Welcome to Cape Town

Hello to everyone interested. This is my first time trying this, but I thought it might be appropriate for my situation, since so many people want to know whats going on with me here. I am right now sitting in a backpackers lodge in Cape Town. Its called St. Johns Waterfront Lodge and I am about 5 minutes walk from the downtown waterfront harbor. It is an amazing location in this beautiful area. Between the ocean views and the crazy views of Table Mountain hovering over the city, this is a really cool place. I'm not here for all vacation though. For those not aware, I will be living in Cape Town until Dec. 20. I am here completing one of the big projects I have to do at WPI, called the IQP. I am working in an informal settlement 30 minutes from here. There are 22 of us working in this one settlement and my group is working to improve the energy usage of the residents by making a plan for upgrading their options, especially in an alternative energy sort of way. It is really exciting work and we have made a lot of progress even in the first few days interviewing residents and getting an idea of what is going on there now. I took a bunch of pictures of the area when we made our first tour and they are on my picture website, http://picasaweb.google.com/cwells235

I also get to have plenty of fun on this trip as well. I've been down to the V&A Waterfront quite a few times now. It has a very cool place, right around the main harbor of Cape Town, with a good mall there for all our shopping and live music often in the central square outside. A lot of restaurants are there as well. And last Saturday I went to the beach with a bunch of my friends here. It was gorgeous and sunny and white sands and the whole area was framed by these crazy mountains called the Twelve Apostles that formed this amazing ridgeline running down the coast. The only bad part was how cold the water was. It was quite frigid. But the sun was very warm, so it was a good day. This weekend I'm planning to hike Table Mountain with a bunch of people. We are also planning trips to see the Cape of Good Hope and Robben Island and a group of us are going on a 4-day safari over Thanksgiving break we get here. So I am really excited for my time here. I'm taking tons of pictures of everything. The internet is limited, but I'll try to post some up to my Picasa site. You should get emails when I post if I figured this out right. Thanks for all the interest and look for more posts soon.

Chris