Maheu? Ew.

I got home from work, put my stuff away and changed real quick so I could run to the supermarket and get some coffee and anything else I found. Which wasn’t much. People’s is no Shoprite. Or Foodworth’s for that matter… at least that place had soup. I got a can of instant coffee, a bag of Malawi tea, some more weird yogurt, white raisins, and a beer! Carlsberg (of Denmark, same as you see there) is like the official Malawi beer after Chibuku Shake Shake (which I didn’t see, but I wasn’t really looking). I neglected to bring both my mini wine bottle opener and my beer bottle opener that I had removed from my keychain for some reason at some point. But, beer can be opened with pliers and various other tools, whereas wine cannot.

On my way in, a man had walked next to me and said he wanted to show me some postcards on the way out. I figured I could lose him. But when I emerged from the store, he found me. And then this other kid came up, and then there was a third guy talking to them, and it was chaos. I said I had to get home before dark, figuring this would get rid of them, but they tagged along, almost all the way home! They were all right, just crazy persistent, and very willing to let me know how broke they were but how they weren’t beggars because they were selling stuff and working. We were to my street, so I figured if they were willing to walk all that way, I might as well buy a postcard from each. It was like $5 for two, but they’re actually kind of neat, in a touristy way.

I knocked my jar of peanut butter on the floor and it major cracked. I put lots of ziplock bags around it, so maybe it will be okay until I can procure some other container. I like my peanut butter. It occurred to me after that I have all these cabinets, one of which could easily be used as a pantry… better than using the TV as a shelf.

I worked on TASS reports and went to bed around 10:30 (after playing around with the Composer function on the Nokia I’m borrowing). At 5 I woke up to pee and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I got up, had some food and coffee, and worked on the TASS reports more. Around 7 I was about to shower when there was a knock at my door. It was one of the Villa guys letting me know it was time for breakfast. I didn’t know there was a time! I promised to be down in 10 after showering. Breakfast was even more elaborate today and involved not just toast but also eggs, home fries, and a little sausage that tasted like chorizo. It was tasty, but it’s funny how everything is just a little bit off of what it tastes like at home. I seemed to be the only person at breakfast, and I’m not actually sure there is any other guest there right now. At any rate, it’s really strange because I feel like I get this royal treatment… I’ve felt that a lot here. I guess it’s partly the nature of tourism that guests get treated well. But it also feels like there’s a little bit of it that’s about me being a white foreigner.

I just wanna be normal peeps!

Despite eating basically two breakfasts, I am already hungry at 11. I think I’m actually just tired.

Breakfast made me sad because it reminded me of how Joe makes me breakfast. This morning we type-chatted on Skype, and he stayed up way late. It’s hard going into the weekend because I won’t have internet, although I am going to explore the nearby Capital Hotel and check out the internet café at City Centre tomorrow. Things close early tomorrow, though, and Sunday is apparently dead (thanks, missionaries!), so I have to find ways to entertain myself this weekend. Joe might try to find a calling card, if he can get through. My advisor has not been successful so far. I called my phone from the office just now, though, and it worked okay, so it just seems to be a problem of outsiders connecting to the cell network, which Kirsten says is a common problem.

One of the guys here brought me something he wrote to edit this morning. It’s like I’m internationally known as someone who edits things. I finished the TASS reports and decided to get some lunch. I got this drink called Super Maheu from Zambia called Chocolate ‘n Milk. The ingredients, however, include neither of these things. Maize meal, sugar, sweetener, preservative, enzyme, flavourant. It tastes like corn with Smarties crushed up in it, and it has a thick and slightly gritty consistency. Every time I take a sip I’m like, ew weird! Huh. Hmmm. Mmmm? And then the taste goes away and I take another sip. They gave me a straw to go with it, so I decided to make it all the more ridiculous and drink with it. I tried to drink it for a while, but I just couldn't. It kind of reminded me of that barium stuff I had to drink when I had appendicitis. I got some water out of the fridge instead.

The samosees I got with it I have much clearer feelings about: delicious! They’re filled with ground beef and onions. Can’t go wrong with that.

In research news, we decided to go with the original four districts that we surveyed for the last midterm. My advisor had also realized that it was weird to do the unsurveyed four but thought it was necessary for programmatic reasons. When in actuality no one had thought much about it. I’m sure this will lead to a flurry of activity this afternoon when Kirsten returns from her morning meetings. In the meantime I have to get this survey tidied up because the numbering and coding is a mess.