I’ve only recently found writing to be attractive; the security of sewing words with an ability to press pause or rewind to sculpt a thought, a task impossible during an important phone call. Maybe I’ve had too many moments, both in relationships and while playing monopoly, that I’ve desperately wanted to reroute. I can only blame impulsiveness as the devil on my shoulder who always seems to have a suspiciously deep voice to accompany his consistent toddler-level development. For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to say about this trip. Neither talking about which ocean had the highest sand quality nor how many bartering battles I conquered in disorienting weekend craft markets forefronted what I really cared about. Why are certain, even familiar, experiences better only because you’re 4000 miles out of reach from the almond toffee fudge you keep under your bed at home after a frustrating day? Anyone else? No? Me neither.

There are moments in life when you are lied to. Your mom tells you that a fat white man who likely injects insulin into his body every 15 minutes takes a break and trespasses into your house and leaves you pink roller blades for the morning. But the most insulting is the safety script on airplanes before takeoff. I’ve transcribed Emirates actual safety script to what it should actually say:

Welcome to Airline Announcements

747 Aircraft Safety Demonstration:



WELCOME/BRIEFING CARD:

Welcome on board Flight 1200 from San Fran to Cape Town. Our aircraft is under the command of Captain John. He has informed me that our flying time will be approximately 9 hours, but it will feel more like 25 hours if you don’t have a Xanax.



While we are here to ensure that you do have a comfortable trip with us today, we are also concerned about your safety. With that in mind, we ask that you ignore the Safety Information Card out of the seat pocket in front of you and follow along of some real life advice.



SEAT BELT:

Your seat belt has been designed for easy fastening and release. Your seat belt should always be worn low and tight across your lap. However, if our plane goes through some shit you’re better off just praying some hungover areospace engineer intern did his math right so the plane doesn’t crash. This is totally out of your control. But we do have free alcohol.



OXYGEN:

The cabin pressure is controlled for your comfort. However, should it change radically inflight, oxygen compartments will automatically open in the panel above your seat. Reach up and pull the mask to your face if it makes you feel better, but you’re better off spending your time logging into the in-flight WiFi we have and start editing and polishing up your will. Save that to your cloud (ha-ha), and when your family has enough free time to do ‘home-sharing’ one day, it will appear in their inbox. Even though oxygen is flowing, the plastic bag may not inflate, which is terrifying. If you are traveling with children, or are seated next to someone who needs assistance, that would suck and we’re sorry.



I’ve submitted multiple drafts to the airlines for revision but apparently the Emirates team has their own (wrong) agenda.

There are certain connotations that are unremovable from a study abroad experience: candlelit group dinners in an underground wooden wine tavern as a shirtless italian boy of legal age plays guitar and occasionally, but consistently, gazes at you, and only you. I could name a few more, but then I’d be no more mysterious than the guy who maxes out his character limit on his ‘about me’ section of Bumble. We all knew that person. And if you don’t, it’s you.

Often times though, reality lives in another zip code from expectations. I found myself sitting at a dinner table primarily concerned on how to jump into a conversation between 6 girls that somewhat resembled this:

“I’m so hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy”

“I know I want to just order like everything on the menu and have 1 bite of each thing!’

‘I wish I had like a million stomachessssss’

‘our waiter is hot’.

I’ll leave the rest up to imagination.

There was a lesson I learned when I was abroad in Thailand, working for an animal rehabilitation program that stole animals away from the pet trade and repeatedly whispered the phrase, ‘its okay’ into their ears until they got the message, then eventually re-released them out into the wild. One day, our director brought back a bear to take in and the only thing he told us was to ‘be flexible’. After that, I thought I could adapt to anything if I could handle a bear just showing up one day. Before the trip to Cape Town, I didn’t know the term ‘cultural immersion’ just means ‘no internet’. Boredom is a dangerous thing. Most people, it turns out, would rather be violent than bored. We got placed in a homestay in an area where I had to open 3 gates to get into my foyer. We never really knew how dangerous the place actually was, but it didn’t help getting two extremely opposing opinions; it’s a weird feeling when all your Uber drivers refuse to drop you off in the neighborhood you claim to live in while after you get home your homestay Dad tells you to walk to the mall and to ‘stop being a pussy’ (are the words I think he used). Or when your program director looks you in the eyes with the same intensity as your first driving instructor did when he asked if you’re ready to get on the highway for the first time and pleads that you don’t dare leave your house after sunset, all while your homestay Dad says if you don’t run 6 laps around the block to get some exercise he will ‘forget’ to feed you.

Once I got out of the house I couldn’t help but wonder, in the midst of sipping on an unpreferable combination of cranberries and liquor, like the bartender had just YouTubed the recipe under the table and had to look at it at the frequency that you text and drive to avoid making it obvious, how everyone at a nightclub knows each other. There’s a phenomenon when you combine four repeating electronic sounds with strobe lights that elicit seizure warnings that makes it look like 140 people are not only best friends, but that I’ve stumbled upon some type of reunion resembling the 10th anniversary of the survival victims of the latest natural disaster, who are celebrating being alive by drinking poison and pumping their fists in the air with the same force that your 6th grade boyscout leader taught you to chop down wood with a hatchet. The worst part is, there’s no good time to ask. The DJ hired that night was nominated for the academy of loudest beat/conversation stopper of Cape Town awards. I went to congratulate him, but he couldn’t hear anything I was saying.

And if you’re part of the 100% of people who opened this link to only see the pictures, here are some. This is what happens when you try to make a chessboard with the metric system:

If all this culture shock is too overwhelming for you, don’t worry. They’re still asking all the same questions at the Cape Town McDonalds that everyone is wondering back home on the fun FAQ wheel they put at every table in case you and your friends are done talking about when you’ll get diabetes from this place:

Just to clarify, who on earth was wondering? People who are dedicated lovers of the McDonalds breakfast but have been thinking about recently expanding their horizons? The Jews who cant eat pork? It’s hard to say without context clues. But even worse, there was no answer.

Did this even cross anyone’s mind before they saw it? What’s the question they turned down to ask this one? I went to the back of the store to try to ask somebody, but it was just filled with pigs standing around.

My goal, which I have cast in retrospect of returning from each trip, has been to touch an elephant wherever I go. If you set goals for the past you can control your success rate.

It’s an anticlimactic experience interacting with an elephant. Before you see it, it’s exciting. Reality sets when you realize that no matter how many whole watermelons you feed it, it still will not talk to you. I wanted to learn so much about this animal. Does it like McDonalds milkshakes? I left the elephant park that day never to find the answer to my questions and, even worse, to wonder if I even took a picture with his good ear.

Thought I’d go try my luck with the penguins. It couldn’t get much worse than the elephant. It just stood there and didn’t seem to care I was there unless I fed it, not unlike most of my friend’s attitudes toward me back home. I came here for a new experience, dammit, and If I had to pay 4 dollars to expose myself to a species that stole its own documentary oscars while Morgan Freeman slowly narrated a journey that I couldn’t figure out was pathetic or courageous, I was gonna do it.

For me, this picture was like one of those optical illusions where they show a girl in a bikini and you don’t even notice the baby drowning in the back of the pool until 4 minutes in and some adderall. I was caught daydreaming how I would eventually be able to afford that house overlooking a penguin beach. Maybe Morgan Freeman lives there!

He doesn’t.

Needless to say, interacting with 60 untalkative animals is not much better than interacting with 1. Some of these penguins just looked confused. But because our carefully crafted UC Davis award winning study abroad program’s itinerary left us here for 2 hours, I stood and imagined what some of these penguins stories were. The two in the bottom middle might have been on a second date, and the penguin standing up just asked the penguin lying down facing away to prom. And the penguin lying down can’t believe it because that asshole penguin just took THE OTHER PENGUIN BEHIND HER TO FORMAL. Are you kidding me????? Now that I think about it, all these penguins look exactly the same and there could be some serious incest going on.

I’ll spare you the other stories.

Later on, we visited a hospital museum, and speaking of second dates, this place would be a terrible spot for one. I couldn’t turn a corner without reading about some fatal accident or some experimental unethical procedures or some questionable organ transplants. Maybe a better fourth date.

I came across this newspaper article; one where I imaged the author struggled to walk the tight rope between not giving away too much information in his title so nobody would read the rest but also trying to intrigue the even the most sophisticated academic, drawing him into a emotional storm of wonder and curiosity:

Here it is. You did read it correctly: “Kidney Boy: We must Wait and See”. Hey author, you couldn’t have given me LESS information. He just picked an organ and a gender and then followed it with a phrase that somehow left us knowing less than if we didn’t read it at all. That could be a technically correct headline for someone who is getting a kidney transplant or a story about a boy who has a 3 day tantrum because his dad wont by him the new android and he must wait and see (spoiler: that boy has a kidney too). After reading the article, I found out it was about the ladder.

I would have post this earlier, but I spent the 3 months after I got home trying to find out what McDonalds actually do put in their milkshakes.