Shopping success

I mostly bummed around the office this morning, and then I went to Shoprite in Old Town to get a water kettle. First I went to the Forex to get some kwachas, and I exchanged a $100 bill, which gets a whopping exchange rate of 146 kwacha on the dollar. This made my wallet very fat. I got a water kettle, but it has a South African plug, so then I had to get an adapter. I also needed a SIM card forthis phone that Kirsten gave me, so we went to the little electronics store to get both.

Shoprite was seriously huge. I didn't really have time to do a lot of shopping, but it was like a grocery store in the US, basically. With weirder stuff, but still. Old Town is waaaaay busier than Capital City, and I'm going to have to figure out the minibuses so that I can go there on Saturday and stave off boredom.

Cell phones here are kind of way better than in the US. They're basically all pay-as-you-go, and with the phone in hand, it was just a matter of forking over like $2 to get the card to pop in it. There are some magic rules about adding minutes and how long you can make outgoing calls depending on the amount you spent to recharge the phone, but it's still way better for my purposes.

Gwen just said on hi on gmail from Holland, and she's in the same time zone!