AUGUST 2008?
Apparently I've been blogging since August 2008. I don't remember setting up the blog. That scares me! Does this mean I have 4 years of blogging to catch up on? Nah... I'll start with today.
APRIL 2012
That's better. I do get confused ever so easily.
It's late and I should be asleep but I'm allergic to sleep.. well mostly. I am not allergic to it from about 3am to about 11am. I've considered the fact that maybe sleep is allergic to me but that's not possible is it? I've spent about half my life trying to convince the rest of the world that my schedule doesn't really work with theirs and that maybe it's time to change theirs. Ha! No luck on that, as you can well imagine.
This morning started with a 10 minute wait for water to come out of the shower. I don't know many people who wake up not looking forward to a hot shower, but when you're me, and you live in Tete, you'll make do with any water at all coming out of there. I'm usually faced with one of 3 options. 1. Dont shower. 2. Screech down the passage to anybody who can hear me to turn off all outside taps and immediately halt early morning washing of dishes or clothes, or 3. Make do with the cold dribble. I've mastered cold morning showers. Jump in, get totally wet, jump out, soap oneself, then jump in again, constantly reminding oneself that it's going to be extremely hot outside so it's good to bring the body temperature down a little. Although I do tend to go out with conditioner still sliding around on my head at times. Nobody cares. This is Tete.
We spent 5 hours at the "Bend over Boutique" today. It's an open air market with daunting road access. By this I mean the roads are bad and there are a maze of them all filled with enormous potholes that could quite easily swallow a small car. The potholes are also filled with mud, sewage, plastic bags that the goats haven't eaten, rotting banana peels and mango pips and probably a few dead cats and dogs. Very little mud now that I think about it. It stinks a stench that I've never smelled anywhere else in the world, and the stink of it remains in your nostrils for several hours after leaving! Second hand clothes are piled on plastic sheets, either in the blazing sun or in make-shift sacking or plastic and wood shacks. If you need to pee, you just pop into the scrub and squat. Nobody cares. We usually find a big pile and scratch around, holding up anything that might be of any interest to anybody else. If we're lucky, the owners of the piles vigorously lift and spin them, just in case we've missed anything at the very bottom. And then if we're even luckier, the ice-cream man comes along and we sit right there, in the piles of clothes, eating lollies on sticks.
There is not a lot more satisfying that bagging a bunch of great clothes for a mere few dollars.
The only thing that tops it is lunch. Shopping makes you hungry. At lunch time, we all file into our favourite "Chippie Restaurant" through a dirty curtain hanging from the 'door' and make ourselves comfortable on a log bench. The owner shoots us a massive smile as we make our order in broken Portuguese. Someone in the corner peels tiny potatoes with a very big knife all day long and the peels pile up in an enormous potato peel pile which, I assume, gets thrown into the rancid potholes too. The oil is boiled on an open fire and the sound of the sizzle of the raw potatoes being thrown in makes our mouths water and we all eagerly talk about the last time we were there and how delicious they were. Once cooked, the chips are equally divided into little blue plastic bags which we buy just outside the restaurant and we season them with salt and vinegar. They are ALWAYS too hot to eat, but we never learn. And we never care. They are the best chips in the world. Ever.
Sometimes we remember to bring something to wipe our hands, sometimes we don't. We must have cast iron guts! Africa is not for sissies!
There is always a little guy to help carry the bags back to the car, all the while asking if you want mangoes or pineapples or chillies or telling the story of how he has guarded the car all day long and requires payment for that. Sometimes you just have to say 'no' with a big fat smile on your face.
BOB'ing is a nice way to spend a day in Tete, but seriously, if you can't handle 30-48 degrees, copious flies, bad smells, or a bit of pushing and shoving, don't bother.
