I know that in my last post I said that I was going to adopt a thematic approach to my blog posts, but three things happened today which I consider worthy of a separate entry.
Being a Saturday I had a sleep in and lovely breakfast of fresh pineapple and passion fruit which I purchased at a roadside market last night. (The lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in the Ugandan diet is starting to take its toll.) I then wandered down the road to town (wandering down the road, involves walking carefully alongside the highway which has 40 tonne trucks passing, unfortunately there is no footpath) for a coffee. I had spotted a cafe earlier in the week called Cafe La Tour. Taking this as a very good sign, along with the fact that they had a picture of a cappuccino type looking coffee on a banner outside, I was anticipating my first "proper" coffee in over a week. Sadly it was not to be, they said they weren't serving coffee, and I couldn't even get an instant to quell the caffeine headache. I ended up having to settle for a coke. Anyway, they had a newspaper to read. One of the nice things about living in Uganda is that English is one of the official languages so all the newspapers are in English. On approximately page 3 was the story about New Zealand refusing a visa for Mike Tyson to enter the country. I was pretty stoked to see news about New Zealand. (Incident 1). This is mainly on account of how little people know about New Zealand. When I asked the kids as school yesterday whether they had heard of New Zealand they just looked at me blankly.
I haven't even been able to engage with people about a Ugandan winning a gold at the Olympics (which I thought was a surefire small talk conversation). When I was talking to one of the teachers about it yesterday she thought the Olympics was some kind of game I was going to teach to the kids.
After my coke, I wandered further down the road. Everyone I have spoken to who has lived here has recommended walking off the main road and onto some of the side streets to get a better appreciation of Mukono which is what I decided to do. All the side streets here are dirt and I picked a fairly large one with lots of people. As is always the case here as I walked along lots of people said or yelled out 'Mzungu' (being the word for white person). I had a couple of kids join me for a couple of minutes just repeating mzungu and trying to talk to me in the local language. Getting to what appeared halfway back to the other main road I was aiming for, I was faced by a big duck. As a lot of you are aware I am scared of ducks. I was so frightened of the duck (it looked particularly manky and was quite large) that I had to turn back and walk up some little side alley instead (while trying to appear cool, calm and collected). I think the people that saw me thought I was completely mad. That is right, so far, my most frightening experience has been a big duck in the middle of a random back street. (Incident 2).
Having navigated my way back to the main part of the town center (and when I write center, I mean T Junction where the road one way goes to Kamapala, the other Nariobi and the other west Uganda) to find some lunch. After a week of beans and posho/rice/sweet potato for lunch and dinner every day, I decided to hunt out chicken and chips at a restaurant I had been told about. I went in and ordered what I thought was chicken and chips. The meal came out and had a piece of chicken (incidentally not fully plucked), and some kind of fried hamburger patties, but no chips. When I got the bill it had chicken listed and 'chaps' listed. Chaps being the unidentified meat I was given initially. Yes apparently, the New Zealand accent faces just the same difficulties here. (Incident 3).
Hopefully there won't be any other incidents today. I am planning to take some photos soon which I will try to upload and I have a post brewing about school life here.
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