Now that I've published all the winter vacation posts, this will finally make sense. Enjoy!
Taxis (called chapas): porfavor, KGB
The women here in Moz wear and use capulanas (a big piece of colorful/patterned cloth) like women in Lesotho use blankets. To wear, to carry babies, to keep warm, etc. etc. Same idea, just a different thickness for a different climate.
"I'm here to drink. Not to teach you."
-Guy at the hostel bar, when our vacation friend was asking him how to say things in Portuguese
"I've had phantom hair for almost two years now."
-Jen, on the phenomenon that results when you lose your ponytail, similar to having a phantom limb
There are cashews everywhere here! Just littering the ground. And I have to pay out the wazoo for cashews in SA or Lesotho.
If a flight takes off and you didn't take a selfie, were you really on the plane?
So many people are trying to tell me, excuse me, but you have a laundry peg on you jacket collar. Yeah, I know. My friend put it there a week ago and I just didn't take it off. But thanks anyway.
I thought taxis in Lesotho really packed em in. But this chapa (minibus taxi name in Moz) has 21 full size people in it and is waiting for more.
Final count: 26 souls on the taxi. Driver, conductor, kid, baby, and 22 adults. They use the place where they normally put bags as another row, with 4 people facing backward behind the front seats. And bags are on the roof.
Whoop, and now the sliding door's falling off as the conductor straps a table and a stack of plastic chairs to the roof.
Latest development: it's raining corn because a bag of corn fell off the top and the driver is trying to sweep the extra kernels off the roof.
We've taken a detour from the paved road through some village. The people are like what's going on? I think they've determined that the driver is trying to avoid a police traffic stop.
At least there's no famu. No throughout-the-vehicle speakers at all, actually. Oh wait- they just put on some Indian/Baliwood music. Interesting choice.
The landscape around Nampula is relatively flat except for little lopsided mountains that suddenly jump out of the ground.
I keep seeing these tricycle wheelchairs with a lever thing connected to a gear for simple self propulsion.
In Lesotho, only women carry things on their heads, but here, men do it too. Carrying all the things on all the heads.
I just saw a guy on a motorbike driving with a bunch of thin tires around his torso like many small pool innertubes. Come to think of it, that's probably the best way to transport tires via motorcycle.
The houses out in the rural areas are rectangular and smade either of stone, bricks, or cinder blocks, or a lattice of wooden sticks smeared with mud. Finish it off with a thatched roof that sticks out for shade and some wooden window shutters.
With the same company (Vodacom), data is 4 times more expensive in Lesotho than it is here in Moz. (2gb is 250 Meticais in Moz and 220 Rand in Lesotho. One Rand is about 4 Mets. Hence, about 4x more.) Though everything else, like food, seems to be more expensive.
There's an overland travel ban through the middle of the country, and I just met a PC Moz girl whose site is there in the middle. She says the airport nearest to her only goes to Maputo, so to get here to northern Moz for a conference, she had to backtrack and fly south to Maputo just to go back north. Yeesh.
I catch myself box-talking to anyone who doesn't natively speak English. I'm so used to doing it with Basotho that now I just do it with everyone. Here I'm not so sure if it helps their understanding or hinders it. Hmm.
(Box talking is what we call slowing down and over-enunciating when speaking English to help others understand. Basically, how we talk to our students.)
A guy at my hostel just silently came into the kitchen as I was making dinner, turned a whole pineapple into a beautifully designed cylinder, chopped it up and put it in a Tupperware, then silently left.
On the train, one of the fluorescent-vested staff people is pacing up and down my car, doing what I think is explaining the train rules and consequences with the fervor and authoritative hand gestures of an empassioned political candidate making a speech. Something about smoking, alcohol, and something else about bathrooms, which I wish I had actually understood.
I've never seen anyone willingly eat anything with such fury as these dudes stripping and gnashing pieces of sugar cane outside as the train waits at a stop.
Almost without exception, every woman on this train car has a baby strapped to her.
Nothing like a dinner of pao (bread) and maheo (like motoho- some kind of sour porridge) acquired by leaning from the waist out a train window. 14 hours in this train and I still have about 3 to go.
Between Moz and Malawi there's a stretch of about 2km between the border posts. And there are a ton of people who live there, in no man's land. What nationality are they??
Malawi:
Taxis (called mini busses): Time Of Favour, Tarzan, New Dawn, Psalm, Maverick 1, New Force, Allah Is Good, Faith, Not Me But Allah, Friday, No Limit, Good Morning
This beer advertises as "probably the best beer in the world." So you're not sure? Way to be confident in your own product.
We just passed a building housing a company called "Difficult to Understand Investments."
Katie knows she's living the PC life when everyone in the US is playing Pokemon Go and the only thing she can think is, "Wow, playing that must take a lot of data."
All the street food comes in these blue plastic bags. As such, everywhere you look, on the ground there is a sea of little blue bags.
One thing that I just ate that came in said little blue bags: fries and shredded cabbage and a few tomato slices, cooked in what looks like a big metal sink over a fire.
I'm operating in so many currencies right now. Exchanging Rand to Kwacha, converting to prices listed in dollars, careful not to try to use the Meticais also in my wallet, paying people back in Maluti. My brain hurts.
Joburg:
In the airport after arriving, we were in a long line for the passport control. This European couple was in front of me, and as they got to the booth, they said something like, "Phew, we finally made it," and the passport officer goes, "Yes, it's a long wait to freedom." and chuckled. This went way over the couple's heads, but I appreciated the joke.
[hint: Nelson Mandela's autobiography is entitled "Long Walk To Freedom"]
Lesotho:
I walked into my house and almost didn't recognize it as my own, as I'd been gone for over a month. It was a really weird feeling.
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