Hey you guys!

First I will show you some pictures of my house, on the first picture you can see my fence and on the second pictures you can see the house I'm staying in:

Furthermore Haike and me are now finally fully registered and we recieved our student cards.

On Thursday we payed a first visit to the township Mamelodi here in Pretoria. We saw their art center (which was quite humble) and went to their shopping center, which was completely pulled out of it's context...
Here some images of how poor these people actually are...

On Friday Amira gave us all 2 books to read for next Friday, so this week we won't do many other things then reading those books...

This weekend on Saturday we went to explore downtown Pretoria with Minette, a friend of ours in our class. She showed us around on the black market and took us for a snack on the Church Square (the very heart of Pretoria where it all started).

And finally to end this post some photographs of our campus.
First the piazza (the central square) and the Client Service Center:

This is the building of the department of Architecture:

This is the building of the department of Engineering:

That was about it for today, people!

Take care!!!

Bye!!!

First post

Hi everybody!

Here my first post on my brand new blog! (Monday 9/2/2009)

I'm writing in English so my family in Cyprus can also attend this blog and see what I'm doing here.

Last week on Tuesday we arrived in South Africa. Fortunately we could leave for South Africa. The snow problem in Heathrow London on Monday only caused a delay of 1 hour. British Airways had rebooked our flights with Lufthansa via Frankfurt so they solved our problem really good!

When Haike and me arrived in Pretoria the next day we had 30 degrees and the sun was shining (next day we had rain, thunder and lightning though...).

We have a really nice room in a seperate house and like 4 keys to get inside the house! First we have to open a fence, then another fence before the front door, then the front door itself and then the door of our room.

Pictures will follow later...

On Wednesday we attended our first classes and it's also the only day in the week we have classes (the rest of the week we have group work though). We attended Landscape Architecture, but actually the classes are all crossing each other. The class was about town planning and it was really interesting!

Unfortunately then we didn't meet Amira Osman yet, because she was on Sabbattical leave.

In the weekend we already visited Johannesburg with some other international students (most international students here are from the Netherlands, some from Germany and we're about the only ones from Belgium).

Jo'burg was interesting to see, but it's really a dangerous city. Luckily we could arranged a guided tour to the most important places there so we were safe. The first day (Saturday) we visited the Apartheid Museum which was really interesting, but also really tiring (too much information in one time).

The museum building was really nice as you can see on the second picture!
In the evening of course we went to explore the night life of Johannesburg (again accompanied by someone from Jo'burg who knew where to go and where not!
The next day in the morning we did a guided tour around the city (by car). We visited the Top of Africa (the tallest building in Africa and it's 'only' 228m), here a view over Johannesburg:

Afterwards we visited Constitutional Hill (the new court house of Jo'burg), which was built in a wonderful architecture:

Today we finally met Amira Osman and she's such a nice lady, she gave us a real warm welcome. Normally tomorrow we will arrange with her the classes we wish to attend so we can finally complete our registration and recieve our student cards!

Well, that's about it for now!

I hope you'll hear again soon from me!

Take care you all!