked into my family’s house after our first dinner in Ocean View, our host sister was sitting on the couch watching “Long Walk to Freedom.” The house we stayed in was great. It had everything I could ask for in a home, a bed, a bathroom and food.

Sitting down with my host family and watching TV was great. I hadn’t watched TV since leaving the US. It didn’t matter that we were watching an Afrikaner soap opera, it was still nice to sit down and relax in front of the TV. Another enjoyable thing was that after working at the crèche, I took a long nap, and woke up to some chicken sandwiches already made for me. For the first time after being in Cape Town, I was both well fed and well rested.

Ryan volunteer at crèche in Ocean ViewThe next day we took a trip to Fish Hoek beach. I had forgotten to pack my watersport trousers, so my host father went and bought me some. They were red with yellow lettering down the side of it. They were a pair of lifeguard shorts. The whole time we were at the beach, I kept getting funny looks from all the lifeguards. My host family kept joking around with me, pretending to fall in the water and asking me to save them. At one point, a random guy came up to me and ask “Sir, that yellow net out there, is it a shark net?” I told him it was and then turned to my family and asked “Why did he ask me, what am I, the authority on the beach or something?” About halfway through speaking I realized what I said and my family had a really good laugh.