Day One

I'm going to start off this post with packing advice. I remembered the bug spray, the sun screen and the sun glasses. It never occurred to me to bring benedryl! I don't know what I'm allergic to but it's making me itch like MAD!

The hotel has an elaborate breakfast buffet spread with dozens of kinds of pastry I wanted to try each and every one. (I didn't Nina!) They also had eggs and something sort of like baked beans, a meat mixture of some sort, grilled tomatoes and several fruits -- most of which I couldn't eat because they have thin skins and that means they could make me sick. I meant to take a picture of my plate, as my friend Nancy Heller would do because it was so beautiful with the variety, but once I sat down, that thought went right out of my head.

When I got out of breakfast the car was already waiting for me. I was expecting Yussaf again, but Moses was waiting for me and he wanted to know if I worked with Malaria. (For those who aren't aware, I'm working with an ANTI-Malaria project.) I'm still finding myself trying to get in the driver's seat and being a passinger is very disconncerting. And yes, before you google it, Mozambique does drive on the left.

The first office that I'm working in is actually a converted house. The houses around here are mostly row houses. There's a small gate in front of the building. What I thought was a group of men just "hanging out" in front of the building now appears to have been a security guard. I have to try to remember to ask if the guard is there full time. Several of the buildings on the street seem to have guards.

Dan, I and Joel (Pronounced Jo-El) working hard on Malaria

I went to dinner with Dan, one of the people I was working with from the project. I told him I wanted the prawns that Mozambique was famous for. We went to Zanbi. It's supposed to be very famous. It was very posh and modern. I got the medium prawns instead of the large. They made our jumbo shrimp look miniscule. They were phenominally good. I meant to take a picture of my plate, as my friend Nancy Heller would do because it was so beautiful with the variety, but once the plate arrived, that thought went right out of my head.

I decided to try a dessert that sounded very portuguese. I don't remember how it was described, but it had cream bruele, and portuguese snowball and something else
lovely. I meant to take a picture of it but... well, you know the rest.




Zanbi Restaurant

After dinner the driver took me back to the hotel where I got on the elevator at floor Zero and up to my room on the fifth floor. So besides the interesting observation of the existance of a floor zero I had some other observations today.

I did not expect the expression of surprise to be "Oohh La la!." I hear that expression a lot from Martine, but it's usually followed by a paragraph's worth of las.

Apparently, an auto accident requires the presence of a truck load of police with machine guns to arrive. They didn't seem to offer any assistance, because before the cars were even separated, the officers jumped back into the open back and drove off.

Have a terrific evening! It's approaching 11:30 PM and my hopes of getting more work done are fading fast.