blogging?

In just a few days, I'll be in South Africa. As a result of peer pressure, I am considering blogging. It seems that some of my friends and extended family members will become intensely more interested in my life once it starts taking place on another continent. I actually find my life intensely interesting all the time (except the painful stretches devoted to studying mass spectrometry), but I suppose I can't blame them. At any rate, I realized that having a captive audience puts me in a powerful position. As long as I include some photos of wildlife and weird food, these friends and family members will listen to whatever I want to tell them. (This assumes that the majority of the wildlife photos are not of lichen, another of my unshared intense interests). If I actually manage to keep this up, five months is plenty of time to convey all sorts of important things about South Africa, and maybe even put in a plug for leafcutter ants, the coolest organism on the planet.
So here's important lesson #1: I am going to South Africa.

I've had a number of conversations that go like this:

Me: I'm studying abroad in South Africa for the spring semester.
Other person: I have a friend/acquaintance/cousin/colleague's child who went to Africa.
Me: Cool, what part of Africa did they go to?
Them: Hmm, I can't remember.


 Africa is a very big place! As you can see, it has a land area greater than the contiguous United States, India, Argentina, Western Europe, and China combined. It has more countries (53) and more languages (over 1000) than any other continent.

In South Africa, I'm studying at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. It's a little inland from the eastern coast in the province that's gray on the map. Pietermaritzburg is a city with about the same population as Albuquerque, New Mexico and about the same latitude as the panhandle of Florida (on the other side of the equator of course).

Now you are prepared to have well-informed conversations like this one:

Another one of your awesome friends: I'm going to Uganda this summer.
You: I have another friend who's in Africa.
Other friend: Where in Africa?
You: She's studying in South Africa.
Other friend (who may be thinking that Uganda is farther from South Africa than NYC is from LA): What part of South Africa?
You: Pietermaritzburg OR She lives in the province of KwaZulu-Natal OR near Durban

Or if you forget the name of the city, that's okay too, just try to remember that Africa is really, really big.