-----Teaching in Namibia-----: Scavenger Hunt and Relaxing

So on Tuesday, we were given a task by our professors that we must complete. The only thing they told us was to be out front at 10:30 am ready to go into downtown for the morning. They armed us with a map of the city of Windhoek and the cell phone they have boughten us to make calls to our hotel and taxi company. They gave us too a list of 5 places that we must find in the city and a few questions to answer for each location. We all were ready for the challenge and set out in our taxi with our trusty driver Shane. Once in Windhoek, Shane dropped us off at the Namibia Craft Centre. We looked around there for a long while at all the amazing things people had made with their hands. My favorites were the things made out of old pop cans. There were picture frames, guitar figurines, volkswagens, trucks, and a few other items made of recycled materials. Once we'd had a look around the craft centre, we found the answer to our question. Paul's cafe is a restaurant that is run by people with special needs in Namibia. From there, we made our way to the tourist information center where we got the answer to the location on our map of the other places we needed to visit. We then made our way up to the Namibia Stat Museum. We first walked through a seemingly deserted building and decided we were in the wrong place, so we found another museum that displayed history of the different cultures found in Namibia. Once we had toured through all the exhibits, we made our way to the National Art Gallery of Namibia. This was a small art gallery featuring local artists from Namibia. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the gallery, but my favorite exhibit was a large succession of watercolor paintings that went along with a children's book about chameleons. From the gallery, we made our way to the Namibian theater which was closed, so we were unable to go inside to check it out. We did however see a little lizard guy who was stuck inside. Our last stop was the mall which we had been to the day before, so we were familiar with where it was. Once finished with our scavenger hunt, we made our way back to the tourist information center were shane was waiting for us with our van. Apparently three guys had followed us from the somewhere near the mall because a policeman met us at our van and asked us if we were okay. It was a cool moment because it was really expressed to us how much we are looked out for here. One of the other taxi drivers standing by said to us, “You are safe here, no Americans, will be harmed here in Namibia.” We had been told that before, but it was cool to see some tangibility to those words. Shane then drove us back to Casa where the sun was beating down hot and we had nothing but time, so what better way to spend the afternoon than relaxing by the pool and getting our tan on? We laid out for over an hour and hopped in the pool occasionally to cool off. We then had some down time around our rooms. Around dinner time, we decided we would check out the Texas Road House (pretty fun that they have a restaurant from Texas here :) for dinner. This was a fun very long dinning experience for us. We were seated in the back room by ourselves which was great because we didn't have to worry about using our loud American voices. We all ordered burgers and enjoyed our time to talk with one another as it took about an hour to get our food and another hour to get our check. We are learning that things move much slower in Namibia and no one really operates on a schedule. Sometimes the slow pace is really nice, other times it drives our American brains nuts. Since we had nothing to do after dinner though, it didn't matter that we were there for so long. Once dinner was over, we went back to Casa and relaxed some more and hit they hay for the day.

The Craft Centre was so cool, I want to go back and buy stuff