malta-yahhh

post date:
thursday, march 25th - 4:15 PM

current weather:
81 degrees, mostly cloudy

so it begins. week number two of work. i feel like i've been here forever, i don't know why it's felt like we've been working for so much longer than that. i suppose this is what real life will be like once i get out of college. but i can only hope that the weather is as nice at home as it is here.

these past few days have been pretty productive days for our group. for our project, we are working on three separate displays in the owela display centre - traditional music, omahango / oshiwambo people, and etosha (national park). our plan was to create a small interactive true / false quiz that featured some information that was already displayed in the cases. we spent the entire day doing research and i decided to re-learn HTML for the actual quiz. janine and lily were able to get all the research and questions done, and i got about half of the actual quiz coded and programmed. that put us wayyy ahead of schedule, so i'm pretty pumped about that. if all goes well we'll be mostly finished with the bulk of our project by next week. i hope it all goes according to plan :)

on tuesday night, chris (one of the namibians) came over and brought his poker set for a casual game of poker. we played for about two hours, mostly chatting and just getting to know more about life in namibia. they're very similar to us, and they absolutely love people from other countries. that's something i still have to get used to - being called an international student. it's weird.

yesterday was quite the interesting day. the maltahöhe group (dan, meghan, and ally) came to work with us so they could tour a little bit on the nama people exhibit, which is what they are doing their project on. while they wandered the museum, i did some wandering of my own. i realized i needed to use the bathroom, and i never knew where it was. so i explored.

when i finally found the bathroom, i felt like i opened a door to an underground dungeon cell. the walls were pale and rusted, and all of the porcelain was dirty. i also couldn't help but notice how interesting the urinals were (sorry if i'm touching on a sensitive subject to some people but i think it's funny!). they are about half the size of urinals back home, and they were mounted so freaking high on the wall. to give you an idea, the bottom of the urinal comes up to my hip. definitely not kid friendly. the flushing system was also very unique - instead of a lever or a button, they had a knob which worked just like a sink. manually turn the knob to unleash as much water as you'd like to clean off the urinal. interesting.

i forgot to mention that in the corner of the bathroom, there was a shower stall with no curtain. now i wonder who would want to use one of those. sketchhh.

on the way back from work, i started paying a little more attention to all the buildings and noticed that most houses had electric fences on them. i guess people here are really protective of their stuff, or the crime rate here really is bad as they say it is. even our bed and breakfast has a huge electric fence, i'm always tempted to touch it to see if it actually works, haha. even if it did i'm sure it wouldn't kill me...

so at night, everyone decided to go back to the box but for some reason i just felt like staying in. after more chilling and mostly doing nothing, i was washing my dishes from dinner when i suddenly needed to go to the bathroom. i walked outside and decided to cut under the umbrella that covered one of the outdoor tables. little did i know that i was about 4 inches too tall. and did i mention the umbrella was made out of thick and rugged tree branches? and to make it better, it was pitch black outside. needless to say, i now have this interesting looking cut right above my left eye. i've never been more thankful for having glasses to wear.

as for work today, well... our main advisor left the country to visit south africa for about a week, so we've been sitting in the office and taking turns using the internet. i have the feeling that tomorrow will be the same. i did take a short lunch break at around 1 and met up with jenna cantwell and john, and i got to eat my first king pie meal. delicious. and i also found out that my computer is too advanced to support the touch screens that our museum provided. but it's already 15 minutes past 4, which means it's time to go! i'll figure it out tomorrow haha.