Slow weekend

I spent most of the weekend enjoying my last few days in domestic paradise. Our house-sitting stint ends tomorrow so I wanted to soak up as much couch-and-tv time as possible. I've been watching the HBO series Band of Brothers as well as the BBC Planet Earth series on DVD - it's quite mindblowing. The power and internet still go out on an almost daily basis so I've been doing a lot of reading as well - I'm almost done with Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

We ended up not going out on Wednesday night for pizza. My stomach was bothering me a bit that afternoon and since eating out is such a big deal here due to the cost and novelty of it, I opted to wait a few days so I knew that I would enjoy the meal. I didn't want to go out for a good meal and not be able to enjoy my food. On Friday night we went to a Portuguese restaurant called O Poeta. For $20, I got a big brick-oven pizza with ground beef, sausage, peppers, and onions. I have to say that it was one of the better pizzas I've had in a long, long time. That might be because I've been living in Kinshasa for over a month and I was living in Denver for a year and a half before that (no offense to my Denver readers, but the pizza there just ain't all that great). I left the restaurant with a full and satisfied belly.

On Saturday my wife and I made our first solo excursion to the local market. A driver had always taken us before so the first challenge was finding the market. We didn't exactly know where we were going so we followed our noses around the city for a bit and hoped we didn't have to deal with the police. I don't know how, but we eventually stumbled across it. Things went well, and on the way back we were going to stop at a supermarket to get more food when we had another minor run-in with the law. On a street congested with traffic, I turned into the center lane to make a left turn and there were two policemen there directing traffic. After noticing me waiting in the lane to make my left turn, one walked over and asked me to roll down my window and hand over my license. Following the advice of others I'd spoken to after last weekend's driving experiences, I instead rolled my window up, held my license against the inside of the window, and began to state in my loudest and most ignorant-sounding voice, "I-don't-speak-French-I-don't-know-what-you're-saying-I'm-an-American-I'm-not-giving-you-my-license-blah-blah-blah" After thirty seconds, the other police officer who was standing nearby got a frustrated look on his face and waved us along. I think they didn't want to deal with us given the heavy flow of traffic on the road and the fact that my French is nowhere near conversation-level yet, let alone negotiating-bribes-with-the-police-level. It would be a different matter if I was doing something wrong, but my wife and I knew they were just hassling us because we were foreigners in a car that was stopped right in front of them. They can't pass up a chance at free money, could they? We headed for home and decided to finish grocery shopping the next day.

Sunday was spent doing more driving and shopping. We're still getting things together for our apartment. I'd never have thunk it, but we can't find clothes hangers anywhere in town. Of all the stores we've been to, the closest thing we've found is small wooden hangers meant for children's clothes for $1 each. Well, we did find one street vendor selling cheap plastic hangers who, after some haggling, agreed to come down in price to $2. Each. Each hanger, $2. You've gotta be kidding me. Luckily, we talked to a clerk at a big store here in town and he said they're getting a shipment of hangers in this week.

Once we finally get moved in, we'll be able to spend our weekends doing more relaxing and fun things like going to the pool at TASOK on Sunday afternoons, or getting together with the church youth group for ultimate frisbee. The couch in our new apartment is nowhere near as comfortable as the one here, so I don't think we'll be too tempted to spend weekend afternoons lounging around on it.

Happy Labor Day to everyone back home...