Molly wonders if she's been playing it too safe

It feels as though the past few weeks have been full of activities for activities sake, doing things because wasting the precious time we have left feels like a sin. A lot of this business has been worthwhile. In the past week and a half I went to a church I’ve been wanting to go to for a while, I hiked a mountain, I surfed, I went to gratuitous night markets, I walked from Sea Point to Camps Bay and found out what the resort part of Cape Town looks like, and I’ve done silly things like taking a 30 minute cab to pet the world’s smallest ostrich. These are all cool things, some of which I never really saw myself doing, but now it’s crunch time and I need to prioritize. When I think about what I really want to accomplish in the remaining week and a half I have here, I try to set my plans according to the reason I came here in the first place. When I think about the reasons I came here in the first place, it’s hard to avoid thinking in clichés. I came here to see new points of view and understanding, to learn about a different country, to experience a different culture. But what does it mean to “experience a different culture”? How are cultures experienced in the first place? I’ve been trying to experience cultures through music, through food, and through transportation. I’ve been avoiding cabs and ubers as much as possible, and I’ve been walking or taking public transport instead. I’ve played with the kids at my activist project and watched tv with the family and ate their samp and beans and prayed with them. But I’m realizing that it’s super difficult to experience a culture when you aren’t living that culture. The closest we can really get is talking to people from different backgrounds, and even that can be challenging. I think that to experience a culture, you need to earn the right to experience that culture. We can’t just waltz into other people’s spaces because we’re students and we’re eager to learn and soak up everything that makes them, them. We can’t just pop ourselves into other people’s conversations after we feel we’ve sufficiently eavesdropped on the minibus or at the train stop.

I wonder if part of the reason why I haven’t really felt “immersed” in another culture is because there’s a racial and socioeconomic South African group that I already fit in pretty comfortably with. If I was living in an area with very few white people, I might have more of an alibi when it comes to inhabiting non-white spaces, but there’s already fairly large group of “my people” in this part of South Africa, and so circumstantially I fall into their routines and their culture, even though vintage/organic markets and folk festivals aren’t really my thing. How would a person really experience a culture that they can lay no claim on, especially when they’re only near that culture for three and a half months? Walking through Mowbray, I’ll see bars or restaurants that I want to go into because they play African house music and have a black or coloured clientele, and are therefore different from what I’m used to. Does that mean I have an obsession with “the other”? Am I exotifying those who I want to learn more about?

Sometimes I come to the conclusion that studying abroad isn’t really about learning about a different culture, even if that’s what I wish it was about. Alternatively, maybe when I get back to the United States I’ll realize that I’ve learned more about cultures than I thought I did. I just sometimes get the feeling that I’ve been squandering my time here by playing it too safe and only doing what I feel comfortable doing, what people in my role with my color skin should be doing.