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Cockroaches, cats, and crappy WiFi


This morning I made an effort to be a productive blogger, I say made an effort rather than was because the WiFi was absolute crap so I spent the morning attempting to upload photos and had to do so individually in order to get any onto Google Drive where I could then upload them onto Wix, the website that hosts mine and thousands of other websites.

At around 11 we went to lunch at a traditional African restaurant called Pepata Restaurant, which had a menu boasting all kinds of traditional African cuisines. It was when we tried to order that I came to the realization that many of these options required special order ahead of time so that the kitchen could acquire the ingredients. I wanted to try something that was slightly outside of my comfort zone but not quite as far as a ‘Smiley’ which is a goat or sheep’s head or a bowl of worms, also called Mopane worms. In the end, I settled on chicken curry because the plate of pastries and the beef stew were both unavailable. If you’re planning on eating a sit-down meal in Africa, expect it to take a while, and then if it comes quickly be pleasantly surprised. We arrived for lunch with things to do in the afternoon not yet ourselves on Africa time and waited two hours only to have to scarf down our meal and then rush to our other commitment and still we were a bit late.

Our other commitment was moving from our guesthouse into our dorm rooms at the University of Namibia. We were moving to Emona Hostel, a group of apartment buildings surrounded by a spiked iron fence with a security protected gate. In the rush to move from the guesthouse I forgot my laptop charger, which would prove to be a problem for a later time. When we arrived at the hostel we had to move all of the PLU boxes in as well as our luggage, these boxes had our mini-fridges, linens, cooking supplies, dishes, cutlery, medical supplies, and bug spray, as well as a lot of extra unnecessary stuff that had to be returned. Once we had moved all of this stuff into the dorms and split it mostly between us we went to the store to grab groceries before we could actually do any shopping though, the ATM ate Elizabeth’s debit card. The shopping was also complicated by the fact that in the dormitory kitchen there were no ovens so most of my meal plan and most of what I knew how to cook was out the window. I was able to buy some great staple produce and grains including bananas, mangoes, and sweet potatoes as well as pasta and oatmeal, to make some basic food necessities out of.

When we got back we discovered three things: we had brought a cockroach infestation into the dorms with the PLU mini-fridges. Two, there was a feral cat colony that had found a very creative entrance into the building in their quest to investigate our garbage. And three, the WiFi that Julie had set up for us might actually be worse than that of the guesthouse. So far our beginning was off to a riotously disastrous start.

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