I have a little treat for all my loyal fans today! Not only am I putting up a new update, but I’m also going back to my old college habits and plagiarizing!! So my mom and Miray were here for our EPIC Africa vacay and Miray wrote updates to our family so I’m basically going to put that up and include some editor’s commentary (in parenthesis) for your reading pleasure! Miray, unlike this panda, is a fantastic writer so hope yall enjoy and understand you’ll never get this type of entry ever again = ]

(After an overnight layover in Istanbul, they finally arrived in Maputo via Jburg, but because the flight was delayed, they just barely made the flight and their bags did not, but greeting them at the airport was a joyous occasion cuz I really missed them! Ok here’s miray...)

MAPUTO

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel. It was definitely a learning experience and a good introduction to life in Mozambique. Apparently, it's not unusual for restaurants to take between 1-2 HOURS from the time that you order to the time they bring your food out because they start cooking from scratch when you order. So we sat down, ordered 4 dishes, and when they finally brought the food out over an hour later, they told us that they didn't have the ingredients for one of the dishes so they couldn't make it. (Haha so typical)

After lunch, Mommy and I both succumbed to the jetlag and fell asleep, only to be woken up by Misol (for those of you who didn’t already know, this is my Korean name) telling us that we had to go to the airport to get our bags. Originally, the airline had told us that the hotel should be able to send someone to pick up our bags for us, but when he got to the airport, he was told that there was an issue with one of our bags, so we had to come get them ourselves. So we shook off the sleep and dragged ourselves to the airport. When we got there, we had a bit of a panic moment when the airline guy told us that the driver had already left with our bags. But after some more back and forth, we finally found a woman with all 3 of our bags. That's when she called over a customs guy who told us that because of the food in our bag, we had to pay a special tax. Misol then started arguing with him in her awesome Portuguese, and it quickly became clear that the guy just wanted a bribe. But Misol wouldn't budge and after much arguing and finally pleading, he finally got tired of her and let us go. (I don’t know if tired is quite the right word… it was more like he was entranced by my awesomeness! I fed him the same crap I give every cop who tries to stop me for a bribe – oh I’m a volunteer teaching at a local secondary school for FREE, you have to emphasize the free part cuz they don’t understand what a volunteer is, and that I’m shaping the future leaders of Mozambique and I live in a mud hut with no electricity and no running water just like the other locals… ok so I embellish the truth just a tad, but gotta do what you gotta do!) So we were finally able to take our bags back to the hotel, and Misol was able to open the bag with all the goodies we brought for her. (CHRISTMAS IN JULY!!!! It’s fitting cuz it is winter for Africa! Thanks so much Jungah and Cass!!!)

Dinner was at the hotel restaurant. Mommy ordered a pasta dish that tasted like noodles in ketchup. Misol ordered steak that was more grey than brown. I ordered fish and chips - the fish had bones, and the tartar sauce had hard boiled eggs. The only redeeming part of the meal was the piripiri sauce - that's the local hot sauce, and every restaurant makes their own version. It's made from these tiny little peppers that are super spicy. Most of the piripiri sauces we've had are red, but the one at the hotel restaurant was green, and it was delicious! Without that sauce, we probably wouldn't have been able to finish our meal.

On Wednesday, Misol dragged us out of bed at the crack of dawn because she couldn't wait to hit the hotel's breakfast buffet. (no joke as soon as I opened my eyes at 7ish I was jumping on their bed to wake up cuz we had to go eat the most amazing breakfast buffet on planet Mozambique!) The food was actually really good. There was lots of fresh fruit, an omelet station, and even baked beans! But the best thing at the buffet was this breakfast pastry that was like a cross between a Korean cream bbang and a deep fried ppat bbang. So the bread was fried on the outside and had this yummy cream filling. Delicious!

After breakfast, we went to the central market, where they actually had a pretty impressive produce selection. They even had fresh gahm (persimmons)! Right across the street, there was a store selling traditional African fabrics (kapulana) - they had hundreds of different fabrics (in a really tiny tight space), so it was a bit overwhelming, but we managed to buy a bunch of really pretty ones.

We then headed to the fish market to meet Misol's friend Colin for lunch. It was fairly small, and more surprising, most of the seafood was frozen. But we bought a kilo of jumbo prawns, a kilo of tiger prawns, a kilo of calamari, a whole croaker, and a whole red snapper. Then we took all the seafood to one of the restaurants behind the market and drank some beer while we waited for them to cook the seafood. It took awhile (like over an hour), but it was well worth the wait. The food was delicious, and we finished every last bite!

After a brief rest at the hotel, we went over to the Polana, which is the nicest hotel in Maputo. We walked around the hotel grounds for a bit, which were beautiful - the hotel is set right above the water, and then we had tea/coffee and dessert on the open veranda. It was lovely and a welcome break from the poverty of the rest of the city. After a while, we almost forgot that we were even in Maputo.

For dinner, we went to an Italian place and had pizza and pasta, both of which were surprisingly yummy. But because it's kind of a foreigners' hangout, as soon as you step out of the restaurant, there's a swarm of Mozambican men trying to sell you crafts, and they're very aggressive.

On Thursday, we got Misol checked into her conference hotel, and then we took 4 of her friends out for lunch, including Misol's roommate Vonnie. The restaurant that we went to was called Zambi, specializing in seafood. Misol found the restaurant online as the #1 restaurant in Maputo, and the rating was well-deserved. All of our dishes were delicious (seared tuna, grilled tiger prawns, grilled calamari steak), with the exception of Mommy's - she was suffering from a bit of seafood overload after our trip to the fish market, so she ordered pasta with a pesto sauce. The sauce was actually pretty good, but the noodles were completely overcooked. So boolsahnghae. (That means poor mommy) But the rest of us really enjoyed our food! For dessert, we ordered a bunch of stuff for the table, the standout being a cashew nut tart. Cashews are grown here, so you can find them everywhere. Anyways, it was a very pleasant surprise to find such good food in Africa. We're even going there again tonight, and hopefully, Mommy will make a better dinner selection.

After lunch, we went to a craft market. It was huge, set in a really pretty park, and there were all sorts of wax prints, carvings, jewelry, etc. We were able to get some great souvenirs, and Misol once again impressed us with her excellent bartering skills. (that’s a LIE! Miray actually yelled at me for not bartering harder and getting better deals!)

So that brings us to today. Like I said, Mommy and I are just hanging out at the hotel. The city of Maputo - especially the area where our hotel is located - isn't really the kind of place where we feel comfortable walking around outside, especially without Misol. It's much more urban than what Mommy expected, and much dirtier. There's no national garbage collection system, so there's trash everywhere. And we clearly stand out as tourists, so it's hard not to feel like a target for pickpocketing or worse. I feel like a wimpy American tourist, but I think it's probably safer for us not to venture out on our own. We are going to take a cab out to meet Misol and some of her other friends for dinner, so hopefully, that'll go smoothly.

Plus, Mozambique has been experiencing its coldest winter in history, so walking around outside hasn't been that pleasant. Thank goodness we're going to Cape Town, which is the only reason I packed any warm clothes. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have even brought a jacket. But we had one really sunny and warm day yesterday, which was nice. The city seems much friendlier in the sunshine. :)

Friday: Misol’s program actually ended much earlier than expected, so she came to our hotel, and then we headed over to the Southern Sun, the 2nd nicest hotel in Maputo. Mommy and I hadn’t really had lunch, so we ordered some butternut squash soup and a ham, cheese and sundried tomato panini. The food was delicious! Mommy of course loved the soup b/c it was hot, and Misol would’ve eaten the entire sandwich if we had let her.

We then headed back to Zambi for dinner with 3 PCVs who hadn’t been able to make it to lunch. Once again, the food was delicious, but we were a little sad because it turned out that the dish that we all wanted to order – fried prawns – had been the special of the day when we came the first time, so they didn’t have it. But we still got to have the cashew nut tart for dessert, so we were happy.

On Saturday, Mommy and I were planning to stay in the hotel all day, but it was a beautiful day, and there were lots of little kids going to the church next door to our hotel, so all of it together made us brave enough to venture out on our own. We walked to Surf Café, a nearby café/bakery and ate club sandwiches. I was kinda proud of us for venturing out and ordering food all by ourselves. (I was def SHOCKED when I heard they had gone out, but so proud seeing as it’s like a 5 minute walk there! Whew! = ])

After lunch, we headed back to the hotel. Mommy watched Korean dramas on my computer, while I took advantage of the South African TV, which played all American shows/movies. For dinner, we went down to the hotel restaurant. We were kind of nervous at first because we were the only diners there, but the food turned out to be really good. Mommy ordered grilled chicken in a piripiri sauce (but you couldn’t really taste the sauce, which Mommy liked), and I ordered grilled chicken in this delicious buttery, coconut-y Mozambican sauce. Both dishes came with steamed veggies and white rice, so Mommy was in heaven b/c she took a tube of gochujang (Korean red pepper paste) with her. Haha.

On Sunday, Misol came over to our hotel, and we headed to the Maputo airport. From there, we took a short flight to Johannesburg, where we had a 2 hour layover. Mommy wasn’t feeling well, so she took advantage of her priority lounge card, while Misol and I browsed the airport shops. Migum, we saw ostrich liver pate and thought of you.

SAFARI

Arriving in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is when our trip started taking a turn for the worse. This was the part of the trip that we had actually arranged through a travel agency, which meant that someone was supposed to be with us every step of the way, but when we stepped out of the airport, there was no one waiting for us. Misol used her awesome living-in-Africa skills to ask a random taxi driver to call the local contact given to us by the travel agency. He of course had no idea who we were or anything about our airport transfer, but he did arrange for the taxi driver to take us to our hotel.

Dar es Salaam seemed similar to Maputo – very urban but rundown. Our hotel, though, was really nice. But when we tried to check in, first they had trouble finding our reservation, and then they said our room wasn’t ready. We finally made it into our room, which was pretty swanky. It was a 1 bedroom/1.5 bathroom suite, and the bathroom was amazing. Too bad we were only there for less than 24 hrs.

By the time we settled in, it was already 9 PM, so we headed down to the restaurant to grab a quick dinner. Little did we know that we were in for a nightmare dining experience. Mommy ordered bouillabaisse, and Misol and I ordered a couple of Indian dishes (I guess Indian food is pretty popular in Tanzania). We waited – no joke – over an hour for our food to arrive. And when it came out, Mommy’s soup was so salty that she had to ask for hot water to dilute it, and our Indian potato pancakes were burnt on the bottom. But luckily, our butter chicken, rice and naan were delicious. And then the chef, the restaurant manager, and various other people started coming out to apologize for the wait and the bad food, and when we finally left (after another long wait to get our check), they took the 2 bad dishes off the bill. So I guess that was good.

The next morning, the bad vibes continued. The night before, the hotel reception guy had told me that he talked to our travel agency and that our driver would pick us up at 7 AM. So we woke up early, grabbed a quick breakfast and went out to meet our driver. But of course, no one showed up to get us – again! Luckily, one of the hotel workers took pity on us and arranged for a private car to take us to the airport. Also, the hotel front desk guy – after much trouble and confusion – had been able to print out our plane tickets for the charter flight to Selous, so we were able to get check in for our flight without any problems. There was a strict 15 kg weight limit on our bags, and we just barely made it – Mommy’s bag snuck in at 14 kg. Haha.

Our plane was a little Cessna that was big enough for about 12 people plus the pilot and co-pilot, but it was just us and another couple. The flight itself was only about 35 mins. And once again, when we landed, there was no one to meet us. But one of the guides from a different camp called our camp for us and found out that our car was on its way. So we waited at the airstrip (which was literally just a strip of dirt, with a couple of benches near by), but during our wait, we saw a bunch of giraffes and impalas (kind of like gazelles). We even saw a lone elephant, which is apparently a big deal b/c elephant are hard to find. Our car showed up about 30 mins. later, but he was dropping off a family, and he couldn’t leave until they left, so we ended up waiting like another hour until their plane came.

So after about 2 hours, we were finally able to leave the airstrip with our guide Rashid. We traveled in a special safari jeep – the seats are elevated, and the back is open, but with a tent to provide shade. The drive to the camp took about an hour, but it was a mini-game drive b/c our guide would stop and point out cool animals along the way. We saw more giraffe and impala, as well as hippos, crocodiles, black faced monkeys, wildabeest, and a waterbuck! It was pretty cool. And then our camp is situated on the other side of the Rufiji River, so we had to then transfer to a small motor boat to take us across.

We’re staying at the Selous Wilderness Camp, which is really nice. Tonight, we’re the only guests in the camp because everyone else checked out today. Our tent is awesome. There are 3 twin beds, electricity, a toilet, 2 sinks, and a cool outdoor shower. There’s even a hammock on the patio. I took a shower before dinner, and it was so cool – being outside, stars in the sky, while you’re taking a shower is so cool. (Mommy, on the other hand, is too scared to shower in the dark. And what neither of them realize is that this ‘tent’ was like a mansion compared to my house so I was in HEAVEN!!)

After a lovely nap, we went out for a river safari with Rashid. We didn’t go that far, but we saw baby crocodiles, lizards, and lots of hippos. We also saw these beautiful birds, green with red/orange/yellow/blue highlights. After riding around for a while, we docked at a sandbank for a “sundowner.” That’s where they set up a table and chairs in the middle of nowhere and serve beer, cocktails and other drinks while you watch the sun go down. So cool!

Once we got back to the camp, we got ready for dinner. Here, when it gets dark, it’s pitch black outside, so they have Masaai (indigenous African people) who escort you throughout the camp after dark. We’re the only guests in the park tonight, so they set up a table for us right by the pool, overlooking the river (except that it was so dark that we couldn’t see anything past the lantern light on our table). Dinner was a spicy gazpacho, kingfish with a garlic butter sauce and basil rice, and crème caramel with peppermint tea. We also ordered a bottle of South African white wine. It was a great meal. And now we’re back in our tent, getting ready to play some GoStop. We probably won’t stay up that long b/c we breakfast is at 7 AM so that we can go on our full day safari ride.

On Tuesday, we went on a full day game drive, which meant that we had to wake up around 6:30 AM. It was still dark out, and there was so much noise in the area around our tent. After breakfast (fruit, eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee/tea), we took the ferry over to our car. The roads are not much more than dirt paths, so driving is extremely bumpy. Our guide Rashid was awesome – he knows so much about everything in the park – the animals, the birds, the plants, etc. In one day, we saw giraffes, impala, zebra, wildebeest, elephants, hyenas, lions, crocodiles, hippos, buffalo, kudu, tons of different birds, black faced monkeys, baboons, waterbucks, mongoose, and warthogs. We also saw some crocodiles feeding on a dead elephant. Some of the animals are very skittish, so they start running as soon as they see us. But others just kind of stand/lie there watching us, trying to figure out whether or not we’re a threat. When we came across the family of lions, we drove up until we were maybe 10 feet away – it was so cool! Lunch was a “picnic” in the middle of the bush. In the distance, we could see a herd of impala watching us. Rashid set up a table (but no chairs) and set out a meal of cheese and tomato sandwiches (on stale bread), potato egg salad (with egg shells), and chicken wings. Mommy was *very* dissatisfied with our meal, but Misol thought it was delicious. (it’s true, I’ll eat anything and think it’s God’s gift to the world!) We discovered that Mommy has a special safari talent: Every time she would say, “I wish we could see __________,” that animal would appear out of nowhere. It was quiet useful. We didn’t get back from our drive until around 6 PM, and then there was a snafu with the ferry (our camp only owns one boat, and another group got back late), so we ended up having to cross the river in the dark. Mommy was SO NOT HAPPY. She kept thinking that a hippo was going to attack our boat. Haha. But we made it safely back to the camp. After dinner, we were all so tired that we crashed pretty much right away, and all of us slept through the night with no problem. (Most of the other nights both mommy and miray were afraid that the little geckos, ants, spiders were going to attack them in their sleep haha)

On Wednesday, we wanted to go on a walking safari, which is best in the morning, so we had to wake up at 5:30 AM. It was pitch black outside and we were still really tired from the day before, but we dragged ourselves out of bed. After a quick cup of coffee, Rashid took us in the boat to the park entrance, where we were met by a park ranger (equipped with a gun and best of all his name was Goodluck) and a park guide. The walking safari was really cool and very educational. We didn’t see too many animals because they ran away as soon as they saw us, but we learned a lot about various things in the park. It’s amazing how much the park workers know about everything in the park – there’s a certain swallow that always builds its nest on the northeast side of the tree in order to face the rising sun; elephants roll around in the mud and then rub against trees in order to get rid of bugs; other animals follow hippo tracks because they always lead to water. After our walk, we all took a long nap, ate lunch and then got ready for a river safari in the afternoon. We saw a hippo fight and lots of beautiful birds. When we got back to our camp, we saw a huge group of baboons right in the middle of our camp. After dinner, we played GoStop and Big 2 (because it wouldn’t be a Gweon Family vacation without card games).

Thursday was our last day in the bush. Rashid was out with another family, so our guide for the day was Kiki. In the morning, we went on another river safari. At one point, the water was so shallow that we got stuck in a sandbank and the boat driver had to get in the water to push us back out. We didn’t see that much stuff – some crocs and lizards, but it was really relaxing. Went we got back to camp, the group of baboons was playing on the beach right in front of our camp, and Misol walked right up to them. After lunch, we went on our last game drive. We saw lots of hippos out of the water, which is pretty cool cause you usually only see them in the water. We also went back to the dead elephant, and it was surrounded by a swarm of crocs – probably about a hundred! We saw one HUGE crocodile out on land – he was probably full from eating because he didn’t move the entire time we were there. It was also Baboon Day because they were EVERYWHERE. We saw lots of baby baboons, who were so cute. On our way back to camp, an elephant family crossed the road right in front of our car. The papa elephant got nervous because the baby was going the wrong way, so he trumpeted threateningly to try to scare us away (and Mommy did indeed get scared). And then about 10 mins. later, we saw another family crossing the road. It may not sound like a big deal, but elephants are actually kind of hard to see because they’re so nomadic, so we were happy to have seen two families during our final safari. Mommy was really cranky at dinner because they served lamb as the main course, and so she asked for fish instead, but she didn’t like the way they cooked the fish, so she didn’t really eat dinner.

On the other side of the river from our camp, between our ferry stop and the game reserve, there’s a small village that we drove through a couple of times. Not surprisingly, it’s not developed at all, and there’s a great sense of poverty. Most of the homes have mud walls and thatch roofs. There didn’t seem to be any electricity or running water. But the kids were so happy to see us (mostly because they thought we would give them candy) and so cute.

The meal portions were on the small side, they didn’t really serve snacks in between meals (other than a really small bowl of homemade masala potato chips once in awhile), and the meal times were normally at 8 AM, 1 PM and 8 PM. So we were hungry a lot of the time. Good thing we took lots of snacks. (I wasn’t very happy with having to share all my snacks all the time…)

Sleeping in the bush is such a cool experience. Other than a few geckos (which Misol said were our friends because they eat bugs) and a few gnats, the inside of our tent was really clean, but just outside our tent, we could hear an entire symphony of different bugs, frogs, birds, etc.

The shower was outside, so when we showered at night, we could look up and see an entire sky full of stars.

All of our dinners were served outside by lantern light. It was very romantic, but we couldn’t really see our food. Good thing we took our flashlights. On our last night, they set up a table right on the beach and built a small fire next to our table. It was lovely except Mommy and I had to keep our feet elevated because we were worried about what would crawl up from the sand. (Mommy was also terrified that hippos and crocs were going to come up on shore and attack us in the middle of our meal hahahahaha)

On Friday, we woke up around 7 AM, packed and ate breakfast. We had a small scare when we couldn’t open the electronic safe (which held all of our passports and money), but the camp manager had a separate key. We also had an unpleasant surprise when it was time to settle the bill – it turns out that when they say that the camp is “all-inclusive,” they’re only talking about the food. In other words, we had to pay for all of the drinks – including the bottled water! Plus, the camp only took cash, and we hadn’t had time to go to an ATM because of our airport transfer issues, so we had a very limited supply of cash. After settling our bill, we didn’t have that much leftover, so unfortunately, our tips for the guides and other camp workers was not as generous as we would have liked. Oh, well.

ZANZIBAR

Our flight to Zanzibar arrived on time but then made 2 unexpected stops, so we got to Zanzibar about an hour later than expected. But we were really happy because there was a driver holding a sign with our name waiting for us! He had a nice, clean minivan, and he even took us on a detour to a Barclays ATM so that we would get some more cash. The drive to Konokono took about an hour and a half. The roads for most of the drive were paved and fairly well-maintained, but the last half hour getting to our resort was a dirt road that may have been even bumpier than the roads in the bush. (in reality this last part took about 10minutes…)

I was a bit nervous about our Zanzibar resort. I had found it online and asked our travel agent to book us there (she had never had any guests stay at Konokono). The pictures were really pretty and the reviews were good, but you never know… But my worries were completely unnecessary. The resort is gorgeous! There are beautiful flowers everywhere, and everything is clean and in great condition. We were greeted with cold towels and delicious fresh pineapple juice. Our bungalow is huge! We have a king bed and a twin, plus plenty of room for 3 chairs and a table, plus another bigger table where we can sit on the floor. There are also double sinks and a huge (indoor) shower. Outside, we have a big patio with big comfy chairs, and a “plunge pool” which is a small pool just big enough to sit in and have the water come up to your neck. We also have air conditioning and 2 ceiling fans, which is great because it’s pretty hot and humid here. But the best part of our bungalow is the view – we can see the Indian Ocean from our patio, and it’s glorious! It’s funny how much more relaxed Mommy and I are now that we’re back in “civilization.” Haha.

Today was the first day in awhile that we got to wake up without setting an alarm. Mommy woke up early and took a long walk (something she wasn’t able to do during our safari) around the resort and down to the beach. Misol and I rolled out of bed around 8 AM. After breakfast, Misol and I headed out to the beach. The water is amazing! There are a lot of leaves/seaweed at the top of the beach, but once you get past that area, the water is amazingly clear and beautiful. It’s straight out of a postcard.

Meanwhile, Mommy did laundry, which made her very happy. J It’s really funny to see how happy clean clothes make her. Haha.

The food is much better (and more plentiful) here than at the safari camp. Yesterday, we had lunch and dinner on the beach (dinner by lantern-light), and today, we had breakfast in our bungalow and lunch on the patio. We’re on an all-inclusive package, so for breakfast and lunch, we pretty much just order whatever we want from the menu. Dinner is a set 4-course meal. Last night was a Greek salad, cream of vegetable soup, fried calamari with rice, and caramel cheesecake, accompanied by a South African Sauvignon Blanc.

We had thought about going snorkeling or taking a tour of Stone Town (the main “city” on the island), but it’s pretty expensive, so it looks like our next few days will be filled with sleeping, eating, reading, swimming and sunbathing. (No complaints here.) There’s also a “spa,” and the massages are really cheap, so we’re going to make appointments for tomorrow. Needless to say, we are thoroughly enjoying our vacation!

Now that we’re in Zanzibar, we don’t really do that much, nothing worth writing about at least, so I’ll write about some random, hopefully funny things.

Both here in Zanzibar and in Selous, there are geckos (little tiny lizard like things) EVERYWHERE. Misol says they’re our friends (because they eat bugs), but Mommy and I don’t like them. Whenever I need to use the bathroom, I make Misol go in first to make sure they are no geckos on the floor. Usually, they hang out on the ceiling, which isn’t as bad – as long as I can’t see them, I can pretend that they’re not there.

Mommy’s favorite hobby in Zanzibar is doing laundry. Seriously, if we didn’t give her clothes to wash, I think she would be complaining of boredom. Haha.

Most of the time, the weather is gorgeous – a bit hot and humid but still sunny. But it also rains about once or twice a day. During our first day lunch, we got caught in a torrential downpour. Our table was set up under a small gazebo type structure (just 4 posts and a thatch roof to provide some shade), so we had to huddle under it to try to stay dry. And then last night, it started raining during dinner, so they had to move our table under the gazebo thing. Luckily, the rain was fairly light and didn’t last long.

When we were in Selous, because of our limited cash situation, we couldn’t order any alcoholic beverages, so Misol and I are doing a good job of making up for it now. There’s a full bar right on the beach with all sorts of pretty tropical cocktails (complete with a pineapple spear and flower), and every night, we order a bottle of wine with dinner. The wine is from South Africa, so it’s yummy and cheap (under $30 for a bottle).

The mosquito situation hasn’t been quite as bad as we had expected, but we’re not sure if it’s because there aren’t that many mosquitoes out or if it’s because of the mosquito repellant we brought. Mommy brought this little device that emits one of two mosquito-repelling sounds – either a male mosquito or a dragonfly (which eats mosquitoes). Both sounds apparently drive other mosquitoes away. And I brought a device that emits insect repellant and then has a tiny fan to circulate the repellant. We’re not sure if either device really works, but we still wear them religiously anytime we go outside at night. Misol, on the other hand, doesn’t give a second thought to bugs. Yesterday, she was outside reading on the back porch right through dusk while wearing a sundress, and now she has tons of little bites on the backs of her thighs. We’re not sure if they’re ant bites or something like a bed bug, but they’re gross. (there were about 50 bites on each leg and it was disgusting and SUPER itchy! Ugh so annoying… pretty sure they were bedbug type things or sand fleas or something… you’ll see pictures soon)

There’s a little spa here that’s actually pretty cheap by US standards, so we all booked massages for tomorrow. But there’s only one masseuse, so we had to book them all back to back.

Misol didn’t do a very good job of putting sunscreen on my back yesterday, so I have a strip of sunburn right across the middle of my back. Good thing I brought aloe gel.

Ok, that’s it for today. Sorry there isn’t more to report, but seriously, all we do is eat, sleep, read, sit around, and eat some more. The hardest part of our day is deciding what to eat for lunch. Haha.

Today’s our last full day in Zanzibar. Mommy’s ready to leave, but Misol and I could use another week or two or ten here. I thought we might get bored with nothing to do, but it’s wonderful. So peaceful and relaxing.

Swimming at the beach here is an amazing experience. The water is ridiculously clear, and it’s a beautiful greenish-blue color. It’s also really salty (per Misol, it’s the 2nd saltiest body of water in the world, after the Dead Sea), so it’s really easy to float in the water. It’s a bit cold when you first go in, but within a few minutes, it feels as warm and comfortable as bath water.

The sand here is also amazing. Zanzibar is famous for its white sand beaches, and I can totally understand why. The sand is a fine, white powder, and other than a few hermit crabs, leaves and twigs, there’s nothing else in the sand. At night, when we go to dinner, the sand feels so amazingly cool on your feet. Mommy’s convinced that the sand glows – when the moon and stars are out, it really does look like the sand is giving off a florescent light.

As I mentioned in my last email, Mommy has been hyper-vigilant about mosquitoes and bugs, but when she came back from her walk this morning, she had a bunch of bites on her thighs. She thinks there was a bug – like an ant or a tick – in her pants, which she’s now too scared to wear. So sad – she almost made it through 3 weeks in Africa without a single bug bite, only to succumb a few days before her departure.

Every morning for breakfast, there’s a different type of fresh juice. Misol and my favorite so far has been the pineapple, and Mommy’s is the passion fruit. We also had watermelon yesterday and mango today. So good!

The agenda for today is Skyping with Daddy (sorry, Migum, but it’s too hard to coordinate the time difference with you), massages, lunch…We’ll probably take it easy on the sunbathing, given that Misol is about 50 shades darker than her normal skin color, and my back is a flaming shade of reddish-pink. (when I was heading back to monapo I had to text von ‘don’t be alarmed if you think you see another Mexican approaching the house… it’s just me’)

Yesterday passed by in blur. We each had our massages – the masseuse wasn’t that great, but the setting was pretty cool. The massage table was set up on an elevated, covered platform, so there was a nice breeze and you could hear all the jungle chatter around you. (miray thought the breeze was nice, but I was FREEEZING! I mean aren’t massages usually supposed to be set in warm places so your muscles RELAX? i’m pretty sure mine were getting tighter with every gust of wind that my skin!)

After our massages, I passed out, Mommy watched Korean dramas and Misol read. We got in a few games of Big Two and GoStop before dinner, and then we enjoyed our last dinner on the beach. Our favorite part of the meal was the roasted sweet potatoes.

Today, we woke up, ate breakfast and packed. Our flight was originally supposed to leave at 7 PM, but we changed to a 2 PM flight so that we wouldn’t get into DAR quite so late. The flight from Zanzibar to DAR is literally a hop across the ocean – it took about 15 mins from take off to landing.

When we got to the hotel, which had become a Hyatt Regency as of August 1st, it took forever to check in, and then they tried to put us in a really small regular room, even though we had paid for an upgraded executive suite. We then found out that the President of Somalia is here, so they’ve closed off the entire 7th floor, which is where we were supposed to stay. When I refused to take the first room (I have no idea how they were planning to squeeze a 3rd bed in there), they said they had to talk to their manager, and after much waiting (luckily, they had snacks and drinks in the executive floor lounge), they finally gave us our new room – they upgraded us to a diplomatic suite (aptly named the Selous Suite)! Now we have a giant living/dining room, and a separate bedroom.

Mommy, in doing some final repacking, discovered that she can’t find her US cell phone. As you might imagine, she’s not happy.

There are 2 restaurants in the Kilimanjaro. The last time we were here, we ate at the Palm because the Oriental was too expensive. But tonight, because it’s her last night here, Mommy said that she (and Daddy) would treat Misol to one last meal. So we went to the Oriental, but it wasn’t open when we first went up. So instead, we went to the 8th floor bar, where we had some pre-dinner cocktails (a mocktail for Mommy). As bar snacks, they served popcorn, cashews and these peanuts cooked in a spicy onion sauce. Quite good.

We then headed over to the Oriental Restaurant, where we had the best meal of our entire trip. The menu is ridiculously extensive because they serve Chinese (including dim sum), Japanese (including sushi), Thai and Indonesian food. We started with a spicy tuna roll as an appetizer, and after the first bite, we were pretty certain that we were in for a good meal. (I was already close to tears of joy at my first bite of sushi in 2 years!) The tuna was super fresh, the rice was nicely vinegared, and the roll was really spicy, but in a good way. But the best part of the meal – hands down – was the prawn dish. It was 4 GIANT fried king prawns in a hot chili sauce. The prawns were so fresh and perfectly cooked, and the sauce was amazing –better than a lot of gampoong shrimp I’ve had. We also ordered this curry dish, which was basically slices of really tender beef in a spicy coconut sauce. Misol loved it because it was pretty much just a big bowl of meat with no veggies to get in the way. Anyways, by the end of the meal, Misol was so happy that I think she was actually close to tears. Haha. And Mommy was happy because it turned out that all of the menu prices were inclusive of tax and tip, so the meal turned out to be way cheaper than we had expected. So basically, it was win-win for all. Daddy, Misol says a great big, “THANK YOU” to you for the awesome meal. (I also took a bath this night in scalding hot water, lotsa bubbles and bathsalts that made the water green! It was heavenly!! The tub was almost too big cuz I kept slipping and plunging into the water! But clearly I’m not complaining cuz it was the most glorious bathing experience I’ve had in 2 years! Also I wore the white fluffy bathrobe afterwards too!)

Mommy has a really early flight tomorrow, so her airport transfer is coming at 5:30 AM tomorrow. Misol and I have an afternoon flight, so we might go back for another helping of the prawns for lunch tomorrow.

Mommy got off this morning without too much trouble (her car was about 20 mins. late – hope it wasn’t a problem). Misol and I slept some more and then finally woke up to eat breakfast. After breakfast, we both enjoyed the wonderfully clean and pretty Kilimanjaro shower (Misol had also taken a bath the night before), and then we read until lunch time.

When we went down for lunch, we were a little early, so we took a quick peek at the hotel casino. Misol was overjoyed to see all the familiar slot machines, but I wouldn’t give her any money to play. Haha. (so so incredibly cruel… I mean hearing all the dingdingdingings in the back and flashy lights! How could I not be drawn to that?!?!)

For lunch, we had a spicy snapper roll, the prawns in hot chili sauce and rice. It was a perfect lunch.

Then it was off to the airport. We didn’t want to risk being late with the unpredictable traffic, so we left really early. It was probably a good thing because the line for the LAM check-in was really long and so slow. But we finally made it through, and luckily, they had our reservation and everything (I can probably stop doubting at this point of our trip, but a part of me is always a bit nervous about stuff I booked online).

MONAPO, CHOCAS, ILHA

Our flight from DAR to Nampula had a stop in Pemba. We thought we wouldn’t go through immigration until Nampula, but they made everyone go through in Pemba. It was a bit of a madhouse, but we actually made it through with 2 things going our way: (1) they were asking to see passengers’ yellow fever cards, which Misol had left at home, but she just very confidently said that she lived in Mozambique, and they let her through; (2) when Mommy and I first got to Maputo, I tried to buy a multiple entry visa, but the woman wouldn’t let me, so I thought they might make me buy another visa (which would cost another $66), but I guess the guy didn’t look at my visa very closely because he just let me through. This trip has definitely taught me to be more appreciative about the small pleasures and triumphs in life.

The flight from Pemba to Nampula was about 15 mins., so we were on the ground in no time. It’s so nice to be back on Misol’s home turf – she just feels a bit more relaxed and comfortable, and it’s great for me because I don’t have to be in charge of anything. Haha. (PSH I thought I wouldn’t have to do much once we got to tanz cuz they speak english there, but miray still made me do just about everything… call for this, ask for that)

We checked into our hotel, which is the nicest hotel in Nampula. It’s pretty luxurious by local standards – there’s air conditioning, and everything’s really clean. We’re just staying here for one night because our flight got in too late to drive to Monapo.

We had a great Indian dinner at the hotel restaurant, which I think is run by an actual Indian family. The food could probably rival some of the Indian food I’ve had in LA.

Tomorrow, we’re going to do some shopping for supplies in the morning, and then we’ll make the drive to Monapo, where we’ll spend a couple of hours. I’ll get a chance to see where Misol lives, Misol will get to unpack/repack, and we’ll pick up Vonnie and then head to Chocas for 2 nights. After that, Vonnie’s heading back home, while Misol and I head to Ilha for another 2 nights.

After breakfast, our driver for the day picked us up and we went to a few different markets to buy food and wine for our trip. We almost had an issue when we stopped for gas – Misol didn’t have as much money as she thought she did, so she didn’t have enough local currency to pay for the gas. Luckily, I had USD $40 in cash, which just barely covered the bill. Then it was off on the 1.5 hour drive to Monapo. (it wasn’t that I didn’t have enough money, usually you pay at the end of the trip and all my money was in monapo, but this guy wanted me to pay for his gas so I didn’t have enough money to cover that!)

It was really cool to see Misol’s town and especially her house. Her house is so much smaller and grungy than I thought it would be. I really can’t believe that she’s lived there for 2 years. I honestly don’t think I would’ve lasted one day there. But it’s also amazing to see how much they’ve done to make their home more comfortable and how much they’ve been able to achieve with so little space.

We also walked around the town and over to her school. I even got to meet a class of her 9th graders, who were all so nice and welcoming. (my rowdiest class…) I also met her school director – I can tell why Misol has so many issues with him. Even in the few minutes that I spoke with him, I could tell that he just isn’t a very nice person.

We ate a quick lunch and then got on the road to Chocas. The ride itself wasn’t too bad, but when we were only 3 km away from our destination, our driver flipped out b/c he said that he had only agreed to take us to Chocas, not all the way to our resort. After some yelling and a phone call to the person who had arranged the ride, he finally calmed down enough to drive us the last 3 kms.

But soon thereafter, the paved road ended and we switched to a sand path. After a few minutes of REALLY rough driving (worse than our safari game drives), the car got stuck! Luckily, we were able to flag down a local man walking by. It was a nervewracking 90 minutes, with lots of digging, pushing and waiting, but they were finally able to free the car.

It was dark by the time we got to the camp, but we were glad to have made it in one piece. Our bungalow is nothing like our bungalow in Zanzibar, but it’s really cute. There’s a porch with 2 chairs and a hammock, and when you walk in, there’s a small dining area and kitchen, a double bed and a bathroom (running water, but cold only), and then there’s a ladder to an upstairs loft with just a twin mattress on the ground. It’s not fancy at all, but it’s so peaceful. And the best part is that there are tons of windows, and the weather has been so nice and breezy.

We ate dinner at the camp’s restaurant. I had a delicious grilled calamari steak, Vonnie ordered a traditional Mozambican dish made with some kind of greens (similar to spinach), cashews (usually peanuts) and local spices – it’s similar in consistency to an Indian spinach curry or creamed spinach (without the cream). And Misol ordered a crab curry, which had tons of crab, but it was really messy and hard to eat.

After dinner, we played some games (Misol and Vonnie are both addicted to games – I think they’re going to have serious withdrawal when they go back to the States) and then went to bed. (We also had the brief period panic when Migum called us to tell us about Mommy’s canceled flight, but luckily, that all worked out ok.)

Waking up was great. It was absolutely gorgeous out. After a breakfast of cereal and juice, we went out to the beach, which may have actually been more spectacular than Zanzibar. It was definitely less populated, and the water was beautiful. We spent the entire morning swimming, sunning and reading. It was glorious. We then came in, showered and then had a lunch of crackers and cheese (there’s only one restaurant here, so we’re trying to minimize our number of meals there). The rest of the afternoon was spent playing games – Settlers, Big Two, etc. – and eating lots of snacks. Now we’re getting ready to head out for dinner.

It’s amazing how quickly the days go, even when you’re not really doing anything. I just keep trying to remind myself to appreciate and enjoy this time of doing nothing because I know I’m going to be back at work before I know it

On Saturday, we woke up somewhat early so that we could leave for Ilha. Although a car is faster, the cheapest way to get from Chocas to Ilha is by boat. And not just any boat but the traditional Mozambican dhow boat, which is a type of sail boat. There are no docks, so the boat just comes to the beach to pick you up, and then you have to walk out (until the water comes up to your thighs) and climb into the boat (easier said than done). Unfortunately, when we got out to the beach, there was barely a breeze and the water was almost completely still. So what they promised would be an hour boat ride ended up taking about 2.5 hours! But it was so peaceful and beautiful that we didn’t really mind.

When we landed in Ilha, the water was too shallow for the boat to get that close to the beach, so we had to land a bit out and walk in the rest of the way. We then walked to our hotel, which was lovely. It felt like we were at an old Spanish house somewhere in Mexico. There was an open dining area next to a swimming pool, and there were beautiful pink flowers everywhere.

Our room itself wasn’t quite so nice – it wasn’t terrible, just really…bare. Also, the hotel “accidentally” gave away the room that Misol had reserved, so instead of having a bathroom attached to the room, our bathroom was “right across the hall,” meaning that it was down the hall and around the corner. But the good news was that our room had air conditioning, which turned out to be quite necessary given how warm the weather got. And the room was much cheaper than a room with an attached bathroom, so we saved some money.

Our room wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we started with lunch. Misol had been raving about the hotel restaurant’s tuna with basil sauce. Unfortunately, they were out of the basil sauce, but they had a garlic sauce instead, which was delicious. And Misol asked for the tuna to be cooked just barely seared on the outside, so it was completely raw in the middle – almost like sashimi. It was SO good!

After lunch, we headed for the pool, where we spent the rest of the afternoon.

The next day, I was feeling too lazy to do any sightseeing (there’s an old fort on the island that’s supposed to be interesting), so we literally spent the entire day by the pool again. For dinner, Misol arranged an awesome grilled seafood feast – grilled tiger prawns, a giant calamari steak and a whole lobster! It was fantastic!

The only negative of our time in Ilha was that, after having survived both Selous and Zanzibar without getting any mosquito bites, I got eaten alive in Ilha. (Mommy, I think this means that neither of our insect repellent devices really work.) I’m still suffering from it now.

CAPE TOWN

On Monday, we left Ilha in the morning and drove back to Monapo. After dropping Vonnie off and giving Misol a chance to repack, we headed to Nampula for our flight to Johannesburg. Originally, we were supposed to have a 1.5 hr. layover in Jo’burg before our flight to Cape Town, but our flight left Nampula over an hour late, and of course, we had to pick up our luggage and go through immigration and customs, so not surprisingly, we missed our connection to Cape Town. The good news was that South African Air has hourly flights to Cape Town until 9 PM, so we just had to get on the next flight. The bad news was that our Nampula – Jo’burg flight was operated by South African Airlink, and according to all of the SA agents we spoke to, Airlink is a completely different, unaffiliated airline, so SA couldn’t help us; we had to have Airlink rebook our flight. But of course, there were no agents at the Airlink counter, and when we called the Airlink customer service number, no one seemed able to help us. Finally, a random SA agent took pity on us and before we knew it, our bags had been checked and we were holding boarding passes for the next flight, which happened to be boarding in 4 minutes. Luckily, there was no one at the security line, and we were at the first gate after security, so we made it with time to spare. (I HATE HATE HATE AIRLINK! HATE! HATE! I had vowed never to fly them ever again after my agonizing experience with them coming back from Barcelona, but miray had booked the tix and I had no say… I hate them…)

By the way, it was FREEZING in Jo’burg! So cold that we could see our breath in the air! And Misol, of course, was in a tank top and skirt. (my teeth were literally chattering in the 10 minutes it took us to get from the plane to the bus to the terminal) We were worried that Cape Town would be really cold, too, but the weather has been great.

Cape Town is wonderful! I know this sounds totally spoiled, but it’s so great to be back in “civilization.” Shopping malls, metered taxis, and amazing restaurants. And the city itself is beautiful – it’s right on the water, so parts of it feel similar to San Francisco, but then there’s a giant mountain (Table Mountain) right in the middle of the city, which is very dramatic and beautiful. I can understand why so many people love Cape Town.

Our hotel is really nice. Clean white sheets on soft beds with great pillows. (THE COMFIEST BEDS EVERRRRR! I pretty much passed out as soon as I laid down in mine!) Gourmet chocolates on the beds for nightly turndown service. And best of all, no more geckos in the bathroom! Haha.

Our first day, we set out to walk to the V&A Waterfront, which is the touristy area of the city right near our hotel. But we got a little bit lost and ended up stumbling across the cutest little café! The food was delicious, and it was really cute inside. We liked it so much that we’re going back there tomorrow for breakfast. (my breakfast had a giant stack of bacon on it! mmmm like 20 pieces piled high! AHHHH)

After breakfast, we walked around the Waterfront a bit (there’s a giant mall with lots of high end stores, restaurants and even 2 movie theaters) and then headed to Green Market Square to check out the local craft market. Then we walked to the Mount Nelson Hotel, probably the most famous luxury hotel in Cape Town, for their famous buffet afternoon tea. We sat on the verandah of the lovely hotel and ate lots of delicious finger foods. I think our favorite thing was a puff pastry (shaped kind of like a mandoo) filled with this yummy creamy mushroom filling. I think we had at least 4 each! It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon. Mommy, we really wished you could have been with us!

After tea, we returned to the hotel to rest for a bit and then headed to a “small plates” style restaurant – instead of serving appetizer and entrée sized portions of their dishes, everything comes in a small portion so that you can sample a bunch of different things. We hadn’t really tried anything “African,” so we decided to try the ostrich and the kudu (looks kind of like a deer, but bigger). Both dishes were surprisingly tasty, as were all of the other dishes we ordered. We just wished we were with a larger group so that we could try more dishes!

Today, we decided to do the hop-on, hop-off bus to tour the city (we saved 10% because I happened to have my ticket stub from Istanbul, which was run by the same company!). Our first intended stop was Table Mountain (the mountain in the middle of the city), but unfortunately, the cable car to the top of the mountain was closed because it was so windy. Instead, we stayed on the bus to Camps Bay, which is a famous strip of restaurants/bars right on the beach. It was beautiful! We grabbed a table on the patio of a cute little bistro and just hung out for awhile, enjoying the view.

Then we got back on the bus and rode to Sea Point in search of a Korean restaurant that Misol had heard about from some of her friends. You should have seen the look of pure joy and excitement on Misol’s face when we finally found the restaurant! We wanted to order everything on the menu, but with only 2 of us, we were limited to a few dishes. The food was just ok by US standards but amazing by Misol’s Korean food-deprived standards. That meal should definitely tide Misol over until she gets to Seoul in December.

After lunch, we took the bus back to the V&A Waterfront area, where we decided to spend the rest of the day watching movies (Misol was adamant that we watch the final Harry Potter movie). This may sound like a waste of a day, but movies are so much cheaper in Cape Town than in the US! We ended up watching two 3D movies, and for all 4 tickets, we spent less than $15! Totally worth it!

Tomorrow, we’re planning on going back to Table Thirteen (the really cute café from our first day) for brunch, and then we’re off to wine country for some wine tasting and dinner. Only one more full day in Cape Town, so we have to make the most of it!

After enjoying 2 days in the mid-20s, we woke up Thursday to a gray day with an expected high of 17˚C. We headed back to Table Thirteen for a leisurely brunch, and then our private car picked us up for the drive to Franschoek. Our first stop was a very small winery called GlenWood. Given that we were there on an off-season Thursday, it wasn’t surprising that we were the only visitors. But it was nice because we got to chat with the woman running the tasting, and we were able to taste some lovely wines.

A taxi then picked us up to take us to our second tasting at Haute Cabriere. There, we were able to go on a cellar tour, followed by a tasting. It was pretty cool, except that we were joined by a group of drunk Australian travel agents who were pretty obnoxious. But after they finally left, when we expressed sympathy to the tour leader for dealing with such an obnoxious group, he thanked us by giving us another free glass of wine each.

By that point, we had about 2.5 hrs. until our dinner reservation and had originally planned to walk around “downtown” Franschoek (which is basically one street with lots of cute restaurants, galleries, shops and cafés), but it was so cold that we decided to pass the time in a really cozy café, drinking coffee/hot chocolate.

Dinner was at the Tasting Room at Le Quartier Francais, and it was fantastic! It’s a fairly small dining room, with excellent service (especially by African standards, but even by US standards). We opted for the full nine course “Surprise Menu,” and Misol added the wine pairings (I had already had too much wine at our 2 earlier tastings). All of the food was so unique and interesting, with good use of local African ingredients and cooking methods. Definitely one of the more memorable meals I’ve had in recent memory.

After our lovely meal, our private car took us back to our hotel, where Misol crashed while I packed.

When we got to the airport this morning, we almost had a problem when we discovered that our flight had been canceled. Luckily, we were just in time to make an earlier flight, so we made it to Jo’burg without issue. After buying Misol one final meal of KFC, I sent her off to catch her flight back to Maputo.

And that, Family, concludes my 28 day adventure. It was an amazing trip, filled with tons of once in a lifetime experiences. Now I have to return to my real life, where there are lots of documents waiting to be signed, emails to be checked, and messages to be returned. I can’t believe I have to be back at work in two weeks. My two-month vacation has seriously flown by!

So unfortunately I haven’t been living up to my name as I haven’t really traveled much at all, not only since I got back from south Africa, but also since my last update. I had finally decided that I was going to get my act together and get out of the house more, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out… I made one trip so far to go visit my friend Camille in Gurue and it was absolutely breath taking! We talk a lot about the beautiful beaches in moz, but this time I headed inland to the mountainous tea plantations of Zambezia province. The trip I had been dreading so much was actually quite enjoyable and I even got to buy a giant basket full of tangerines for about a buck fitty! And they were so delicious too! Camille and her new roommate annie live in a cute little house in a teacher’s compound on school campus. There were about 15 volunteers visiting that weekend and as always it was a weekend filled with really amazingly good food and a fair amount of drinking = ] the only bummer was the first night we were all there, 5 ipods, including mine, and a set of speakers got stolen. After we had all gone to bed that night someone had cut a hole in their window screen, reached in and nabbed em up off the table… it definitely put a damper on the weekend. I also realized just how much my life had revolved around that thing! It had my entire address book (speaking of which I now no longer have anyone’s address cuz recently, when I was really bored, i moved all my contacts to my ipod, so everyone email them to me again please), calendar, pictures, video clips and of course music… no more mr.aahh, angry birds, word warp, trivial pursuit and scrabble!!!! Falling asleep has been a much larger challenge without games to make my eyelids heavy and my e.p.i.c playlist to lull me to sleep… although now I may actually finish reading my 900+ page whopper ‘shantaram’. It’s a really good book, but I read and read and read and just don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere! I’ve been working on it on and off for about 2-3months and I’m on page 470 or something… daunting! And that bad boy is so heavy to hold up and after like 10 min of reading my arms start falling asleep! Anyway can yall believe it’s already JUNE??? We’re about halfway through the second trimester and july’s gonna be a big month with some people coming through to visit including von’s best friend michelle and then MOMMY AND MIRAY COME!!!! I seriously seriously seriously can’t wait!

Oooh last month von and I also started English Club! It’s a very elite, invite only, group of our very best english students that don’t get the challenge and level of attention necessary during class. The group meets every Saturday and we’ve done everything from play games to paper folding to watching movies and the only rule is that you have to speak english! Oh my students also taught me this awesome new trump game! So pumped cuz it is by far the best 2person card game I have ever played and can be played with up to 8 people although at that point it’s just a hot mess. So the game started with just me and this kid Nelson so he taught me and I picked it up pretty quickly and I actually kicked his butt, but as more kids started trickling in we added them in and played in teams and every time kids came in and saw me playing they would look to nelson and ask ‘does teacher know how to play?’ and he would be like ‘I only just taught her, but oh she knows. she gets it.’ haha I felt like I was hustling them but what can I say? I’ve had lotsa practice! thanks gweon family! But they’re a great group of kids so it’s been really fun!

Also von and I started tutoring this 5-year-old cutie patootie! His family is totally loaded but he’s too young to start school and his parents just wanted him to get a jump-start on english so we see him 4 times a week. It is crazy the difference it makes to start learning a language when young though cuz I’m pretty sure he, after just 2 months, speaks better english than most of my 9th graders! He does some dang cute things like von taught him ‘I don’t know’ and he says it all the time now, and he says ‘thingers’ instead of fingers and I secretly hope he’ll make that mistake for the rest of our time together cuz it’s so so so cute!!! The parents wanted to pay us, but since we’re not allowed to ‘make money’ while we’re here, they instead bring us the most amazing snacks ever! From cookies and cakes, to green mango curry soup, we almost prefer it to cash!

So thanks to my malaria meds I’ve been having crazzzyyy dreams, and I really should start writing them down, but last night there was one where I was trying to save a talking dugong and running around trying to get him to water and instead we got chased by a crocodile and it got the poor dugong and I just barely got away. I swear I didn’t throw the dugong to the croc to save myself! But seriously… right? anyway I think I’ve been chased by crocs and sometimes snakes a few other times too which is weird cuz I still haven’t seen a crocodile in this country, or at least not in the wild as we do have 3 baby crocodiles in our ‘zoo.’ We call it central park zoo, but its just one little cement and gate structure that holds 3 baby crocs captive… it’s really kinda sad, but it’s the highlight of the Monapo tour whenever friends come to visit!

So von was gone this past weekend, she went to go help out with a conference, so I was home alone for about 5 days, and all I can say is thank GOD I don’t live alone… I almost lost my mind trying to find things to do and being alone makes you constantly THINK! I had a few things on my mind and I swear I was non-stop obsessively thinking about them and I don’t think it was very healthy… may have aged about 2 years in 5 days… no good… von don’t ever leave, ever. Ever.

Well I think that’s about it and I should have more to write in the coming months so I’ll try not to slack on the blog writing! I miss everyone SO SO SO SO much, especially my doofus of a nephew, bambo, who thinks Mozambique is filled with ‘beaks’ haha.

20 months down and just 6 more to go!

The lame panda

So since getting back to site and school in mid January, I really haven’t done a whole lot except teach. I haven’t traveled at all, only one daytrip to nampula for medical stuff, but other than that I’ve been burnin the midnight oil for 2 and a half months! So this year I’m teaching 9th grade again and I followed my 11th graders from last year up to 12th grade. In 9th grade, compared to last year, there are way fewer standout students that already know a basic level of English and are really eager to learn more. I’ve also decided that I needed to go at a much slower pace than I did last year and I started the year off with the alphabet! You wouldn’t believe how many students don’t know the order of the alphabet and also the sounds of each letter even though it’s almost exactly the same in Portuguese… yikes. Honestly, as long as they can conjugate ‘to be’ in the present and past tense perfectly I will be a proud mama. With 12th grade, I have my kids from last year and I inherited one of vonnie’s classes, and let me tell you, I got JIPPED! I didn’t have anything to compare it to last year since I only had the one class, but this year teaching two of them, I realize how BAD my kids were and are! Von’s kids are friggin angels and always want to do extra work and ask questions and don’t talk, but my kids are NEVER quite, never wanna do anything, and don’t even appreciate the awesome things I do for them like review games and prizes… the only thing I had to compare them to were my 9th graders and yeah compared to a class of 120 fifteen year olds, 70 eighteen year olds seemed like heaven! But now I know better and won’t be letting them get away with anything! So the past few weeks have been jam packed with testing and proctoring other teachers’ end of trimester tests and it is so tiring. They are pretty much constantly cheating and cheating really poorly… and it has been so hot and you’re just sweating bullets in the classrooms and having to walk around and btw aisles that I can barely squeeze through… absolutely no fun. But it’s almost over and we just have lots of grading and grade entering left to do til the end of the trimester. So right now we’re nearing the end of tempo de fome, and it literally means time of hunger, because there is hardly any food. The only things we’re able to get at the market are tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and lately cucumbers. But we’ve been doing pretty well as far as meals go, and even added some new meals to our rotation, like now I can make a banging white cream sauce for pastas, but the real highlight to my culinary feats is my pancake and omelet making skills! I can make amazing pancakes from scratch now! When I first started out they were flat and rubbery, gross, but now they’re fluffy and delicious! But there’s some real worry about the amount of rainfall this summer because it just didn’t rain enough and now all anyone is talking about is how nothing is growing in there gardens. This means they won’t be able to feed themselves, and that there won’t be much being sold in the markets, also it means we’re gonna have a hell of a time getting water again… it is no fun having to live in fear of not having enough water to cook, shower, and esp drink. So hopefully (everyone do some rain dances) it’ll rain a bunch more before the summer ends! What else… ohhhh von, megan and I have perfected drinking sorry! Haha and it’s absolutely glorious! Now if I could only get my hands on sorry spin haha = ] also our friend sam has proven that the ‘win by development card’ strategy in settlers does work! It is something that I have seen many people attempt and fail miserably at so parabens (congrats) sam! Also my mom and miray are coming out and it’s right around the corner!!! Almost all the plans are now set and I seriously can’t wait! It’s going to take some arm-twisting to get my director to sign off on my vacation days again, but hopefully since it’s my family coming here to Africa, and also to Mozambique, he’ll be more… what’s the word… pleasant? Understanding? Lenient? None of those quite fit the sentiments I feel towards him = ] ok well that’s about it for me since nothing interesting is going on in my life, but do you guys realize that assuming I get to leave in December, I only have 8 ½ months left!! WAHOOO! Home home home home home!

Teacher panda

My journey back up to monapo ended up taking a little longer than planned. So I’m up into inhambane, and I just don’t feel well… my head felt like it was detached, I was sweating profusely even though I wasn’t doing anything strenuous, and I felt super nauseous. At first it was just really bad diarrhea and vomiting to the point where I wasn’t eating and it was still continuing. And then the fevers started. I don’t think I’ve had a fever in my adult life so I didn’t really know what was going on or what to expect, but that first night I thought my body was going to either burst into flames or spontaneously combust. The next day the fever still hadn’t gone away and when we measured it, it was at about 39C which is about 102F and that was when I was feeling a little bit better. Over the next two days my temperature went back and forth from about 100-104F and the times when it got up to 104F I felt like straight death. But like all sicknesses I thought this would just pass, so I didn’t call the doctor til after about 3 days. I even thought I was getting better so I tried to travel again, but I left my friends house, and I got as far as the main road in front of her house, which is only about 20yards away, and I was already winded, sweating and then finally I threw up. I am seriously so lucky that Alexandra was around to take care of me, force feeding me oral rehydration salts and electrolyte drinks, making me cold compresses and singing really awesome songs for me. I finally called the doc who said to keep hydrated and to take antibiotics and we would see how to felt in another day or two. Well unfortunately all symptoms continued and finally the doc decided to fly me down to Maputo to check me out. So in the 4 day stretch after getting sick at alex’s, I had eaten a bowl of soup, some crackers, a banana and a piece of toast. It was definitely the sickest I had been in my adult life. So I arrive in Maputo and the doc after checking me out a little took me to the hospital so that I could get hooked up to an IV cuz I had gotten too dehydrated. So I was there for about 24 hours getting hydrated, getting shots on my butt to help me not vomit, and when I got fevers, they gave me a paracetamol drip and my fever went away almost instantaneously! That was good stuff!! They also ran tests on me to see what was going on cuz up to this point the doc was thinking maybe I had malaria, but when I took a self test it came out negative, so a few blood, urine and stool test later it turned out I had tick fever and some sort of dysentery stomach inflammation something or another. Basically it wasn’t just one thing but a few things that hit me at once and made all symptoms way way worse. And being in Maputo by myself was so friggin lonely… in a hospital alone, at the hotel alone, walking around alone. But what really sucked was that I was starting to feel better, yet my stomach was still not so that meant I still couldn’t enjoy quite possibly the only good thing Maputo has to offer… good food! I was still eating only saltines, bananas, apple juice, Gatorade and water. In the 9ish days I was in Maputo I think I drank about 15L of liquids and in all honesty that could even be an understatement! Luckily my friend Anna was in town for a few days and had her laptop with her so we got to catch up and watch some big bang theory too! Also, I mentioned the Hazels in the last blog, and they are an American family of 4 living in Maputo for work and they are amazing. They really took to PC volunteers so they let visiting PCVs crash at the house, raid their fridge, do laundry, watch cable tv and use internet! They were within walking distance of my hotel so once I started feeling well enough to walk around, after test and dr’s visits I would head over to the Hazels and hang out at their pad usually with their 2 girls, who go to a private school kinda like I did in korea so we had lots to bond over, but mostly just talking about American things we missed most! it was just nice to be around people and they made me feel so welcome and seeing all the good food they were eating, kinda made me wanna get better faster! I think it was really good motivation! Finally about 2 days before I was leaving Maputo I finally started feeling well enough to eat normal human food, while still staying away from certain things, and boy was it great! They have a BEAUIFUL dream kitchen, and just to say thanks, the girls and I baked a pineapple upside down cake and then later I made us a penne pasta bake with probably a pound of mozzarella cheese on top! Then the next night we had a picanya (this one part of the cow that melts in your mouth like butter) bbq with their neighbors and omg I think it was a small glimpse of how I’ll be feeling after living here for two years and going back to the states. After not eating for 2 weeks, this was heaven! There was this salad with another leaf kinda like arugula… I forget… and feta and tomatoes and cucumbers and chickpeas and a balsamic vinaigrette and so friggin good! And the meat… holy cow… it was just these picanya steaks salt and peppered and thrown on the grill for like a minute and then taken off and cut into pieces immediately and you just eat right off the cutting board! Still dripping juices and perfectly marbled with fat and OMG! And then there was this celery salad that was pretty much just celery and onion but sooooo goood! Anyway, food aside, the Hazel family just made me feel like I was a part of their family, which when sick, felt really really great. THANK YOU SO MUCH HAZELS! MISS YOU SO MUCH ALREADY! REALLY REALLY HOPE I GET TO SEE YOU SOON!! Anyway so after 10 days in maputo I was finally feeling in good enough shape to head home, so I got to fly up to nampula, stay in the city for a night, then headed back to monapo! It had been so so long since being home it was so weird and so great all at the same time. The best thing about being back is getting all my clothes washed, as I had been washing things here and there in the sink of my room, and not living out of my backpack anymore! Since being back I had a few more fever attacks with really bad chills, but it’s now mid feb and I think I’m pretty much back up to 100%! Ok I think that’s about it for now! Hope you enjoyed reading about my last 4 months! I put up all my pictures from these blogs as well so be sure to check em out on ‘the Facebook’! can you believe I only have like 10 more months? CRAZY! Miss everyone so much!

Healthy panda

So as I had mentioned before, for our summer break a bunch of us decided to visit our neighboring country South Africa. After traveling 2,500km and a few pitstops along the way, I finally made it to Maputo! It was my first time visiting our capital city since training so I was pretty excited! I was also super super excited to get to meet Von’s mom and cousin marti! They are so awesome! When I first arrived at their really swanky hotel, after jumping on von and bear huggin her for a while cuz it had been like 2 weeks since I’d seen her, I got to catch up on the fam news and hear all about their cape town/Krueger trip! The food in Maputo is something else… good pizza, real Chinese, club sandwiches?!?! It was pretty great~ I also got to go out to dinner with Colin’s parents and the Hazels(I’ll tell you more about these amazing folks later) at the Polana buffet which is like 5 star class class class, and is it sad that more than the different kinds of meats, which were delish, I was more excited to see things like broccoli and mushrooms! Omg it was so amazing! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DINNER JONES’!! Von’s fam and I also got to visit Namaacha and our host families, and even though my host mom was in Maputo for the day, just plain bad luck as we completely missed each other, I got to hang out with my host brother Eduardo all day!! He’s the greatest and he’s going to begin teaching at an elementary school next year!! It was really great, but I hope I get to go down that way again so I can see my host mom too!

So then Diana, von and I left Maputo on Christmas eve to leave for Johannesburg. We got tickets for an overnight bus that put us in joburg at 4am Christmas day. Upon arrival in joburg however, we couldn’t find a bus that would take us where we wanted to go on the schedules and had to wait until the ticketing counters opened at 8am, but there were no clear signs as to where we needed to wait and which carrier we should wait for. So we were standing in the line that I thought was right, but just past 8 I saw this lady walk by and go toward a different ticket counter and I just had this hunch that I needed to follow her so I told Diana I’d be right back and followed her to another office that she opened up and I was second in line and when I got to the front I asked her for 3 tickets to mthatha and she said the bus was already sold out and my heart just sank… but then she was like ‘oh wait a minute…. To mthatha… ok.’ And I was just like ‘ok…what…?’ and she starts telling me what time the bus is and how much the total is and I think I was too shocked to feel anything, but I got the tickets and I came out to meet von and Diana, who were so confused as to where I had run off to and why I looked so shocked, and I just held up the tickets and we just started freaking out cuz we were so happy that we got tickets! It was a friggin Christmas miracle! Unfortunately it was another overnight bus so we would be spending the next 10 hours in the Johannesburg bus terminal, but as long as we had tickets all else was A-OK! We ended up taking turns napping, eating bad terminal food, playing too many games of phase-10, and enjoying real ice cream cones! All in all it was an interesting Christmas day and the next day we finally made it to our first destination, Coffee Bay!

Coffee Bay was the most difficult place to get to, but it was worth the trip and hands down my favorite spot in SA! We stayed at Coffee Shack, which is the absolute best run backpackers I have ever been to and a backpackers that all other backpackers should strive to be even half as awesome! I won’t go into details but one of the really cool things we did here was go on this death hike on the Cliffside of coffee bay and it was tiring, exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. But the reason why we went on this death hike, knowing very well that these could be the last steps we ever take, was because the hike would be ending with us getting to go cliff jumping! It was about a 10m jump into the ocean and it was by far the coolest thing I had ever done! I mean the scenery was absolutely breath taking and the hike there was so scary that it almost made the jump seem like the safest thing we did! Anyway I would go back there in a heartbeat especially if it also meant reuniting with the 2010 Coffee Bay Pub Crawl Crew! Our slogan was “Like we’ve been friends forever” cuz we forged this out of this world bond over 2 days with 3 other travelers and it was so much fun!

Next we travelled to Plettenberg Bay, where we spent new years eve, but we rang the new year in with a serious jump off the Bloukrans Bridge! A lot of jumping this trip! We went to Storm’s River to bungee jump off the highest jump bridge in the world! It was 218m to the rocky river under us and it was AMAZING! They took our group of about 15 across a walk way to the middle of the bridge where they have their entire business set up between the bridge where the cars go by and an arch underneath. It was also quite possibly the best party I have ever been to in my entire life! There was party music blasting and all the people who work there had the most amazing personalities that just made you feel comfortable and pumped you up for what was to come. I should also preface this story by telling you that there is a bar where pre/post jumpers, fam and friends can hang out and watch live video jump footage. So right before leaving to go across the bridge I stopped in the bar for fun and I walked in just in time to see this chick refuse to jump. She was like in tears and kept trying to back up and not jump and then finally the workers just kinda pushed her off the ledge… terrifying for her, HILARIOUS for everyone else watching in the bar cuz everyones screaming JUMP! JUMP! So then I run outside to tell the others about the crier and they all come in to watch some other jumps and we noticed that there are good jumps and bad jumps. A good jump was dependent on whether they actually took a leaping jump off the ledge or just kinda fell or got pushed off, and if they had good form. So they take you one by one and strap you into all the necessary gear and up til this point all we’re talking and thinking about is our form and how we’re gonna jump. This was key cuz it took our minds completely off what was going to happen after that form perfect jump off the platform. My turn finally came up and they bound my legs and attached all the cords and then no joke the next few steps all happened within 20seconds… they helped me to the ledge, said look and wave hello to the camera, so I gave em a big esther smile, and then they yell 5,4,3,2,1 (but not like 5mississippi,4mississippi… more like in nanoseconds) and at 1 I bend my legs a lil and then jump up and out, arms straight out superman style and in my head I’m thinking ‘OH YEAH that was a gooooood one’ and then it hits you… the music starts to fade and you’re diving head first into nothing and your stomach drops and so I started rowing my arms backward and out loud saying “OH MY GOD! WHAT DID I JUST DO! HOLY COW! WOOOOOOOOOOOOO! OH MAN! WAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! THIS IS FRIGGGIN AWESOME! WOOOOOOOOOO!” and as you get to the end of your bungee you stare down at the river and trees but it’s silent except the babbling of the river and some birds chirping and it’s so peaceful and then it springs you back up and I thought it would be a lot more jarring but it was a smooth ride up and a couple times you’re completely upright and staring out past the bridge to the river mouth where it meets the ocean and it was seriously the coolest feeling and sight ever! I hear you freefall for about 7seconds and then bounce up and down for about another minute or two and then they bring you back up. The whole process from when it’s your turn to when you get back up on the bridge I think is about 5 minutes but they are the most exhilarating 5 minutes EVER!

After the jump we went to Jeffery’s Bay and relaxed, ate at a real Mexican place, had the best mint chocolate chip ice cream, shopped and even had a real South African Braai, which is just their version of a bbq. We then headed back up to Joburg but stopped for dinner in Blomfomkstein, which is where J.R.R Tolkein was born! I mean who knew he was South African and now not only does the scenery of LOTR make a lot more sense, but also S.Africans are hobbits. I mean really, LOTR just makes so much more sense now… I can’t get into it, but man! Haha so we couldn’t agree on a place to eat because some people, AHEM mike and kelly, didn’t want mcdonalds, and we didn’t really see anything else, but there was a mall there so we decided to food court it so everyone could choose their own cuisine. Well there was also a movie theatre there and I just about peed my pants cuz I was so excited to see a movie theatre so I spent the next hour trying to convince everyone that we had time for a movie, and being the super persuasive person that I am, got everyone on board and we saw Due Date! The next morning we finally made it to joburg and we couldn’t get a bus out that day so we stayed one last night in South Africa, but I got to cook everyone Migum’s famous chicken, spinach and tomato cream sauce pasta! It was so yummmm!

Anyway so that’s the South Africa trip! Sorry it was long, but it was an eventful trip and I even cut out half of it! a few other notable things from the trip: I got to skype with my family a few times which was awesome! I love South African gas stations! I had about 20 chicken, steak, mushroom, spinach and feta pies during my trip… they are delicious. And even though we were only there for about 10 days we even got to have pies from the place where they supposedly have the BEST pies in all of South Africa. I was hooked = ]

traveled panda

So somehow I made a name for myself here in Mozambique as the ultimate party planner and here’s the story of how that came to be. It all started when vonnie and I were going out to visit our friend michelle on Ilha. Normally we can find a ride that’s going all the way onto the island, but this time they dropped us off right before the bridge going across, which meant we had to take a chapa across the bridge. Normally this would have been annoying, but it all changed when we stepped into the pimpest chapa in Mozambique! It looked like any other chapa from the outside, but this was no ordinary chapa. When we got in, my jaw dropped at the sight of the wine colored plush velour couch seats! I was as giddy as a PCV getting their first care package, and when we sat down every muscle in my body relaxed as I melted into the seat. The chapa also had a raised roof and surround sound speakers that were blasting JAMS! When we reached our destination, what I really wanted to ask was how much would the driver sell the chapa to me for, but I settled for his phone number cuz we had the brilliant idea to throw a party on ilha and hire him to be our private party chapa! We were looking for any and all excuses to throw a party and realized that our good friend Brian would be turning into a grandpa in December and also that our ex-roomie Dillon was going to be leaving so we decided to convince all our friends to come up for a ‘Happy Birthday Brian and Farewell Dillon’ party! Over the last year we had been introduced to a great little backpackers on Ilha called Ruby’s that is the coolest place and because of how many people we were going to have, I decided to just rent the entire place out for that weekend! Anyway so the big weekend was fast approaching and I had made just about all plans and reservations except one… the chapa. I had called the driver about a 100 times in the few weeks before the big weekend and I don’t know if his number changed or whatever, but he never answered… needless to say I was crushed and almost, almost cancelled the entire party! I mean the whole thing was planned around the party chapa and not being able to book it was a bad omen in my mind… but with a lot of reassuring, I continued with the planning. Finally the highly anticipated weekend had arrived and friends from all over began trickling into Nampula. We spent only a day in monapo before leaving for ilha as our house is not quite equipped to cater to 15 guests! The trip out to ilha ended up working out better than ever cuz brian sat in the front cab of the open back truck while the rest of us planned out just how we were going to Roast him for his birthday! The rest of the weekend on ilha was great! They have a fully stocked kitchen there so we cooked and ate some really good food, including brian’s favorite, homemade lasagna, and had some wild nights on Ruby’s gorgeous rooftop! In true Dillon fashion, there was lots of straight bottle drinking and raging dance parties to really give her a good send-off! Oh dill… I miss you so much already… The roast for brian’s birthday was HILARIOUS, and I was hoping to be able to put up some of what we said on here, but it’s been a while now and I don’t remember… but there was a lot of talk about his pickiness with food, his sweating, and his love for floppy disks = ] After ilha everyone needed a little r&r so we sailed to chocas, a beautiful beach across the water, and kicked it at the very deserted white sand blue water beaches of carushca. We rented out a giant bungalow and played games, listened to music and read in hammocks and of course floated in the very salty Indian ocean. There’s no kitchen there so we, especially me, didn’t have to worry about who was cooking what meal! Everyone loved it so much that we even ended up staying another day so that everyone would be fully recuperated! It was hands down one of the greatest most E.P.I.C. (another special shout out E.sther and P.ete I.ncredible C.ompanions for life!) weekends of my life and it will definitely be talked about for years to come! I may even be able to get more people to come visit up north! Yeah you heard me you lazy southern moz slackers that never come up north!

Ultimate planner panda

So I invited myself to Gorongosa to spend Thanksgiving with the Mills’. Jordan’s parents were going to be visiting so I wanted to meet them and I def wasn’t about to spend it alone in Monapo, so I made the long journey down! Sidenote: I feel that I may need to clarify. When I say brian and jordan, I mean the mills’, the married couple that has oh so graciously taken me in = ] they’re pretty awe… I mean ok… (I know they, along with their friends and family members, read my blog and I don’t want anyone’s head getting bigger… Oregonians…) anyway so on the journey down I had been talking to brian and he said their power had been out, but we just thought it was from the weather and we kinda just assumed/hoped it would be back before the big day arrived. Jordan’s poor parents got the real moz experience sans energy which means no fans and romantic candle lit dinners! Luckily the weather was pretty overcast and not blazing hot, but still November in Africa is still summer… come Wednesday evening, the electricity still isn’t back so we cook an entire fiesta night dinner on two charcoal grills! Mexican rice, chips, salsa, queso dip, beans and dude it was friggin awesome! But if we thought that took long and it was a lot of work, we were in for a surprise! By Thursday morning we had just accepted the fact that the electricity would not be coming on and at 7am we started cooking! Peeling potatoes, boiling pumpkin, rolling out biscuit and pie dough, and most importantly, getting the charcoal grills going! We bought a giant bag of charcoal and a few extra pots to make a dutch oven and to cook in, and the boys went to go pick up the turkey… the very alive turkey! I guess you’re supposed to feed it alcohol so that it’s not so crazy when you kill it, but apparently our turkey wasn’t so thirsty cuz it wouldn’t drink the wine, although personally I think the turkey just has good taste and knows really bad Mozambican wine when it sees it, so the killing process was a little more hectic, but tikha, the mills’ ‘very excited over a giant bird‘ dog, didn’t help either. After the kill, that left 4 guys covered in splatters of the turkey’s blood, and tikha ripping out most of the turkey’s feathers, colin and espanhol tackled the rest of the defeathering and degutting of the turkey… it was not a pretty site. Well once the turkey was clean, since our dutch oven wouldn’t be big enough to cook the entire bird, we cut it into parts and marinated it and set it aside to get grilled. 13 hours, a lot of beer, and half a sack of charcoal later, it was pitch black dark with the romantic candlelit votive, and we ended up with regular and pumpkin biscuits, garlic mashed potatoes, a green bean and bacon casserole, stuffing, fruit salad, pumpkin and apple pie, turkey and gravy, all cooked on just 2 little charcoal grills! We stuffed our faces that night and I got to have delicious pumpkin pie for the next 4 meals! It was probably one of the most hard core peace corps experiences I have had, but it was a friggin blast and it definitely made me realize how thankful I am to be here and to have had the pleasure of sharing these experiences with some of the most amazing people I have ever met! I will also never be complaining about cooking another thanksgiving dinner where there are ovens, sinks and stoves, but I’m also very thankful for all the stores that sell pre-packaged thanksgiving meals! Oh glorious ralph’s thanksgiving box… how I miss thee = ]

Also a special shout out to my new best friend, pete! He’s the cyclist doing the ‘against malaria’ cycle I talked about last time and anyway he had made it into Malawi, but for some odd reason ahem alex ahem, came back to visit and spent thanksgiving with us in moz! Anyway one thing led to another and we became best friends forever and because that wasn’t enough he’s also my second best friend as well. Really sorry to all those out there who wanted those position, but he’s just really awesome and he has a british accent! I mean how can you beat that? Haha MISS YOU PETE! COME BACKKKKKKKK! Are you in Rwanda now?

Stuffed panda

So after giving out last tests of the year and turning grades in, we travelled to Rio Savane in the central region of Moz to celebrate Halloween and more importantly Vonnie and Dov’s birthdays! While it was unbelievably fun it was also a logistical nightmare as our original group of 5 turned into 17! Everyone and their mom (literally, as dov’s mom and step dad were visiting) wanted to join in on the fun that was DoVon-a-pallooza and I guess I don’t blame them cuz let’s face it we’re awesome! So after once again making it to Gorongosa in one day, (1000km in less than 24 hours? Impressive, we know) we ate dinner that Brian, he’s the vonnie of the mills duo, prepared! He made really delicious corn bread from scratch! I don’t think I can even do that! We were beat so it was food and showers then bed for us cuz we would need to get up early the next day to finish our journey to Rio Savane. We made pretty good time cuz we got some great rides and did a little last minute food shopping in Beira before finally making it to our destination. We had to boat across a narrow river to get to a small peninsula with the ocean on one side and river on the other. It was absolutely beautiful and the facilities were pretty great too. we were piled into a bungalow that had a bathroom and kitchen, but the one thing that no one who had been there before nor the owners whom I made reservations with bothered to tell me was that they don’t have running electricity and they only turn their generator on from 6pm to 9pm… charging phones, ipods, speakers were a nightmare and sleeping sans fans was not fun as we’ve now fully entered into the HOT summer season. But nonetheless it was great to be with everyone and it was great to be able to celebrate DoVon in true Halloween glory. Von was dressed as an MC Hammer “Can’t Touch This” back up dancer, and I found a ‘dracula’ made for Halloween cape at the market and so went as a vampire. We enjoyed lots of good food thanks to Dov’s mom and mike even taught us how to ‘dougie.’ Actually that’s a lie as we still have no idea what the ‘dougie’ is, but we pretended to have learned. We made it back, tired but in one piece, then had a week of “preparing grades.” Basically we read grades as another teacher wrote them down on the master grade grid, which is just archaic but how it’s done here. This weekend we went to Ilha again to party with Michelle one last time cuz she has finished her service and is leaving… so we hit up all her favorite places to eat her favorite foods and say bye to all her friends and also relax poolside one last time. She had become one of our closest friends here and since she lived so close to us we saw her more often these past few months so we’re really really really sad to be losing her… BYEEEEEE MOOOOCHHHEEELLLLLAAAAAAA!!!! SEEEE YOUUU IN A YEAR!!!! we’ll definitely be seeing more of her since she’s most likely be in SD when we get back~ Also goodbye to all the other Moz13ers! The last of them will be trickling out til the first weekend of December… EAT LOTS AND LOTS OF GOOD FOOD FOR US AND TAKE LOTSA HOT SHOWERS!!

For the next two weeks we will be proctoring national exams for 10th and 12th grade students, which basically means staring into space for 5 hours a day. We’ll probably have to grade some too eventually, but they haven’t asked yet…

Well that’s about it for now but let me fill you in on a few trips coming up!! Both von and megan are abandoning me for thanksgiving cuz they’re going down to the Moz15 training, so I’m gonna make another trip down to gorongosa so spend thanksgiving with the Mills and to meet jordan’s parents!! And then I’m gonna see Dave Bae and a few other 13ers on their last weekend before leaving moz as well and also hang out with Dave’s Korean friends that live in Chimoio! I guess there are a group of Korean Ahjussi’s that have a weave/wig factory and dave hung out with them a few times and got fed samgyupsal and kimchi! HELLLLLLO!!!! Clearly I must meet them and get in on some of that action! The only thing that would make that more amazing would be some ggettnip and soju! Mmmmmmmmm… haha and then back home for some more national exam proctoring and then we’re going to Ilha to celebrate Brian’s birthday and dillon’s departure… that’s right, our third roomie is leaving us… she had already done a little over a year in Mauritania before they got pulled out and she joined our crew, but she’s put in her second year and feels that it’s her time to go back to civilization as well, so she’ll be leaving us mid December… pretty much everyone we love in the north is leaving us and we are not very happy about it! CUSTODIO! IF YOU DON’T SEND US SOME AWESOME 15ers YOU’LL BE HEARING FROM US!!! We have definitely gotten SHAFTED these last few months… after ilha I’ll be heading down south to meet colin and mike’s families and then to Maputo to meet Von’s mom and cousin!!! I’m so so so excited! This also means I get to go to Namaacha to see my host family as well! I’ve already called and told them that I’m coming down and my Mae and brother Eduardo are soooo excited! As am I! It’ll be such a refreshing change to be able to communicate in more proficient Portuguese! And then me, von, mike, Kelly and maybe a few others will be travelling to South Africa to hit up a few malls, eat some mcdonalds and take some real showers for a few days! So I’ll try to update once more before all the travelling begins, but if I don’t update for a while just know that I’ll update soon with AWESOME adventure stories! Miss everyone so so so much and HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON!

Eat lotsa yummy holiday food for me!!!

est

So teacher’s day was interesting to say the least. It was kinda like harry potter movies 5 and 6. You wait soooooo long for them and the build up is sooooooooo hyped, and then the day finally comes and it’s just like WAHHHHH WAHHHHHHHHH… so our school has been talking about the big teacher’s day celebration since 1st trimester. How much we had to pay, what we wanted the shirts to look like, where we wanted to go, what we wanted to eat, can you bring family yaddhi friggin yaddha. So its been talked about for so long and at great length during every one of our teachers meetings so it was pretty hyped up and we had to pay 1000mts ($30) which is a lot for us and for our fellow colleagues with these grand promises of how amazing it was going to be. Well the big day comes around and we were told to be at our school by 7am. We got there at 7am sharp and there’s only one other teacher there. Finally by 8am most teachers are there and now we’re supposed to go to the Teacher’s Union office for a short ceremony. The walk there was about 5 min and then another 10minutes for the short ceremony. Then we had to wait around til 9am to walk to the praca for the town ceremony. Well we get there and we have to wait til the administrator gets there and that doesn’t happen til about 9:45. Finally the ceremony ends and it is HOT and we finally pile into our chapas that will take us to the beach. Mind you until yesterday we thought that today was the main event and all eating/drinking was going to take place today… not so much. We so we’re on our way and all the teachers minus maybe 4 of us, have started drinking… beers, gin, whisky, pretty much whatever they could get there hands on before leaving and conveniently the chapa picked us up in front of the town liquor store. It was like being with a bunch of teenagers who were let loose and drinking for the first time in their lives except they can take it down like WOAH. So it’s rowdy and they said we (von and i) had to come up with our chapa’s team name so von came up with team “SAY WHHAAAAAAT?” and we taught it to them just saying it with sooo much attitude and it just stuck... So that every 4 minutes someone would scream ‘1, 2, 3’ and everyone would yell out “SAYYY WHAAAAAAAAAAA?” about 5 times in a row and then wait another 5min and do it allllll over again. It was also yelled every time we passed a car, or the other chapa. We were also stopping every 30 minutes to restock their quickly diminishing booze supply. Anyway we FINALLY make it to the beach and that was a disaster and a half cuz no one knew where exactly we were supposed to go, but we finally make it to our destination and everyone runs out to the beach. Oh yeah also Mozambicans don’t really understand the concept of swimwear. So out of everyone who went, there were like 5 girls and 30 boys. Well almost all the men just wore their whitey tighty undies. It was funny cuz even the one teacher who I was like ‘oh he has some legit board shorts’ took em off as soon as we got there and jumped in with just his undies. All of this might have been more enjoyable or at least tolerable had we been drunk, but alas… it was mostly painful. So we swam a little too and bumped the volleyball around a lil before it busted its gut and died, and then we stuffed ourselves silly with our packed lunches of fried rice, grilled chicken, salad and fries before taking one last dip, drying off then comin back. It was a really really really long day and I was completely drained and all I wanted was to get home and sleep, but mind you this was a Tuesday and we had to get ready for school the next day… awesome. So that was teacher’s day celebration #1. The second came on Saturday. The notice about the event said it would start at 7pm at the ‘club,’ which basically looks like a middle school gym, but another teacher tells us not to show til 8pm cuz it would probably start late. So we get there around 8 and of course it hasn’t started so we go to the bar next door to grab a few beers. 9pm rolls around and we make our way back to the club and still not showing signs of life… so we wait around inside and finally at 9:30 they call our names one by one and the event begins! So our director and one other pedagogical director don’t show up and so the MC for the night says a few words then introduces the other two ped directors and also the administrator who then says a few words and then it’s time to eat! By the time we get our food and they wash our hands it’s 11pm and we get pretty much the same packed dinner of fried rice, grilled chicken, salad and fries, but this time we also have to eat sans utensil haha. There’s also no table and we’re balancing our tray on our knees, beer in one hand and trying to pull chicken off the bone with the other… it was super awkward and just the set up of the event was like a middle school dance in the gym. When we’re done eating they clean up and then it’s time to dance. Seriously though world’s worst DJ in the history of DJing… Mozambicans I feel will generally dance to anything and even they were complaining that it wasn’t good dance music. And he starts with slow dance songs and of course everyone wants to see the foreigners up dancing so everyone tries to get us to go up and we’re like woah woah no thank you, but after a while we couldn’t refuse any longer and danced… also awkward. Finally some better dance music comes on and we boogie and I tried to request von’s new favorite song ‘Amazing’ by Inna, but they didn’t have it… it’s like this super hyped club song that Mozambicans LOVE so it was pretty much a crime that this DJ didn’t have it… that pretty much put us all in a spiral of disappointment and set the mood for the rest of the night. However the night was redeemed for vonnie when she was introduced to the love of her life. His name is ‘ray’ and he is a year old and he was the chubbiest happiest cutest little baby ever! Haha he’s the son of one of the teachers we like more and so megan and I lost von to baby ‘ray’ for the rest of the night. Anyway I was already tired before the party even started, so by the end of it at like 1:30am, I was BEAT. I think I woulda had more fun if I just wasn’t so friggin tired! Oh yeah also, each person was supposed to get 10 beers, and I mean really who drinks 10 beers at a formal teacher function with family, so between the three of us we had 6 and brought 14 beers back home with us. We’re set for the next month I’d say! So this week is trimester finals, and then next week is our LAST WEEK OF SCHOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!! We just have to get a grades in and then we’re DONE! DONE DONE DONE!!! Well almost… we may have to proctor some national exams but other than that we’re done!!! Also von’s birthday is coming up so I gotta get on getting her the bestest birthday present ever! Slightly limiting here in moz but I’m working on it. Also her birthday is on Halloween so we’re gonna have an awesome costume party so we’ve been on the prowl for some gems to get dressed up in, however I don’t think anything will beat my chun-li outfit from last year! okok i think that’s about it from me today, but more to come soon! miss everyone so much!

e-money

Another post after only 2 weeks! I know I know I’m pretty awesome. I’ve recently taken up telling slash reminding everyone just how awesome I am and I’ve found it surprisingly therapeutic! I’m not exactly sure why but yeah ok moving on… just after writing my last blog, PC put on an English Theater competition for the northern region. Basically volunteers who wanted could create groups at their schools or in their communities to prepare a 15minute skit on subjects like HIV/AIDS prevention, corruption in schools and communities, gender equality etc. Von and I decided that we didn’t actually want to have groups this year, but the competition was taking place in Carapira, dillon’s site which is only 10min away from us, so we decided to help run the event. We were assistants to the almighty coordinator Imani and co-coordinator Gina, and made posters, signed certificates, and pretty much flawlessly ran the reception table as we gave out name tags, water, meal vouchers and information on the event. There were 12 participating groups and the whole event was pretty long, but it was really fun! The winning group was SO good, oh man but they deserved it cuz we heard that they, on their own, wanted to practice almost every day! Most other volunteers had to force their kids to meet even once a week and it showed… Haha I also offered extra credit to my students if they attended the event and a makeup test grade if they wrote an essay about it, and I had 12 kids show up and they ALL wrote an essay!!! AND no one cheated! It was great!!! Some of them left much to be desired, but man some of them were so great! I mean lotsa vocab and grammatical mistakes, but still they answered the questions so well!! I was so proud! I had been stressing alllll year long how important it is to think for themselves and to not cheat and it finally paid off on the years very last writing assignment… figures they would need an entire year to learn a lesson… But yeah it was so much fun and great to see other volunteers and their hard work and then as a reward we took a little trip to Nacala. That’s the beach where von and I took all those jumping pictures on the beach! Haha so yeah we went back with a few other people and stayed at the cutest lil backpackers that has a bunch of bungalows for couples and then one dorm that has 6 beds. We occupied 4 of the beds and then there were 2 other South African dudes staying there for work. So we walked down to their private-esque beach and went snorkeling, played scrabble (I won of course!) and ate delish burgers and bacon egg sandwiches! BACON!!!!! YUUUMMMMMMM!!!! It was a super great relaxing weekend and on the return trip I got to explain the ins and outs of Amazing Race to Diana and Michelle, and man do I love that show! I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY EXPLICITLY REJECT PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS! I honestly think they should do an “Amazing Race: RPCV” season! Oh man seriously! Will someone help me pitch that to CBS?

Last weekend we went out to Ilha again which has become our ‘guilty pleasure escape from Mozambique weekend getaway’ spot and well Michelle, the PCV that lives in Ilha is leaving in like 3 weeks so we’re trying to get all the Michelle time we can! Anyway we went to go eat dinner at this local bar where the owner LOVES michelle and always hooks her up with delish food. Anyway the place was packed and we were sitting right by a window that had mosquito netting on it. Well while we were eating, there were all these little kids on the other side of the window whispering ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘give me food,’ just the usual dinner chatter, and von noticed one kid had his thumb and index finger poked through two little holes, but didn’t think much of it and we continued eating. Well right at the end of our meal we were talking and getting ready to leave and out of nowhere michelle feels something hit her arm. She also didn’t think much of it but then a lady at another table screams ‘your phone!’ Well the littler kid had apparently been working on those two holes all night and kept making them bigger and eventually made one big hole, stuck his arm through and grabbed michelle’s phone right off the table and went running! We’re all freaking out, but all the patrons at the bar get up and go outside and one guy just goes off sprinting to where the kid went! I had just gotten a phone call from Brian so I walk outside too to talk to him and I’m giving him the play by play and I feel like an eye-witness reporter telling him what’s happening during a break in and vonnie and one other woman are the only two people left inside the bar and everyone else is standing outside. Well like 3 minutes later michelle and Andrew start walking back towards the bar surrounded by the other patrons and other little kids and I go back inside and that one guy got michelle’s phone back!! It was CRAZY! The biggest 5minute thrill! Michelle was so bummed that she wouldn’t have a phone for her last 3 weeks, but man it was like the greatest send-off she could have gotten with a bar full of drunk Mozambicans all coming to her aid to help get her phone back! It was really really great. We’re usually always complaining about how passive many Mozambicans can be sometimes when it comes to helping ‘foreigners,’ but maybe it’s cuz they know michelle and feel like she is a part of their family and they needed to protect her, but it was just super awesome to see that kind of support from the community! And then we ended the weekend with the most amazing lunch ever everrrrr! It was hands down the best meal I had eaten in Mozambique and it woulda been good for anywhere! It was the basil tuna steak, which was basically a giant slab of tuna that was marinated in olive oil, basil and garlic and then we asked them to just lightly, very very lightly sear it so that it would be like rare rare and it was PERFECT! The tuna first off was so fresh and the marinade was delish and it was cooked to perfection where the majority was still red and it came with fries and a small salad and OMG it was soooooo gooooood! It was the perfect sushi replacement for the time being and it only costed $8.50!!!

Ok so I think I’m gonna end it there for now because I have a good two part story about Teacher’s Day coming up after this weekend!

Love,

Panda

I realize that I’m hitting a few mile markers in my life. I have officially lived a quarter of a century, as von loved to remind me every hour on the hour of my birthday, and Moz 14 has officially been in Mozambique for 1 whole year! I can’t believe it was already a year ago that I had the most amazing send-off party at scott and nicole’s and then I was sitting in my room at my host family’s house in namaacha thinking ‘what the heck have I gotten myself into?’ but here I am a year later, still alive and well! So anyway I just wanted to take a few moments to reflect on just how unbelievably blessed I am. I feel blessed to have had this opportunity to be a PCV in an unbelievably beautiful country like Mozambique. Really really blessed to have the most amazing friends back home and to be surrounded by great new friends here in Mozambique, where in tough times you can seem all alone. Also, I have the best roomie in the history of PC, and maybe in life =). And last but not least, I am seriously blessed to have such a supportive family that loves me day in and day out and is genuinely proud of me! Life here seems to be amplified somehow where the highs reach new heights and the lows go into the deepest abyss, and when I wrote my last entry I was probably at the lowest I’ve ever felt. But it’s a good thing it came right before my birthday cuz nothing short of one of the greatest birthday months ever could have pulled me out of that funk. Ok ok enough with the mushy babble!

SEPTEMBER WAS AMAZING!

Yeah we had the rocky start due to the rioting in Mozambique, which I know many of you had read about and were worried, but they were mainly confined to the major cities and mainly just Maputo at that. Most PCVs live in smaller towns so we didn’t even hear much about it, but for safety reasons we were all put on house arrest and everyone was kept safe, just a little stir crazy. But the house arrest was lifted just in time for the birthday weekend so we made our way out to Ilha de Mozambique! It was a girls night out on the island and it was soooo much fun! We ate lotsa good food, meat lasagna being one of them mmmmmm, and went to the beach, went on an Ilha pub crawl, and spent a lazy Sunday pool side! We even had a sunset yoga session with Michelle, at her friend’s beach house that looks like it came straight out of a crate and barrel catalogue, on their rooftop terrace and right as the session began we saw a whale! It was great cuz that morning we were going to go whale watching, but it was too windy so we canceled, but we got to see one anyway!! It was seriously one of the most picturesque snapshots that’ll I’ll always remember! And then on my actual birthday we were off to Nampula city, which is usually my least favorite place in the world, but Von had a dr’s appointment so we went in to at least get a good meal and turns out her appointment got pushed back so PC put her up at Hotel Millenio so for lunch we had Cajo’s delicious burgers and for dinner we had pizza, chicken tikka masala and naan!!! And we got to take hot showers and sleep in an air-conditioned room! What more could I have possibly asked for?? It was pretty great and then the next day we headed to Dillon’s site and she cooked up a Peruvian dish, Lomo Saltado(?), which was UNREAL, and for dessert, RED VELVET CAKE with homemade cream cheese frosting!!! Oh man oh man it was friggin so delish!!

The following weekend we went to Ribaue to visit Scott and Greg. Their site is about 6 hours southwest of us and we got to take the train there! I’ve realized that I haven’t been writing in much detail of the things we do here, so I’ve decided to pick one thing Mozambican in each blog and write as much detail as I can about the experience! So the train is this entry’s highlight and boy was it something. First off you can only buy train tickets one day in advance and starting at like 4pm. So our friend got there at like 4:15 and there were only 2 tickets in the 2nd class cabin, ~$3, available and the rest were 3rd class, ~$1.5, also there’s no first class so why not just call it 1st and 2nd class? Anyway so then we get to the train station the next morning at 4am, but the line to get on the train was already outrageous, cuz you don’t get an assigned seat so it’s first come first serve, but it’s completely chaotic to the point where if you’re not paying attention and the line starts moving in front of you, another person has the right to cut you in line… makes sense yeah? I saw this happen at least 6 times and everyone else just laughs. Well then we board the train and it leaves right at 5am, which is unheard of here, and since we weren’t there early enough to get seats, we waited til the dining cart opened and quickly snagged a table. We had yummy egg sandwiches, fried egg on a roll with ketchup and mayo, and played games and talked til we arrived in Ribaue. The scenery was beautiful and looking out the window doesn’t make you dizzy cuz the train only goes about 25mph haha. So this technically could be an hour trip with an Amtrak train, but alas it took us about 4 hours! After getting off the train we then had to get on an open back truck to get to their site about 15minutes away. As soon as we got there it was a non stop party with about 15 PCVs there and scott made us AMAZING coconut banana pancakes, like seriously restaurant quality fluffy delicious pancakes, and chilli with sweet potatoes for dinner. We started early with the Agua do Papa, which translates to ‘water of the fathers’ but it’s bubble gum flavored sugar cane alcohol gloriousness =). The next day, after not enough sleep, it was back home on the train, but this time it was not the most pleasant experience cuz the train was jam packed and we were basically standing in the aisles of the dining cart dying of heat and dehydration, but it was a really really good time and I’m glad I got to experience the Mozambican train system and see more sites!

This past weekend we traveled to Gorongosa once again to surprise Jordan on her birthday! I ended up ruining the surprise cuz I accidentally texted her something that I meant to text her husband brian, but she was just as excited! We actually made it allllllll the way down to Gorongosa in 1 day!!!! Which is a HUGE HUGE deal for us cuz we didn’t think it could be done, but we just got some really awesome hitchhikes and booked it there! There ended up being like 30 people coming and going that entire weekend, mainly PCVs but there were also some friends and then 2 cyclist doing a 8000km cycle up east Africa for a foundation called Against Malaria! Tom and Pete were super cool and they got super lucky to meet all the Moz PCVs during their trip through Moz cuz clearly we’re a good time! Haha GOOD LUCK BOYS!! So it was lotsa good times swimming, playing games, dancing, drinking 30 cases of beer and tipo tinto ‘ star of the orient rhum’, and lots and lotsa really really good food! Donna and luis whipped up a Mexican feast of chilaquiles and homemade salsa, Alice made us chicken and dumplings, we let Jordan cook one breakfast only cuz I was super selfish and wanted her bagels, Kendra made meat sauce spaghetti and choc chip cookies, Alexandra made mini lemon cupcakes with lemon coconut buttercream frosting, and I took the reigns on the rest of the weekend cooking a sausage carril(sauce) with rice, chicken peanut noodles, tuna egg salad sandwiches, sausage homestyle fries, and a vanilla birthday cake for Jordan with vanilla buttercream frosting! Nicole I woulda made you so so proud!

So now we're back in monapo and i even had a birthday package waiting for me from Migum and Bambo (THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!), and we're trying really hard not to travel until the end of the school year, but we have about 1 more month of classes left and then we have about 2 months off to travel and recoup and not see students yelling "HELLLLLO TEACHHHHAAAA!" I'm really going to try harder to blog more often so keep checking!

Also a big big shoutout to the new MOZ15 group that just got in yesterday! Esp PAT!!!! YAYYY you're finally here!! can't wait to see you!!! We're all so pumped to meet yall and to have to fresh blood in our PCMOZ family!

ok folks that's it for me today!

miss everyone so much!!

panda

***note from the blogger: haha i wrote this like a week ago but didn't have internet to be able to post it so here it is! but now i'm in barcelona and it's AWESOME! i'll blog about it soon! enjoy!!***

so pretty much every time von and I go to the market to buy food, I’ll say ‘oh we’re going shopping,’ or ‘yeah when we went shopping,’ and von always corrects me to tell me that we didn’t go shopping, but more like “made purchases.” Anyway so when we went down south during our travels we visited our friend colin. Well colin was unfortunate in that he got robbed last December, Christmas eve to be exact… it really sucked for him as pretty much alllllll his stuff including clothes and other valuables got stolen. We have been fortunate to not have had any thieving issues, other than peter and his 3 other rat friends stealing our food, and let’s all hope and pray that it stays that way. (knocking on wood for von) well since his break in he’s had to go clothes shopping in his local market and has gotten really really good at it. he even showed us the ropes when we visited, and he took us to his market and we hit up all his favorite ‘stores.’ Well the markets here are basically just a lot of wooden stalls next to each other like a ghetto flea market and they either sell food, bike parts or clothes. The clothes that they sell are pretty much bags and bags of goodwill stuff that doesn’t pass the bar of US sales so I think they come here. Well so there are A LOT of clothes from summer camps, gyms, retreats and most are hideous but once in a while you’ll find that gem, that diamond in the rough and you bargain it down to about a dollar or two. Well colin tends to get anything ‘american’ and i even got to see one of his purchases which was a tank with the American flag and a bald eagle soaring across it… it was great! Haha well so von and I kinda just laughed it off and never really felt the necessity to seek out clothing, but the other day we went into our market looking for something and finally decided to give this clothes shopping a go. We went into the pits of our market, parts we never even knew existed, goin through back alleys and circling around the same stall 4 or 5 times cuz they all look the same, but in the midst of this craziness, this traveling panda found her perfect panda shirt! I have been wanting a panda shirt for a very very long time and I tried ridiculously hard to get the Johnny cupcake panda eating cupcake shirt, but by the time I tried it was already sold out and discontinued cuz it was a special edition shirt. Anyway so here we are wandering through our market and I turn the corner and see this perfect shirt out of the corner of my eye. It’s a lime green wwf shirt with their panda logo on it! it’s AMAZING!!! and he wanted like 2.50 for it but I got it down to 1.50… I got this bargaining thing down to a T! anyway so it’s awesome and now von and I have the shopping bug and are probably goin to continue to scour the markets for cool new stuff and develop secret codes with vendors for when they get new shipments in hahahahaha.

So the past 3 weeks have been end of trimester test weeks and testing always gets my moral down down down in the pits… I know I’m not the best english teacher in the world, but these kids make me feel like I’m a complete failure when they still to this day can’t conjugate the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense, or they don’t trust their own ability and cheat to get a few extra points, but end up getting a zero cuz I catch em… sucks… anyway enough about that cuz it’s depressing…

on to more exciting news…. Drum roll please darrrrrrurrrrrrurrrrrrrrrrrr~

I’m leaving for spain in 2 days!!!!

The day I never thought would come has FINALLY arrived!! Mir and I have been planning this trip for about 2-3months now and I have been waiting to go to spain since high school so it’s a pretty exciting day for me! We’re going to be in Barcelona for about 8 days and San Sebastian for 4! i’m first off super excited for my first and last meal of the trip to be McDonald’s at the jburg airport, mmmm cheeseburgers, chicken mcnuggets, crispy fries, fountain diet coke and sweet and sour sauce…. Mmmmmm….. and then for all the other amazing Spanish food I’ll be partaking in, mmmmm sangria, tapas, wine, meat, beer, arzak, sangria, sangria, meat…. Mmmmm, and last but definitely the MOST IMPORTANT, I GET TO SEE MY SISTER!!!!!!!!! For the most part I’m pretty used to spending long periods of time away from my family, but this is a whole different ball game! Granted my parents call me WAY more often than they ever have in their entire lives, the family is the bestest and I miss them tons so even though I just get to see miray it’s gonna be awesome!

Also congrats to vonnie who is now a godmother to little baby kellen!! He’s shoooo cute!!! And congrats to von’s cousin! 3 boys eeepah good luck!!!

Aiight I think that’s it for now, but I’ll be posting pictures and an update from spain soon!! love and miss everyone!!

Panda

the glorious new panda shirt!

So the new group of MOZ 15ers are starting to get their invitations to Mozambique, including my friend Pat, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, and i remember how daunting packing felt, and then reading a few of the volunteers’ suggestions on what to bring that really helped, so here are mine and vonnie’s two cents on what you can probably leave behind and what you should absolutely, definitely bring!! First, here are two websites that I didn’t find until just a few weeks before leaving, but there are A LOT of companies that will let you sign up for their pro-deal for being a PC volunteer, which means discounts on a bunch of their stuff. Money is tight so take advantage, but get started now cuz it just takes a long long time to get approved and then shipping and whatnot so…

http://www.peacecorpswiki.org/Volunteer_discounts

http://coconuth8r.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/freebies-and-discounts-for-pc-volunteers/

you should also sign up for the bed bath and beyond mailing list and start getting coupons, and ask all your family and friends to donate theirs to you cuz you’ll save a TON of money with all those 20%off coupons! Also a lot of drug and office supply stores will be starting their back to school sales so hit those up! Also grab a Sunday paper here and there for coupons and sale notices.

Things I brought or got sent that I absolutely could not live without…

- Laptop, camera, hard drive (pre-loaded with all your favorite movies, e-books, music, tv shows, and if you can afford it, bring an extra one to steal stuff from other volunteers!) ipod (if you bring an ipod touch or iphone, load it up with multi player games cuz a round of scrabble, monopoly or trivial pursuit can get you through even the most ‘exciting’ sessions, and there are a LOT of really ‘exciting’ sessions!), and flash drives – just cuz you’re in the PC doesn’t mean you have to deprive yourself of ALL luxuries… trust me it’s hard enough as is without some music/movie/tv escape. (oh and don’t forget all the cords and chargers you need!

- REI chamois towels – they are super thin and pack small and dry ultra quickly!

- USB plug in speakers – recharging batteries is a HASSLE and a half, and most of you will bring laptops so you can just have em plugged in. I did bring a small battery powered speaker as well for travel, but I gave it away and don’t miss em!

- Lonely planet Mozambique

- Sharp knives and a peeler! Whether you like to cook or not, you’ll need a knife, and I bought the Henckels 4pc pairing knife set from BedBathBeyond for 20 bucks and they are GLORIOUS! Also you’ll prob be eating a lot of potatoes and having a good peeler will save your thumbs from carpel tunnel.

- Printed pictures – during training they’re great to show to your host fam, and then once you get to site you can use them to decorate your room! Printing pictures is kinda pricey and hard to find a place to do it outside of the bigger cities.

- Any and all on-the-go drink mix packets! Crystal light, propel, Gatorade, lipton – bring as many as you can! Also if you are a tea drinker, bring your favorite teas cuz the only one you can get here is ‘five roses’ Ceylon tea which is… ok… but gets old quick when you drink it with almost every meal during training cuz you don’t want to drink sodas with every meal… haha

- Duct tape and clear fishing line – can be used to fix or make anything!

- School supplies that I love – good quality pens (that you like using cuz you can get the sucky bic pens here too), scotch tape, markers, crayons, colored pencils, colored chalk (I also use this small plastic case thing to carry chalk cuz if you just put it in your bag or pocket it will rub off white on everything!) also I got self laminating sheets and dry erase markers sent and I laminated a poster size sheet to write tests and texts on and it’s AWESOME and you don’t waste lots of poster paper or get cramps in your arms from writing on the black board.

- TONS of ziplock bags in all the different sizes! Snack, sandwich, 3oz, gallon – I packed a lot of clothes and supplies in the larger ziplock bags and then when I got here I used those bags for other things!

- Spices that are easy to use – taco, garlic powder, course ground black pepper (pepper is really hard to find here!) parm cheese, Italian, pasta sauce, HOT SAUCE and anything that’s just add water!

- Warm clothes, sweat shirt, sweatpants! It is ridiculously HOT most of the time, but during the ‘winter’ here it does get pretty cold at night and your house will have NO insulation which means cold when you sleep… not fun! And a couple of days it gets really really cold and rainy during training! But also beware that you’ll be doing your own laundry a lot of the time, so don’t bring anything that you wouldn’t wanna have to handwash!

- My rain boots! (along with other rain gear like a waterproof jacket, rain pants and small umbrella) I got the cheapy ones from target that I would have never worn in the states, but they hands down were a lifesaver during training! They were warm and the mud in namaacha is OUT OF CONTROL! All your long pants will forever get ruined from it and if you wear flip flops, the mud tends to swallow them whole! Also the mud gets under your toenails and eww your feet just get gross looking… so yeah I know a lot of people don’t use them and don’t find them useful, but I loved em and I left them with my host family in namaacha cuz nowhere else in Mozambique will you ever need them!

- GAMES! We played games during every break, at the end of the day, on weekends! They were a great way to get to know other ppl in a “in-your-face-I’m-better-than-you” kinda way~ haha but really you’ll be invited to every gathering cuz they’ll wanna play your games! I brought cards(of course), uno, travel settlers (seriously the best game ever), and catchprase. Some other suggestions: skip-bo, phase 10, lotsa dice, travel scrabble, travel anything = )

- Nalgenes! You can do two different sizes or a widemouth and a skinny. But one thing that von had that I got super jealous of was her nalgene cover! It’s just a neoprene cover meant to keep it cold/hot (which is awesome if you have a fridge) but more than that, your nalgene will sweat when going from cold to warm and if it’s in your bag it’ll just get water on everything and ruin papers, books, electronics! No good!!

- Febreze – sometimes you’ll be short on water and can’t do laundry or you forgot to wash something, and you’re just sick and tired of smelling your stinky self? Cover it up with some febreeze!

- A good quality 220v extension cord! Very few volunteers live sans electricity here and most of you will have electronics, so if you can get your hands on one there you should def bring it! I had my mom send me one cuz you’ll either end up paying a lot of money for an OK one or get a cheap one that’ll melt after 15min of use… not fun.

- Some other misc things – don’t bring orbits or anyother stick style gum. They melt and stick together… instead bring mints and chiclet style gum like eclipse. Swiss army knife and flashlight – definite musts! The fake q-tips here SUCK so if you’re a q-tipper, bring real q-tips! Lysol or wet wipes come in handy since running water and soap is hard to come by so they can clean up minor messes. Good toothpaste, deodorant,

- If you’ve read my blog, or anyone’s for that matter, you’ll know that rats getting into your stuff is pretty common. Von’s mom sent us sticky glue filled rat traps and they work like MAGIC. They’re small and light and we’ve already caught 4!

Things I still don’t have that would be awesome…

- for english teachers, you should def bring a simple grammar book cuz if you’re like me, even though we speak it, teaching it is different and who knew there was a name for every grammar tense!

- For science teachers, von came as a bio teacher and is now teaching bio, physics, and english, and she really wished she had brought basic text books. Even though they’re heavy I think it’s a good idea to bring at least one and then you can always trade with other volunteers once you know for sure what you’ll be teaching! The science courses here are bio, chem, physics and math and there’s a good amount of bio and chem books already floating around, so it might be better to bring a physics and/or math book. If you’re dead set on teaching a particular subject, unfortunately chances are you won’t be teaching it so just keep an open mind and be prepared to be flexible, and to teach english!! Haha

- Thermarest! If you’re planning on traveling at all while you’re here, which you absolutely should, you’ll want a small but comfy sleeping bag type thing cuz cement/mud floors are cool but super uncomfortable! We’ve used some of our friends’ thermarest and they are AWESOME! You should try to find the space to fit one it! A travel pillow and blanket are also key~!

Things you don’t really need to bring….

- a million day supply of meds… just bring the truly basics, (pepto, advil, vitamins) and REALLY, REALLY, REALLY only a 10 week supply, cuz once you become a PCV they provide a pretty good spread of meds. And even in training if you get seriously sick, the doctors will take care of ya, they won’t leave ya hanging!

- If you’re not crazy sensitive to the sun, you really don’t need to bring a hefty supply of sunblock. During training you’re honestly not outside that much and namaacha’s pretty overcast and chilly and you’re more covered up anyway.

- Lotion… I brought this GIANT bottle of it and haven’t touched it and once you swear in this too is provided for… I’d say bring a thing of Vaseline instead cuz if you wear sandals a lot your feet may dry out and crack so Vaseline would be better than just lotion.

- Bug stuff – you’ll be sleeping with a mosq net and namaacha just didn’t really have that many mosquitoes.

- I really really really wanted to buy a UV water purifier cuz they just seemed really cool, but I’m glad I didn’t bring one cuz they’re pricey and you’re pretty set with the filters they give you.

Host family GIFTS

- This was a tricky one for almost all volunteers and since you don’t know who your host family will be, you kinda have to buy stuff for all ages and types of people. I don’t know why but I just assumed I would have a house full of little kids so I brought like hair and makeup stuff for little girls and hot-wheels cars for boys and I didn’t have any kids in my family… so those ended up being prizes during model school and given away to neighbors, but I also brought a set of pairing knives (the same ones I brought for myself) to give to my host mom, and luckily I just had one super awesome host brother who was 17 and I had brought a $10 usb 2gig mp3 player from target that I loaded up with his favorite music and gave to him on his birthday which passed during training! They were both huge hits! Von says American candy is good like skittles but avoid ‘hot’ candy… why that was an option to begin with I’ll never know… (she’s looking over my shoulder and demands that I write that hot tamales, red hots, and any type of Mexican candy that is coated in chile are strictly prohibited… thanks von) but she does say that different plant seeds were a huge hit and her family planted them the next day! Also I know a lot of people brought jerseys, t-shirts and hats of their favorite sports teams from back from and host fams ate that up! Really they will like anything that comes from you so don’t stress is too much cuz it’s the thought that counts! Oh one last thing, you could bring a picture frame, then during one of your trips to Maputo get a picture of you and your host fam printed and then give them that framed picture! I think a lot of people do that too!

Ok so there it is. It’s kinda monstrous I’m sorry, but really don’t panic, take a deep breath and get packin! Definitely give yourself an extra packing day than what you’re planning to allow some wiggle room for procrastination and panic attacks! It will take a long time and lotsa brain power so gear up! Also you can start buying stuff and just keep all receipts and don’t take tags off and if you find something for a better price or realize you really won’t be needing it just return it!

Von and I are available for personal shopping consults so email us (esther.gweon@gmail.com , voncontreras@gmail.com) with any and all questions! This was just stuff that we really loved or didn’t so if you want more input on the packing list they send you we can do that as well~

So my sister seems to think all I do is travel and have fun, and let’s face it, it’s hard not to when you’re me! Haha no but really I write a blog once a month and I don’t wanna write about the boring day to day stuff so I wait for something big and fun to happen so it just seems like all we do is have fun! Anyway so thanks to miray this blog will be all about the day-to-day stuff! Well for starters I wake up at 6am every morning like clockwork these days to pee. I don’t know why but 6am rolls around and I just can’t hold it any longer and I have to leave the comfort of my bed and stumble through our yard to pee… no fun! I can usually fall back asleep pretty easily, but then at 6:50am-ish the elementary kids sing the national anthem and it’s so loud and off pitch that it sounds like they’re inside the house! so I usually wake up for that and then try to go back to sleep… usually about 7:30am is when our 9th graders start coming by the house to ask for any number of things from water, tutoring, breakfast, games, or just our company, and force me to get out of bed once again. When I finally make it to the door the kids are usually all in an uproar cuz I’m still sleeping… most everyone here starts there day at like 5am so they don’t understand how we could possibly sleep in until 8AM!!! I mean I can’t remember the last time I got to sleep in undisturbed til like 10am! DOUBLE DIGITS I MISS YOU! So then with kids coming and going and trying to wake up, I’ll eat breakfast and make sure I’m ready for my classes. We try to have all our lesson plans done at least the night before, so I may look over my notes just to make sure I don’t need to take any other extra props in or anything. This second trimester von and I decided to have some fun with our 11th graders and have music Fridays! So far we’ve done ‘california waiting – kings of leon’ ‘forever – chris brown’ ‘mo money mo problems - biggie’ ‘don’t stop believin – journey’ and ‘no air – jordin & chris.’ We usually start the class with some kind of review of a simple grammar point that may be in the song. Then we do vocabulary from the lyrics and then we write the lyrics up on the board with blanks for the vocab and then play the song for them to listen to the lyrics and fill in the blanks. Usually after the 2nd time through I’ll pause and actually go over the lyrics and kinda try to explain what the song is about. And then I’ll play the song until class is over and it pretty much just turns into a crazy dance fest! It’s really fun and the kids enjoy it because they get to listen to music and learn lyrics! This week we’re doing ‘waving flag – k’naan’ for a little Africa pride and then next week we’re doing the ‘cha cha slide’!!!! haha we’re takin it back old school and teaching them some sweeet dance moves! We already did it once at Dillon’s school and it was really fun so hopefully our kids will get a kick out of it too! Although… she only had 25ish kids in her class and we’ll have like 70 so… we’ll see! With 9th grade I’ve had to begin each class with conjugating the verb ‘to be’ in the present or past tense. Even if they don’t learn anything else in my class, I WILL ENGRAVE the conjugation of ‘to be’ in their brains by the end of the year! Oh last weekend von was really sick and so I had to fill in for her at her science fair meeting. It was only the second meeting so I had to give them notes on scientific method. The lesson part actually wasn’t terrible. I remember it pretty well and von’s notes were great so I made it through the lecture part and then von wanted me to split them into groups and have to talk about potential topic ideas and walk around to talk to each of them and that’s when it got a little hairy… these kids would talk a mile a minute cuz they’re excited about their topic and I would just look at them and smile and say ‘oh that sounds like a really interesting idea! you should definitely come by the house this week to tell it to teacher Yvonne and she can help you form it into an experiment.’ I still don’t know what half the topics were about let alone if they were even remotely feasible as science fair experiments! I never once in my life participated in science fair! I’ve never even made one of those volcano things! Ooh it started getting kinda chilly at night here so we’ve had to start heating up water to take our bucket baths and some nights I go to bed in sweats and a sweatshirt! It’s awesome! Oh we totally made an awesome new Mozambican friend! We’re integrating!! About a month ago I started tutoring one of our fellow teachers in English. Ana Paula is a 22 year old, super stylish, French teacher. She’s new this year as well and she’s just really awesome. At first I thought she was super shy and timid, and I guess she is kinda, but once I started talking to her more and getting to know her, we’ve realized she’s super funny and way way way ahead of pop culture! We find out what music is popular from her~ haha it’s great. So last week we had her over for dinner and made a Mexican feast of chips and salsa, beef taquitos, and Mexican rice. I recently learned how to make Mexican rice from scratch through von’s mom and I’m pretty pumped to have it in my repertoire! On the weekends we try to do at least one home improvement project and this weekend we made a photo collage hangy art piece thing and painted a few ‘chalkboards’ in the house. they’re pretty exciting and they also cover up all the places where the wall peeled off from duct tape, ahem erin and nia ahem. But yeah our house is definitely shaping up and while I’m sad that we’ll only be here for 19 more months, I’m pretty excited for whoever replaces us! Hope they like green and chalkboards! OH OH OH I also found out last week that Pat O got her invitation to PC Mozambique! SO exciting! Congrats and I can’t wait to see you!!! I’m working on a packing list for ya so hang tight! Ok so I got kinda side tracked on the day-to-day life thing, but I’m too tired to write more so I’ll try to write more next time! Love and miss everyone! e money out

so ist was pretty much the most glorious thing that could have ever happened to us after 6 months of being away from home and in africa. we got a ride there pretty easily and 2 hours later we had arrived at the pc office. there were a few other ppl there, but they were pretty much invisible cuz there were much more pressing things waiting for me – 3 glorious packages! 2 from my sisters and 1 gigantic one from my parents! that last blog worked like magic on them apparently cuz these were so overflowing with goodies that i almost felt like I had enough to share with everyone else who would be in town! i mean obviously that didn’t happen, ok well i shared a 2 packages of oreos, some m&m’s, sweethearts and fundip cuz i’m a super nice generous person. My sisters sent me an array of goodies from ranch dressing, velveeta cheese, tuna and hamburger helper, cheese-its and SPAM!!!! Now I can make some legit dad’s meal and i’m gonna attempt making some cabbage kimchi bokkeumbab! mmmmmm!! yeah von and I were drooling and ooohing and aaaahing as i pulled out each and every item! haha it was great. migs sent a photo calendar with pics of the fam which was awesome and mir sent 6 dvds with the rest of FNL, vampire diaries, life unexpected, burn notice, chuck, himym, and some other misc things. 4 days after being back home we’ve already watched 4 of those 6 dvds… yikes! we don’t know how to pace ourselves!! anyway, after opening those two we decided that we didn’t wanna carry everything to the hotel so we didn’t open my parents package and waited til they brought it to the hotel. so we’re carrying giant boxes and bags to the hotel and we’re sweating bullets and we take the long way around to the hotel cuz we have no idea where it is, but we finally walk into the lobby and it’s a frozen tundra of awesomeness. right towards the end of checking in, a gaggle of hot messes aka central folk walk in the door!!! i had pretty much been losing sleep over the anticipation of getting to see brian and Jordan, the members of the original lang group (the tims and camilla), kendra, alex and the pretty girl aka rebecca haha. so when they walked in it didn’t matter that everyone was sweaty and gross, von and i pretty much tackled them to the floor in excitement! And then the eating began… we started with that lunch at the lebanese place and just never stopped! every single day breakfast, lunch and dinner were provided at the hotel buffet style and it was an amazing mix of mediterranian/indian/moz/american food and i still feel full just thinking about it. all of us pretty much stuffed ourselves silly every meal just cuz we could and we wanted to store it all away til the next big conference! the ac in the rooms were unreal and then there are the showers… i was ecstatic with what we had, but it wasn’t until the second to last night that i realized that we had the worst shower ever… the water pretty much trickled out and even that was amazing so when i showered one last time in one of the other rooms i was blown away! the water pretty much jetted out and almost hurt… almost but not quite since i was too busy enjoying the water pressure doing all the work of cleaning me and not me scrubbing my skin off! haha so yeah it was pretty much amazing and i haven’t even gotten to the partying! lets just say that room 108 (our room, shocker) had seen better days! it was just a lot of fun to chill out and play games with everyone with some liquid refreshments. so anyway now we’re back and it was a rough week with tests, grading and just getting back into the swing of things, and now we have more tests but 2 more weeks and then we get to go to gorongosa to visit the mills’!!!! we are so friggin pumped to see them that we will even brave the massive amounts of traveling we’ll have to do to get there~ oh yeah btw the interenet place… down again… so that’s why i haven’t been able to reply to all the emails quicker! but you should all be getting replies soon! miss everyone so much! byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

ps. we finally got an empregada (maid) and she started today and she’ll be coming once and week to do laundry and clean our latrine and she’s wonderful and not having to do our own laundry is wonderful and walking into a clean bathroom is wonderful and it’s really just truly wonderful~ wonderful wonderful wonderful!

i have oh so much to write about, but i think i’ll start with what i’ve appreciated the most since i’ve last written… packages! haha they have been glorious! it’s funny cuz the very first package i received was the one box i had packed for myself before i left the us so i knew exactly what was in it, but opening it up was still like christmas! i mean it was just stuff like school and kitchen supplies that i couldn’t fit in my luggage, but man getting a bag of halls watermelon flavored vitamin c drops was like getting a bag of caramel apple pops! i mean that’s how excited i was… oh so sad… the second time i got packages was when i got a christmas package from my sisters and a package from my parents. i learned a valuable lesson on why i shouldn’t judge a package by its shape and size! my parents had sent me a fairly large box of korean goodies, complete with different kroean food like gochugaroo(korean chili flakes), chocolate filled pepero, and gongi(korean game kinda like jacks)!!! thanks umma and abba! the second package was from my sisters and well it was… small… it was only a soft envelope mailer and when i saw it my heart sank a little… i was like really miray and migum? realllllly? this is it?? but then i opened it and i no joke ate those words and i did it happily cuz it was the greatest package everrrrrrr~ it had 2 recorded dvds, a flashdrive, a deck of cards and a couple of cards. the 2 recorded dvd’s had 6 glorious episodes of friday night lights and the season finale of top chef! i mean really as if we needed any more ‘hotness’ in our lives hoooo it was amazing~ but hang on that’s just the beginning! the flashdrive had 2 home videos of the fam, 10 episodes of the new season of how i met your mother, up and 14 episodes of GLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE~! unfortunately we weren’t able to watch any of it til just recently cuz i needed internet to authorize my computer to watch it cuz they were all itunes purchases and as you now know the internet didn’t work for a while, but as soon as we got internet we watched everything in pretty much one weekend! we declared yesterday glee day cuz we saw all 14 episodes in one day! and seriously it was unreal! SO GOOOOD! we can’t wait for more! ahhhhh tv’s so goood! oh and they sent a deck of scrabble slam! cards which is a super fun game! and then of course there were homemade cards from my bambo, his christmas tree by the way was amazing! so thank you thank you thank you! i love it all and can’t wait for more! ok now a few quick words about school… it’s well… school… haha well i teach 4 classes of 9th grade and there’s about 95-110 kids in each of those classes… it’s tough getting through to those kids just cuz theres so many of em, but when atleast one or two get it I feel accomplished! we also ended up taking over for a sister who teaches at the school cuz she’s been sick, so vonnie took her 11th graders, and i took her 12th graders, and man you would think that after 6-7 years of english they’d be fairly good, but… yeah… it was a rude awakening… but the sister is back now and i think she’s taking back the 12th graders, but we still have to split up the 11th grade classes, so i’m taking one of the classes, and vonnie’s taking two, but i don’t feel bad for her cuz she gave me the delinquent class and kept the two good ones for herself haha but at least now we get to lesson plan together so it’ll cut down on the work a bunch! ok well i think that’s about it for now, i have many more stories to tell you like the one about the rat being in my room, so another blog’ll be up soon I promise! oh and i got the mac facebook photo uploader thing so hopefully that works well and i can put pictures up easily! kk love and miss everyone! byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

p.s. can you believe it’s been 5 months??

happy new year everyone!!!!

so i could write about how awesome i’m doing here in mozambique, but what fun would it be if i bragged about going to a beautiful beach for new years or having a weeds marathon with home made chips and salsa? right? so instead i will write about every peace corps volunteer’s favorite discussion topic, POOP! i know i’m not usually one for talking about bowel movements openly, but we don’t have much else to talk about here so when we say gossip it usually involves who’s having what kinda latrina issues. so where to start, cuz these are also not just any pooping stories, no no those happen even stateside, so all three of ours involve a common unwelcome guest… a bat… yep you heard right, vonnie, d illon and i have all shared many a laughs and tears over the next three stories i’m about to tell you… i will refrain from telling you which story happened to which person but i’ll tell them to you in chronological order. so since we’ve arrived to our wonderful house in monapo, we’ve been having awful stomach issues. we’re not sure if it was from the brown water we drank for the first week or the stress from cleaning and making our house our home, or some sick cosmic joke to make us use our latrina more than we would ever care to, but what can you do? when you gotta go, you just gotta go! so to begin our first story i should first tell you about our house and latrina. since it was our first week in our new house, we locked up pretty good when going to bed and it did not help our first victim to do so. there are two heavy duty locks and also a slide and latch lock and then we also have a grated gate with two padlocks. so it’s a lot of work to get out of the house and you have to go out of the house in order to walk to our outdoor latrina… the latrina’s about 15 yards away but the walk there is a treacherous one, and it’s a sandy death trap even when you can see where you’re walking, so in the dark… yeah not so much fun. anyway so on one fateful evening our first victim felt the pangs in her stomach and started her journey to the latrina. there was a struggle at the door because the locks are upside down and instead of turning the key away from the opening to unlock, you have to turn it toward the opening… and then the rusty slide and latch handle is really hard to jig open… and then the sprint toward the latrina tripping through tall grass and quick sand holes… lets just say she didn’t quite make it before it officially started. but then she finally got to the latrina and she’s squatting over the hole and all seems right in the world when she hears something fluttering and trying to get out of the hole! she freaks out and moves out of the way to find a theoretically poop covered bat fly out of the hole and fly around her head and dive about trying to get out of the latrina as it finally finds its way out the door and free into the night sky. thinking it couldn’t possibly get any worse and just wanting to finish and go back to bed she squats over the hole to finish up when she feels something crawling over her foot. when she pointed her flashlight toward her foot, a giant cockroach was trying to crawl its way back into the hole… oh yeah she was done. ever since then and a couple more times of carelessly walking into the latrina and having bats frantically flutter around our heads has made us more conscientious about checking the bathroom before walking in. that’s where the second victim’s story begins. it was already dark but not terribly late in the night so she set off for the latrina with the tp in one hand and flashlight in the other. she didn’t think it was late enough for the bats to have already seek refuge in the dark latrina so she just walked in, but she ducked and jumped back when there was not just one but 3 bats flying around. she threw a couple of rocks to try to scare em out but there was one pesky little bat still left in there and just flew from one corner to the other. our second victim didn’t quite have to go just then, maybe the bats scared it away, so she went back into the house hoping that when she returned the bat would have left. when the urge returned she went back to the bathroom and banged on the door to find the bat still fluttering around. she threw a few more rocks in but it wouldn’t leave and now after 30min she really really had to go. she walked back toward the house and announced that she could no longer hold it and that she would be digging a hole in the back yard to do her business. she walked to the back of the other side of the house and found an empty coconut shell and began digging. after finishing she covered it back with the dirt and put a rock and the coconut shell back on top of the mound as a warning. it now looks like the final resting place of turk the turtle. our last victim’s story doesn’t actually involve poop or the latrina, but the bat does strike again. we were watching it’s always sunny in philly in the living room and sitting on the floor on a friend’s sleeping bag when suddenly a bat swooped in and started flying around and diving into us, its bearings confused by the light. we all crouched down lower screaming and trying to get out of the way when she yelled oh my gosh i’m gonna pee. we all think that it’s just an expression when she darts up and sprints out the door leaving a wet spot behind. she was literally so scared/excited that she peed herself… we eventually got the bat out of the house, but i don’t think we’ll ever get these stories/images out of our minds and i hope they stay with yall for a good long time too. feel free to print it out and read it every time you’re on the john to remind yourself just how lucky you are, your indoor room with a ceramic throne completely bat free, or tack it up on your cubicle or office wall to brighten up your mood when you’re having a bad day or forward it to anyone else who may be having a bad day!

oh and a belated shout out to my favorite married couple (other than my parents of course), brian and jordan mills! can’t friggin wait to see yall, so brush up on your gaming skills and we’ll be in gorongosa sooner than you think! (hi jordan and brian’s parents! thanks for reading and i’ll try to get them to update their blog more often too!!)

ok 2010! here we go!!!

love,

panda

ps. after writing this blog, but before i got a chance to post it, the bat struck again! we found it swimming in one of our buckets and then after it was done swimming, it was hibernating on a rock… and then it freaked out and flew into our house, but we think it may be dying cuz it couldn’t fully fly, so then it hopped around here and there and then we finally got it outside again… crazy bats!

pps. we also just found out that the bats can crawl under the door crack and another one got in and started flying around and then in went in vonnie's room and camped out on the ceiling so we started throwing bottle caps and beans at it to try to get it out but it wouldn’t budge… it finally flew out of her room and back into the main room and then it crawled under the door into the back room and now its just chilling out back there…. wonder when it’ll go away….

will someone please research bats for us and let us know what keeps them out of the house and latrina? cuz something tells me garlic won’t work…