The Road to UCT

Greetings to everyone! I feel like 90% of all blog posts begin with an apology to the readers for having such infrequent blog posts. So I'm not sure if it'll be worse for me to apologize and contribute negatively to the statistic, or not apologize and sound unappreciative of my readership. I suppose I'll compromise by just talking about apologizing without actually doing so. There you go.

I think you all deserve the whole story. The whole truth. It's been a journey, my friends, and I will try to capture the essence of each important moment on the Road to UCT. Stay with me, here.

I send in my application online on April 11th, 2011. I was young, I was innocent, I had already gotten into three respectable Canadian universities, but not too deep down I wanted to go somewhere exciting, somewhere different. So the University of Cape Town it was. I've been asked a few times why I decided to go for UCT and not somewhere else. Yes, it was the urge for adventure that motivated me primarily, but there was some reason that went into the decision as well. It's a school taught in English, first of all; it has a really, really good reputation, both from people who have gone here and from studies done on the world's educational institutions; it had programs that were interesting to me; the price was not exorbitant; and the campus is unbelievably beautiful. And look, they've already taught me how to use a semi-colon! Okay, so in April, my hopeful self applied.

Many of you were with me for phase two of the application process. By phase two, I mean the phase where I didn't know what was happening and I was floating around like an aimless plastic bag on a highway. I had deferred my acceptance to Carleton University, and shipped myself off to Calgary after camp in the summer to get a job and save up for this elusive education I was planning for.

Now, phase two lasted a while, let's not lie. The number of vague answers I gave in those months would probably knock you off your chair. Thanks to much support from all of you, I managed to make those months beneficial, more than just financially. I had a good job, good home, good church, made a bunch of friends, did a bunch of paperwork for school and everything else... It was good.

Then, the "conditional offer" was made on my online account. We'll call this phase three. This conditional offer was supposed to be followed by a letter. The letter never came, the email was supposed to have been sent, it never was. And then I flew to Tanzania for Christmas.

Two weeks went by, beach and safari and sleeeeeeep, and still no letter. So, another few phone calls later, and I actually had my acceptance. Which signalled the panic of getting a visa in two weeks or less, in order for me to make it here on time. Miracle of miracles, the South African High Commission can get a Canadian kid's visa done in a week! Amazing! Hey, why not call this phase four? It lasted about four days, so it's an appropriate name.

Now, I welcome you to Friday night, Friday the 27th of January. Saturday was the day we would fly to Cape Town as a family, to do all the fun starting-university-in-a-new-city things. Oh, Friday.
We got home from dinner on Friday, I checked my email. Waiting for me was an email from UCT. It was a short email, and to make it shorter, it said that my final examination results had not been received, and my acceptance had been withdrawn. Have a good day.

Phase five wasn't a particularly pleasant phase. It was horrible. I mean, I had sent in my final examination results. I knew that. I knew that it wasn't my fault, and that the university should technically let me in, because it was their mistake. But that wasn't very reassuring. I had already packed and everything, and we were ready to go, and that night was basically a night of wondering bad things.
I won't really go into details, but I kind of feel like I wrestled with God that night. He won. His winning, though, involved me giving up things I was clinging to, and resting in the assurance that He's got it under control. It was beautiful. Oh my goodness, it wasn't a fun night, but it was a good night.

Then suddenly we were in Cape Town. Doing tourist things, negotiating with Humanities administrators, trying to find me a place to live, going to the International Students' orientation despite not being a student yet... One of the weirdest weeks of my life. I was just swimming in uncertainty.

And then BAM. Phase six. As I'm listening to somebody or other's address at the International Students' reception, my Dad's fiddling with his Blackberry, and gets onto the website to check my application status. Bu-yah, I'm in. Suddenly, it all comes together. Suddenly, we spring into action and get me a place and a phone and I can actually make friends and go to orientation and unpack and let all the past five phases go. Some of you will say, "Finally!", but I take none of it for granted.

So, here I am. I've started classes now. I survived O-Week. I'm learning about religion, history, philosophy, and writing in the media. I'm loving it. It's been a little hard making my brain start learning again, but I'll get back into the groove. I'll let you all know about other stuff I've been up to here, but I think this is plenty long for now.

Thanks for reading, thanks for praying and worrying and asking. I'm taking sign-ups for anyone who wants to come visit me. I have a really convenient spot on the floor that would be perfect for an air mattress, if you catch my drift.

And I will have internet soon, and I can Skype with all of you a hundred times a day. I promise.

We're Approaching the Climax - Get Ready

It's been a while! I'm still around! On the earth, anyways. If you thought 'around' meant around you, you're probably mistaken.

I'm in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the moment. In case you're out of date. I got here on the 23rd of December, after about 24 hours of travelling. I slept for almost eight hours total on the trip, which is better than I was expecting. And I got over the jet lag within a couple of days.
The Christmas season involved a couple rounds of present opening, lots of food, several family games (I don't think I won any of them until New Year's Eve), and some other events thrown in. Events like a two day trip to the beach and a four day safari excursion. Lots of adventures were had, including hiking up an unexpectedly tall hill to swim in a waterfall with an Indian tour group and getting our vehicle stuck in a muddy patch of road for three hours in a wild game park. Good times.

I suppose now would be the time to do the traditional Start of the New Year Reflection Post.
I'll start off by outlining my New Year's Eve. Well, you've already heard about me winning a family game. After coming off that intense win, Ross and I tried to stay awake until midnight by watching football on TV and reading. When the clock changed over to 12, we wished each other a Happy New Year and fell asleep. Exciting, I know.

But when I think about the year of 2011, I do have some thoughts. 2011 was the year of my high school graduation. That will probably be how it's most often remembered from now on. It was also the year I got my first job, visited Italy for the first time, learned how to play the ukulele, and moved to Calgary for a few months. All important events.  If I look back at the me of one year ago, I can't even imagine what she would be thinking. Probably something about surviving the last months of school.
I think January 2011 would have been about the time that I was coming up with the tentative plan of going to school in Cape Town. If I had known it would be this much work for me to get there... I probably would have done it anyways. It was all worth it, for the ripple of surprise that travelled across the crowd at graduation when the speaker said that I was planning to go to the University of Cape Town to study the Humanities. That was a good moment in my life.

All that being said, I could continue to reflect for a while. Trust me, the IB program breeds children that are excellent at doing personal reflections on things they never cared about in the first place. But there are things happening right now in my life that I think are more interesting.

We called UCT a little while after Christmas, and asked three different people if they would send me that elusive conditional acceptance letter via email. Highlight of the phone call: "You really need to get that letter so you can get started on your student visa." My thoughts- No kidding.
They actually sent me the email! It had supposedly been mailed on November 17th. And the mysteries never end.

I quickly printed off the letter, signed the part saying that I "accepted their conditional offer", and scanned it and sent it back to them. The next day, my online status said, "We have received your acceptance of our conditional offer". Hoorah!
With this conditional offer letter, I could now start applying for a study visa. There are about 20 pieces to a study visa, so I had to gather those from near and far, and request favours from people I've never met before all around the world (sounds elaborate, right?), and finally we got everything together. I handed in the form two days ago, so on January 16th. Usually a visa takes longer to process, but the nice visa lady told me that she would request to get it done in two weeks. The start of UCT orientation weeks is January 31st. So, according to my calculations, the visa will be done on January 30th, leaving us a spacious 24 hours of wiggle room.

Sorry to leave you on the edge of your seat, there.

But wait! There's more!

Because of the lateness of everything, I was not able to get a spot in residence. So I've been house/apartment/room hunting feverishly. I found a building called The Baobab, which is sort of like an off-campus residence building. Awesome location, self-catering, a legitimate website with minimal spelling errors (you'd be surprised both by how rare this is and by how much it matters to me)... The shared rooms are obviously cheaper, but I don't know anyone in Cape Town, so I was worried about finding a roommate, only to learn that they happily assign people roommates, and all would be well.

Many prayers have been answered recently. Many, many prayers. So, despite the fact that I spend most of my days doing nothing at all, and I still probably should be worried about financial things and the visa getting done on time... Well, I'm not. I feel very cared for. I know I won't be left hanging, and I have no fears about trusting in a God this good. So the next weeks should pass by quickly enough. There will be a whole load of things I'll have to deal with as soon as I arrive in Cape Town, but that's okay. Today has enough worries of its own.

There will be another update soon. My adventures are just getting started.

So Here's the Deal 2.0

I'm leaving in a week. Didn't see that one coming, did ya?

Really, though. One week from today, I'll be on a plane on my way to Heathrow. So, I thought it was time to give a bit of a practical update to everyone who cares. Here's what's going on in my life for the next little while...

I'm working and frantically packing and wrapping presents and tying up loose ends here in Calgary for the next week. Seeing everyone I need to see, buying stuff I need to buy, throwing out stuff I need to get rid of... Sleeping might take a back seat in the priority bus. Story of my life.

Then, on Wednesday, December 21st, at 20:55, I should be flying off in a 9-ish hour flight to London Heathrow. I have a six hour layover, and then another 9-ish hour flight to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where my parents are residing. By the time I get there it'll be about 7:30am their time on the 23rd of December. Just in time for my Mom's birthday. Considering I'm not usually able to sleep on planes, I'm planning on reading through at least one book, finishing whatever I'm knitting, and really, really messing up my body's schedule. (For all of you attending the IB reunion party thing, it'll be about 11:30pm when my plane lands... So if try really hard I can probably be on Skype with you within an hour and some of that. HOPEFULLY the flights will all be on schedule. Cross your fingers.)

And then I'll be in Tanzania. Living it up. Not climbing Kilimanjaro, sorry to disappoint.

Now, after that is still quite the situation. I still have this conditional acceptance to Cape Town. I think I've fulfilled most of the conditions. A letter was mailed to me almost a month ago, and I haven't received it yet. So it's hard to say what's going on, really. I've reached the point now that I'm just going to dive head-first into this thing, and see what happens. UCT wants me as a student. They're just bad at making that happen. So I figure if I keep emailing them and sending them random documents they'll eventually just let me in for sheer determination. That's my plan. I won't even tell you what the back-up plan is. I don't care what the back-up plan is. Sometimes you just have to think about Plan A.
I don't know if God wants me in Cape Town. But He hasn't let me know that that's where He doesn't want me, and since that's where I want to be, that's where I'm heading. I hope that if He ever does direct me elsewhere that I'll have the humility to go that direction and give up on what I think would be sweet. We'll cross that bridge and clear that hurdle and brave that storm if and when it comes.

In the meantime, I have stuff to do. And by stuff I mean lots of stuff. Getting to Tanzania means several things to me. Firstly, I get to see my family. Awesome. Secondly, I'll be in Africa. Awesome again. Thirdly, it'll be Christmas. Awesome to the max. Fourthly, I won't have to go to work or any such place. Oh, sweet relief. Fifthly, it'll be the end of this phase and the beginning of a new one, and it's always an adventure when that's the case.

Anyways, more reflections will come later. That's enough for now. That's your summary of my life for the near future. Hope you're having a wonderful Christmastime. Jesus always has the best birthday parties.

Conditional has always been my least favourite tense

So, I kind of got into university. Woohooooo. I hope that cheer didn't sound as sarcastic to you as it did to me. Don't get me wrong, at one in the morning when I read checked my online student profile, I was pretty shocked and delighted. For seven months now, I have been met with the words, "Decision deferred pending receipt of further or final results" each time I've logged in. Last Friday, or early Saturday morning, as it were, I encountered these phrases: "Conditional offer made. Letter with conditions to follow." It was a nice change, to say the least. They were words of possibility, of change, and of weird sentence fragmentation. But I was excited.

Now, the reason for me not churning out a super spiffy, flashy blog about how pumped I am for the future and blahbatiblahbatiblah (besides the fact that I don't know if you can churn anything besides butter) is simply that I'm still not completely sure what the deal is. And I don't want to get ahead of myself. I still have to get some documents to them, and their supposed "letter with conditions" will take a while to "follow", since I am way over here and they are way over there. So I'm working out the kinks of this conditional offer.

Update: it's less than a month until I leave to go to Tanzania. Update 2: I got all vaccinated up yesterday, and have been feeling reasonably crappy ever since. But if the small taste of yellow fever that I have experienced from the shot is any indication of the pleasure of the real thing, I'm just glad I'm now immune to it. Update 3: it's weird that I'm going to be leaving Calgary soon. I feel like I just got used to this. And it's weird that I'm going to leave Canadian winter behind and hit 30 degree weather in one fell swoop, and won't return for a long time. No matter how much I'll be dreaming of a white Christmas, I really, really doubt that Dar es Salaam is going to get that. Unless there's a plague of locusts or something. (Are locusts white? For the purposes of this blog, let's assume the answer is yes. I'm too afraid of the disturbing possibilities of Google Images right now to check up on this.) Oh, and let's just hope that the whole plague thing doesn't happen. Not cool.

Please keep praying for me. These next three weeks I'll be working seven days a week probably, and 60 hours or so? I'll be tired.

And listen to this song. It's a Christmas essential.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Awesome

It seems I only have a craving to blog when I'm really tired and should be going to bed. That's actually when I have the willingness to do almost anything. A lot of things about me haven't changed since I was six and begging my parents to stay up just a little later. Unfortunately, there's no one around to tell me to go to bed. The cat sleeps all day, so it doesn't care whether I hit the sack right after dinner or at 3 in the morning. So, here I am. Left to my thoughts and stubbornness to go to bed like a responsible human being, and also a box of Wheat Thins. Luckily, I don't work tomorrow, so I can sit here and write and eat crackers 'til the dawn breaks. But I will definitely regret it later.

The thing I've been pondering as of late has been the presence of beauty in my life. Real beauty. Not People Magazine beauty. Not beauty to the standard of perfection. Beauty.
I still haven't gotten over being able to see the Rocky Mountains every day I'm here. I can just look climb a hill and there they are. As much as I don't like going in for early morning shifts at work, the last few instances have been timed perfectly for seeing the sun rise. Just as I'm walking across the parking lot from the bus stop to the !ndigo (because apparently that's the correct spelling), the sun is bursting from behind the big box store barricade (can anyone identify that literary device?) and cascading over the pavement. And from certain angles I can see the mountains. Sometimes intertwined with clouds and mist and hard to identify, other times in sharp contrast with the pale blue sky, piercing the backdrop with their power and size.

It doesn't have to be in the morning for me to see the mountains. Sometimes I'm on the bus in the afternoon with a couple dozen other people, and a stunning view of the mountains appear on the horizon, and I just look around at my fellow public-transportation users and wonder whether they can see what I see, and if they're appreciating it at all.

I've become fond of one particular bus route, in part because it's a lot less crowded and sometimes gets me home faster, but mostly because of the view. I work at the complex called Signal Hill, and it was a thrilling moment for me when I discovered that there's actually a hill behind Signal Hill. It's called Signal Hill. And there's one bus stop that I can use to transfer from one bus to another that's right where there used to be some sort of signal... thing... I haven't really read up on it. The layover from one bus to the next is usually between 12 seconds and 3 minutes, and it's hard to tell which one it will be, so I haven't had time to read the info boards yet. Someday. Anyways, the view from that bus stop. Amazing. A couple of times I've gotten there just as the sun is setting. So the wind is blowing, there are flags cracking in the breeze behind me, the sun is shedding an array of colours in the sky as it descends behind the mountains... And then bus 53 rounds the corner and I have to frantically wave at the driver because they never expect anyone to be at that stop. But seriously, those two minutes of just pure beauty a day... I feel like those are nourishment to something inside me. For me, it gives me a healthy dose of awe for my Creator, for The Creator. But for anyone, I think experiencing beauty is an essential to life. And I've realized that going out of my way to find beauty and taste it daily is not that hard, and so, so good.

It keeps things in perspective, if nothing else.

Here I am, frail and small and confused. Here is something else, something enormous and beautiful and overwhelming.

Awesome.

Foundational

I'm kind of lacking in solid ground right now. I don't have a home, a school, a family, old friends, familiar locations, a bus route I know. Whatever I held close and depended upon for consistency and solidity has been taken away or shaken apart.

That's when you start to question what your foundation is made of.

I know that I intentionally planned this out for myself to see how I would react. It was partly a matter of practicality and convenience, but it was also this desire to push myself past my comfort zone, and watch myself try to live.

I think that in situations where all the superficial aspects of your personality disappear, you can either delve deeper into yourself, or you can grasp more tightly onto God, or whatever your notion of a greater being is.

Repeatedly I'm being shown that I am a finite, exhaustible source of life, and that God, the living God, will provide more than I need in any circumstance. I want to believe that with my whole being, and I want to live a full life because of that.

This period of uncertainty is not going to be my last, but I can't complain. The lessons far outweigh the challenges.

What Not to Order

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I followed up on the whole being employed thing. So here's what's happening right now in my life.

I'm still employed. By Starbucks. I've worked two 40 hour weeks so far, and hopefully that'll continue to happen. The goal is to make as much money as possible in this short span of time. I've worked mostly 8-hour days, and usually between 10 and 6:30ish. I've done a couple of closing shifts, which are from 2 to 10:30, and I'll likely do an opening shift sometime soon, but my shifts will continue to vary. I've had weekends off so far as well, which has been nice. That'll probably change :)
And now that I've been there two weeks, I actually know how to do stuff. I can run your order through, I can brew coffee, I can serve you a pastry, I can make drinks, and I can even whip up a Frappuccino for you. I'm still a little unsure of some of the recipes, and there are some weird exceptions to rules (Caramel Macchiattos, for instance, take their espresso shots not directly in the cup...), but honestly, I've learned the French language, and it has several exceptions, so I think I can handle this.

As per the title of this blog, here's what not to order. Or what to order if you want to be one of those annoying Starbucks junkies:
Annoying Starbucks Junky: I'll take a half-caf, triple long shot, Tall in a Venti cup with no sleeve, sugar-free two-thirds sweet, kid's temperature, no whip, extra foam, light drizzle, salted caramel hot chocolate, with maybe an ice cube thrown in so it's not too hot.

Please, don't. You're not cool, you have too much time on your hands.

I work with good people. They're quite funny, and they want to do their jobs well. And they've been patient with me, even when I'm annoying and repetitive with my questions.

So, it's been good. For a first job, I think I totally lucked out.

Thanks for reading!