Arrival in Cape Town

The trip started off with a bang when my initial flight out of Boston to JFK got delayed three hours. This meant I would definitely miss my connector to London-Heathrow. Fortunately, there was a scheduled twelve-hour lay-over in London and our nice travel agents at Raptim Travel were able to get me on a later flight out of New York without having to reschedule my flight from London to South Africa. I happened to run into another group of the interns at Terminal 5 in Heathrow and we played games and shared stories until our departure.

After twelve hours I was ready to get off the plane when we landed in Cape Town. A representative from the Best Western picked us up in a shuttle from the airport and brought us to our hotel in the city. Our thirty-minute drive along the highway took us past the townships and suburbs of Cape Town. The townships are where a lot of black South Africans live and work. These are very poor areas with an extremely dense arrangement of houses made from paper and sheet metal. The townships go on for miles and this is where we do a lot of our work (more info on this to come).

We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of our hotel with its spacious rooms, a pool, a restaurant, and a pub. This is where we would spend the next ten days living out of our bags and learning all that GRS has to offer.