Grand Canyon University Athletics
Dominique sends fellow classmates update from South Africa
7/28/2010 11:53:42 PM | Dominique Daniels - BMX
Throughout the course of the UCI BMX World Championships, Dominique will send daily 'blog' entries describing the events, experiences, and lessons learned as she explores a new country hoping to find old habits, winning habits. Having already won three of three races this month, Daniels hopes to continue in her winning streak. While in South Africa, Daniels will represent not only GCU, but more importantly the United States. Here is her first entry after day one of her journey to winning a World Championship.
I’m Dominique Daniels, and many of you don’t know me yet but I am a new freshman at Grand Canyon University and I am presently the Number One Ranked Women’s Pro BMX rider in the United States. I’m on a quest to represent not only GCU but also the USA in the 2012 Olympics. The first leg of my quest brings me to the capital of the Zulu nation, yes “Zulu”, nation located in South Africa, to participate in the 2010 BMX World Championship. The capital at which I am participating in is called, Pietermaritzburg. Pronounced PETER-Maritz-berg.
Just to give my new classmates an update on what I’m up to this week, I’ll start from the beginning. Our travels took us from up from hometown Phoenix to New York, and from there, to Johannesburg. The flight was 20 hours long (just across the ocean), granted that seating was nice, getting 3 seats to myself, but nonetheless an enduring flight. From Johannesburg we flew to the capital on a small pilot plane no bigger than a van, and I’m putting that literally. Landing the small plane was interesting as we landed into a small local airport hidden from the sky in the jungle. (For the capital?) A small airport?
Exciting, I know.
My first 24 hours in the capital was spent visiting the track, putting my bike together, meeting some of the interesting locals, and trying to fight jet lag. I took a picture of the hotel and the mall, which is oh-so-conveniently, located not even a two-minute walk from the hotel, which is named Easy Stay. It is literally across the parking lot. And needless to say the mall here makes any local mall in Phoenix look tiny. One of the interesting things that I learned here is that the city has not only one local language, and I don’t mean an accent people, I mean they have over 8 different local languages, 11 nationally. While striking up conversations with the natives, it wasn’t hard to hear that a lot of the languages blur together. Though English is the common written language and the most often spoken, it is definitely not the only one used in everyday conversation.
Another thing that I found most captivating was the food and etiquette in which meals are eaten. Nothing is drastically different from the USA but the people here are definitely hygiene friendly. They don’t emphasize cleanliness, but it is subtlety suggested for sure anytime after you eat. This hint comes with lots of sanitary wipes, dry wipes, or a small scented water dish in which you can dip your fingers and wipe your hands after having a nice meal or an ice cream cone.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to look me up on Facebook. In case you get confused with the images, I’m the one soaring through the air on a bike ok? Helmet on, just so you know.