You drive a WHAT?!

Student cars - you can't miss them. First you hear the rattling and backfiring...then you see the rust patches and the missing doorhandles...and then it jerks to a stop in front of you, and promptly falls apart like something out of a cartoon. How I wish I was exaggerating...

In the two years that I've been here, I've been on one or two roadtrips in student cars. The first one was a brief trip to Port Alfred for a weekend, and although the weekend itself was amazing, the car we travelled in was a sight to behold. During one trip the owner of the car and his friend were sitting in the front seat while we took the back seat. I remember the conversation going something like this...
Friend: Shit.
Owner: What?
Friend: Dude, something just fell out from under the dashboard. (holds up random black thing). What is this?
Owner: Dunno.
Friend: D'you think it's important?
Owner: God I hope not. Put it back.
Whatever it was (everyone knows I am not good with cars...) it must've been important because we broke down ten minutes later. We ended up sitting on the side of the road for half an hour until a good Samaritan offered to tow us to the nearest 'garage', which turned out to be a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere. Another hour passed before a friend from Grahamstown finally arrived to pick us up. On the bright side, one of the guys did take off his shirt and thus provided something interesting for us to look at while we waited ;)

Later in the year we headed down to PE for Trivar. After some wild partying, we were driving back to the flat we were staying at when the car's clutch burnt out. And there we were, only one of the five of us sober (the driver), stuck at a traffic light in the middle of a city that we didn't know, at 2 o' clock in the morning. A police car stopped briefly to find out what was going on, 'helpfully' offered to give us the number for a towing place, then left us alone again. Drunk and tired, we decided to push the car 1km home.
We had barely been pushing for 200m when a second car pulled up behind us. You see, what with us being Rhodents and it being Trivar, we were all wearing our white, purple-painted overalls. The car which stopped turned out to be full of Rhodents as well, all heading home from their Trivar celebrations. When they recognised our overalls they decided to stop and help. What could have been a disaster became quite festive as we took it in turns to push the car, chatting and taking photos and generally being drunkenly friendly. To this day I have no idea who they were.

These are just two of many, many stories that I could share about my experiences with student cars. I've come to realise that there are several factors you can look out for if you want to tell whether a car has a student owner or not. These include:

1. Does it make strange rattling or squealing sounds when being driven?
2. Does it slide slowly to a halt when the brakes are applied?
3. Do pieces fall off when it is parked?
4. Is the bumper held on with string? (alternatively: is the aerial held on with duct tape?)
5. Does it take ten minutes to start?

If the answer to any of the questions is "YES", then it's either a student car or a broken-down pile of junk on the side of the road. Same difference, really. Unless, of course, Daddy has money and can afford to buy his little darling a BMW (don't laugh - I know people whose fathers buy them cars like that! One guy totalled his. So Daddy bought him another one). But in the end, wheels are wheels and a car is endlessly useful to any student. Even if the engine falls out everytime you close the door.

What's in a name?

When I was in primary school, my nickname was "Dictionary". Why? Because I was good at spelling and other kids would ask me how to spell things for their essays and such. I was later upgraded to "Spell Check" by the guy I sat next to, because he decided that my nickname wasn't modern enough. Since then I've gravitated through several other nicknames, but it wasn't until I hit Rhodes that I realised how common nicknames are. Especially among guys.

In my first Philosophy tut of first year, a friend and I discovered that there were several very good-looking boys in our group. We didn't know their names, so we decided to give them nicknames. Mostly so that we could perv over them together. Some of them were very boring; one guy was nicknamed Blondie because he was, well, blond. Duh. Another was the gentle giant, because he was 6"4 and talked about emotions a lot. The one I was crushing on was nicknamed the sexy loudmouth, because he was drop-dead gorgeous and talked way too much. The one my friend was crushing on was God's gift to women (which I'd assume is self-explanatory). Of course these guys never knew their nicknames (and if you're reading this and figure out which one you are, I applaud you :P ).

I think I've always been in the habit of nicknaming guy friends, but some nicknames stuck more than others. My two closest guys from school were alpha geek and the cupcake. Alpha geek came from a definition we once found in a magazine, as "the person who knows more on a subject than anyone else in the room". The cupcake was my GBF (gay best friend) who wanted to write a cookery book and use the pseudonym The Cupcake Queen. This habit extended into varsity - my friends have been nicknamed with terms as diverse as Creep (because he gets creepy when he's drunk) and Neanderthal (I just spent fifteen minutes rereading old gtalk conversations to remember where that one came from - apparently because he couldn't multitask).

Since coming to Rhodes, I've discovered that guys have some strange nicknames. I've been introduced to ones as diverse as Mouse, Mad Cow, Hedgehog, Krusty, O Snap, Frenchie and Ralph (which, incidentally, did not come from a vomiting habit as one would think; it had something to do with the character Ralph from Lord of the Flies). Sadly I can't explain where all of these nicknames come from; some are from surnames, some are from physical appearance, some are from drunken incidents, nationality or a habit of using a particular saying. Sometimes I find it's safer not to ask.

Girls with nicknames don't seem to be quite as common somehow. Shortened versions of names occur; for example, a lot of friends call me Tay or Tails instead of Tayla (although Tails goes way back to when I was much, much younger. My sister and I used to watch Sonic the Hedgehog. Because she was older, she got to be Sonic. And I got to be the sidekick named - yes, you guessed it - Tails). Francesca is known as Fran, Danelle is Dan, Melinda is Mel and Lwambeso (I hope I spelled that right) is Lulu. Now that I think about it, maybe girls are just a lot less original when it comes to nicknames. Come on, ladies! We need to get creative. We've already had one step in the right direction with one friend, who recently decided to nickname me Sensei (for reasons that will remain undisclosed...). It's not like we don't have enough embarassing drunken moments to provide for potential nicknames! (Well, I'm speaking for the Jammies girls here - I don't know about the rest of you :P ).
...actually, on second thoughts, let's scrap that idea. Certain embarassing moments should stay as secretive as possible. I can live with 'Sensei'. :P

PS: brief shout out to the phil boys. You're still as good looking as you were last year :)

Beauty is painful

One of the things I've always loved about Grahamstown is how chilled the fashions are. If you feel like rocking Friars in denim shorts and slops, no one is going to judge you. If you want to hit lectures barefoot, go for it! If you're not keen to take your slippers off (you know who you are...) then you'll probably start a new PJ trend by wearing them out. Generally, anything goes.

Except for heels.

For some obscure reason, wearing heels in this town is frowned upon. I always assumed that this was because it implies some kind of shallow-girl, poppie status which is rarely seen at Rhodes. In winter, boots with heels are OK and for formal nights out (dinners, hall balls etc) they seem to be acceptable. But a general night out in Friars or the Rat? You get judged hard. Now I found this depressing, because in the last holiday I managed to buy a gorgeous pair of hessian wedge heels that I've fallen in love with :D But I hadn't had an opportunity to wear them here yet. So one Friday about two weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and wear the damn things out. I learned two important things that night.

Firstly, heels hurt. For a formal dinner or dance they're fine because you spend most of the night sitting down, but when you're traipsing between clubs or wiggling your butt on the dancefloor all night, your feet start to feel the strain. By 11 o' clock I was dying a slow and painful death feet-first. When I woke up the next morning, I had blisters on my toes. :( it was also near impossible to dance. The closest thing you can get to dancing in heels - short of a waltz - is a kind of retarded bouncing-up-and-down-at-the-knees with a lot of arm action. And the moment someone bumps into you, you face a huge risk of losing your balance and ending up sitting on Friar's dancefloor (which, from experience, I would definitely not recommend. It's rather sticky).

Secondly, when wearing heels there is an ever-present chance of falling on your ass. Unless you're the kind of girl who wears them 24/7, there's always that chance of overbalancing and faceplanting. Normally the solution to this problem would be to not get drunk, but I can claim from personal experience that you can bail just as hard when you're perfectly sober. While walking down the stairs into the Friars bottom bar, my heel caught at an odd angle on the second-to-last stair and I performed a very undignifed tumble into the room. Talk about an entrance...thank goodness it was still early and very few people saw it. I did have some epic bruises the next morning, but I'm not entirely sure whether those came from falling or from some other mysterious source (You may laugh, but it's rare that I wake up after a night out without at least one bruise...). On the bright side, my heels were unharmed.

On the other hand, there are many many reasons why wearing heels out is a good idea. They make you look taller (which a shortass like me finds endlessly useful); they look delicate and feminine; and they make your legs look fan-bloody-tastic :D So allow me to present you with a few hard-and-fast rules for wearing heels out in Grahamstown:

1. Don't get drunk.
2. Don't expect to be able to dance.
3. Avoid stairs at all costs.
4. Prepare a soothing foot spa treatment for the morning after.

Oh and don't wear a very short skirt with them. If you do as I did and decide to bail downstairs, you may give the boys in the room more of a show than you intend to. Or if you have to wear a short skirt, don't wear granny panties. If there's a chance you're going to accidentally flash the whole room, you may as well make it pretty :P