Old Peg (:

The hospital was the same thing as the rest of the week; there weren’t any patients that stuck out to me. Just a lot of TB history and HIV/AIDS related illnesses, which is so unbelievably common here. I was told that in most hospitals in South Africa, 90% of incoming patients are HIV infected. In the Kwazulu-Natal area alone, they have more HIV infected people than the United States as a whole. That’s astounding to me, and I definitely see that while working in the hospitals. It’s very different than in the United States; there it is pretty rare to come across an HIV positive patient, but here, it is assumed that every patient is positive until proven otherwise. No matter how long I stay here, I don’t think I will ever get used to that.

All three of us decided that we wanted to do something fun tonight. We had heard about the casino here and thought it was something we needed to go see at some point. If you recall from Durban, the casinos here aren’t like casinos in the states. They have everything under the sun inside them. This one in Cape Town obviously had a casino, and then tons of restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, two skating rinks, a hotel and much more. It was about four times as large as the Durban casino, and I thought THAT was huge! My host mom Joan’s niece Megan stays at the house with her so that she can attend university, so we brought her along with us. The casino looked like Disneyland, literally. It was the most ridiculous sight ever, but it was beautiful and all lit up in the evening sky. We took a look around the huge casino first to check everything out. We wanted to grab some desert, so we found a cute little Italian restaurant to do that at. We also bought a bottle of champagne that we ended up stashing in my handbag because they didn’t finish it and didn’t want to throw half the bottle away…it was pretty funny and I felt like a straight up alcoholic carrying his humongous bottle around in my bag. Mine was the largest bag in the group, so I was designated the carrier. We looked around some more, and decided to throw some change into the slot machines for fun. We had a really nice time. Everywhere we walked around, the security guards would ask Lauren and Megan for their ID, but never Miles and I. They got asked a total of FIVE times! It was so funny, especially because I’m the one that always gets asked for ID! I felt kind of old today (: