Bio-Diversity

Today is the first day of our second class! For the first week everyone was together in our South African history course. It was a really good class and Professor Smith, our instructor was really good. One day she even brought in an older man who spoke to us about his experiences under Apartheid.

Today though we broke off into four different classes. My class is Bio-Diversity of the Western Cape. It doesn't help for my major, but it counts as a science course, which I need. Plus the course description sounded really interesting. I am one of six students taking this course. I have no idea why nobody else took it, but Dirk told us this morning that it's always the smallest group, and it's the class that the students have the most fun in.

Our classroom is only a little bigger than a storage closet, but there's only six of us, so it's really fine. Our teacher, Dr. Dreyer is really good. She's important in the Zoology, Horticulture, and Botany department (in South Africa they're called faculties, not departments). She told us at the beginning that she really wants us to learn, and not stress about our grades. There will be an assignment for the end of the class though. Today we each got assigned an indigenous plant family and we will do a presentation and turn in an essay on our plant at the end of the week. Today's lecture was just setting up information about the Cape Floristic Region (CFR as it's called). It's so crazy because there are six major botanic regions in the world. One covers North America and Asia. One covers South America. One covers Africa, and so on. the sixth is found only in a small part of the Western Cape! For such a small area it is incredibly rich and diverse biologically. It's really incredible. It has to do with the unique geographic features and climate of this region.

At 10:30 of course we got to have our tea break where we met up again with the other three classes for half an hour. After that we finished up our intro and she let us out early for a two hour lunch break (that's when I'm writing this). Because we will be going on class field trips some days the school provides us with a sack lunch. Bio-Diversity is the only class that gets lunch provided! I think I picked the right course.

This afternoon at 2 we are going to meet up with Dr. Dreyer again and our class is going to hike in the mountains! I'm glad it rained after all yesterday. I was going to hike up the mountain, but because of the rain I went to Fairview instead (which I would have missed out on had I gone hiking). Now I get to hike up the mountain anyway, and the weather is beautiful. I have my window open and it's sunny and feels great! It's a really good day to be outside, and I feel sorry for all the other students who are stuck inside all afternoon. She told us that for the whole week we only have lectures in the morning. Every afternoon we're out on some sort of excursion!