Durban!

April 11-13^th, 2013

Our last two night of vacation were spent in Durban.  An actual city!!!  It was a short two days, but the best two days!  Here in Durban we met up with 4 more PCVs from Swaziland.  It was great to expand our group a bit, and even though there were only 7 of us, this is now 1/3 of our group that’s left in country.  It was fun to be on a Group 9 only vacation.

Night one, after reuniting, we all went out for a nice meal.  A real meal, it was amazing.  We went to an Italian restaurant in walking distance of our backpackers.  It had gluten free options so I had real pizza for the first time in 22 months.  Thankfully g-free pizza only came in one size – large, and I ate the whole thing not feeing one bit of guilt.  It was great being with my Peace Crops friends in a modern environment.  We had so much fun at dinner!  I felt we were that table that people wanted to be with, our happiness for being surrounded by good friends, food, wine, and having gotten a shower that day was radiating.  We felt alive!

For our only full day in Durban we spent the whole day at the waterfront.  We leisurely walked along the entire beachfront, toes in the sand, sun on my back, and the smell of water in the air.  It was so relaxing.  The afternoon we spent eating of course (my one an only plan for Durban…eat, eat, and eat some more) looking over the water, and shopping!  We headed back to the backpackers and got all glam-ed up for a Friday night out on the town.  We started with a sushi dinner, which spanned 3 hours and several bottles of wine, simply perfect.  Then we hit a rough spot trying to find a place to go dancing, but after walking off the sushi for a while we found a place called Tiger Tiger.  Best night out of my Peace Corps Service.  We spent the entire night dancing and singing our hearts out to the best music.  We closed down the dance floor around 4am, and then in pure American style had our cab drive-through McDonalds (we don’t have them in Swaziland).

After one hour of sleep, I roused everyone and we packed up the best we could and half functioning got ourselves to the bus rank.  Seven uncomfortable hours later we were back in Swaziland.  We all grudgingly crossed the border with the fuzzy memories and the faded entry stamp from the night before to remind us of our fabulous weekend in Durban!  

PCV girls:  Emma, Me, Mia, Kelly