Day 7: Host Family Day!

***Two blog posts this evening because of the busy weekend***

You can choose to read this post or completely disregard it- we all did something different today! Sunday is a host family day, so the hosts pick an activity to do with their American student. Some families will go as far as Cape Town, others will stay right in Irene. I always LOVE hearing about this day on Monday because everyone always gets a taste of something a little different from the next person. You can read about my day, or you can just skip this one and wait until tomorrow night... I won't mind :)

Last night, Mr. Klopper mentioned that he would be attending church this morning and that it was Presbyterian. I was very excited to attend with him because I was raised Presbyterian. He stopped by the boarding house a little before 9 to pick us up for church. His congregation is 20 members strong and meets in a tiny stone church on the campus of Irene Primary School. It is called Highveld Community Presbyterian Church. We met everyone before church started and it was a very nice service- same format as mine at home :) The church was very cold and the congregation gathers for tea and fellowship afterward. It was a great way to start our Sunday.

In the morning, we drove all the way out to Cullinan to tour the diamond mine. Cullinan is a tiny, tiny town in the middle of the "bushveld" of South Africa. The landscape is different from Irene because there are a lot more trees, taller grasses- it felt like we were on safari as we drove out there. Vervet monkeys even ran across the road! All of the buildings in town are made of feldspar stone and they each have a green tin roof. The only house that is different is the home of William McHardy, the general manager of the mine during its hey-day in the early 1900s. We toured his home, then went on the surface mine tour. The tour took us through town and each of the buildings have been converted into shops and restaurants- it was a popular brunch spot on a Sunday.

Cullinan has the 4th largest surface diamond mine in the world- it is 1 kilometer by 500 meters. Just 9 meters under the surface, the Cullinan diamond was found in 1905. It is the largest gem-quality diamond ever found, over 3,000 carats! The diamond was cut into 9 larger diamonds and 96 smaller brilliants. For some reason, it was sold by DeBeers (who owned the mine at the time) to the Transvaal government, who presented it to King Edward VII on his birthday. The diamonds are on display in the Tower of London.

At the end of the tour, they bring you to the jewelry store to look at the diamonds. They give everyone glasses of champagne and let you shop and look at the Cullinan Diamonds, diamonds with extra cuts to make them different from the typical 58 cut brilliant stones. I had a lot of fun trying on the 1.63 carat Cullinan cut ring that sells for $35,000 :) It was cool to look at all the different jewelry designs and the 5+ carat rings after seeing where they come from. They mine about 15,000 tons of kimberlite (the volcanic rock named after Kimberley, South Africa) each day, and only about a handful of it contains diamonds- only 20% of it is gem-quality! The other 80% is used for industrial materials, like drill bits. Something else cool: blue diamonds are blue because they contain boron, which is an excellent conductor. The majority of blue diamonds are sold to NASA to be used for their shuttles. They also use the diamonds for all of their camera lenses.

After the diamond mine, we drove in the opposite direction to Tswaing Crater. Tswaing means "place of salt" in the Tswana tribe and the Afrikaners call it Soutpankrater, or salt pan crater. It is a large impact crater, 1.13 kilometers wide and 100 meters deep, formed by a stony meteorite over 220,000 years ago. It is estimated that the meteorite was 50 meters in diameter and vaporized on impact. There is water at the bottom of the crater from a surface spring and rainwater- and it is incredibly salty. Before the area became part of a nature reserve, there were mines for soda and salt, hence the name. There are over 10 kilometers of trails around it (unfortunately, we did not have time to hike) and we saw more vervet monkeys and some gorgeous birds.

This evening, we stopped at Menlyn shopping center in Pretoria, a place where a lot of the kids have already gone. It is the most confusing mall I have ever been to- three floors, then sometimes floors in between, additions to the buildings, loops around, etc. It would be very easy to get lost in there. We got dinner and looked at some of the stores- I still can't get used to the prices! I think that everything is over priced... then I have to stop to do the math.

Tomorrow is another full day at school. I have to finish up my lesson for tomorrow and get some sleep! I hope that your kids had a fun day with their families- I am looking forward to hearing all about it :) Hope you had a nice weekend as well and I will post again tomorrow night!