Lake Malawi... where I bought my new curio shop

1/17/10
Well it’s been a few days, I’ve been without internet for a while so let’s catch up. Friday was a national holiday so not too much could be done there. We went to the Queens hospital in Blantyre and met with one of the heads of the lab there to talk about their process and then headed out of town. We thought, it’s been a long week, we should go and check out Lake Malawi. So we had the UNICEF folks drop us off at the crossroads and hopped into a minibus headed for Salima, once we got there, we took a pickup to Senga Bay and checked in at Carolina Hotel. That night we decided to gofor a long walk down the beach to go check out Cool Runnings, another hotel, which we heard had the best burgers in Malawi. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t know that they only did dinner for people staying there (and they were fully booked) due to their small kitchen. I appealed to Sam, the owner, but se apologized and just said that there was no way to accommodate any extra diners. However, we soon got a message that the kitchen had extra chicken curry if we wanted it, so it all worked out in the end. We had someone call a taxi for us, but apparently the driver had been drinking so Sam took us herself, which was really nice of her. On the way she said if we wanted to come and eat there the next day, all we had to do was call in advance. So, it was time to sleep and we didn’t let the lizard poop on our beds deter us from getting some rest. Oh, I did accidently break the key off in the lock trying to free a deadbolt which had been stuck… oops. So the door to our room would no longer lock. My bad.
The next day I realized that I had completely depleted my cash reserves and was left with 610 Kwatcha in my pocket, which about $4, and headed to the nearest ATM which was in Salima. Along the way we dropped off Annelies and Michal at this really cool crafts market. I’m not sure exactly how this came to be, but there were nearly 50 stalls along the road, all of which had people doing all sorts of cool art. So, I joined them on the way back, and proceeded to buy a ton of gifts for family and friends back home. Annelies says I bought that whole market and that it looked like I was going to start a rival shop once we got back to Lilongwe. The cop who checked the trunk of the taxi today must have agreed because he asked if we had papers to transport all the stuff we bought, but he just laughed and let us pass when we said it was gifts to take home. Anyway, I’m jumping ahead. After the shopping, we went back to relax ant the hotel and read and nap and do all the other things that make me grateful for weekends. Then we headed back to Cool Runnings for dinner and afterwards met the most cynical lady… She didn’t like anything and was highly disapproving of everything that everyone does. So yeah, That lady wasn’t much fun but gave us something to laugh about on our way home. Oh, yeah, during the relaxing part I’d also talked the hotel folks to give me a new room, as the lock was broken and went to I think 3 rooms which had varying problems such as being completely devoid of furniture or lacking a working light before we finally got one that worked, though the fixture was a little broken so I couldn’t turn off the light without also turning off the fan. When I wanted to go to sleep, I ended up just removing the light bulb.
This morning just as we had packed up and got all our stuff ready to go and to the main building, the skies opened up. We had called our taxi man to take us to the main road where we were going to wait for a minibus, but we weren’t even sure the road was drivable for his old Toyota Carolla. Sure enough though, he showed up. Oh, and I should say, it wasn’t just raining… it was the type of rain where if you run to a car about 20 feet from cover, you are as wet as if you’d just hopped into a shower. We had discussed that maybe it wasn’t the best thing to stand out in said rain with all our stuff (including laptops) getting soaked so I bargained down the price to get all the way to Lilongwe down from 15,000 to only 11,000. As we headed to town I had to just put on my seatbelt and listen to music without thinking too much about it, because the rain for nearly all of the 120 km was so thick you could barely see past the hood of the car. We stopped a few times by the side of the road just because there was simply no way to drive in it. However, we eventually arrived safe and sound at Kiboko Hotel, our old friend which seems even better now with its clean rooms and fast internet, and just got settled in before watching Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny on the satellite TV in the lounge, which was kind of a trip to see that… It rivals the time Labyrinth was on Ghanaian TV when I was in a pharmacy buying doxycycline. Okay, well, that’s it for me for now. Tomorrow we are headed to the UNICEF offices and will begin work on our process models. More then!