Walking around town

We've moved into our new place which is a bit closer to downtown. I'm still within a 10 min walk from the VSO office and about a 10 min walk from the Ministry of Education (MINED). It's a great place and like with many places that you move into it needs a bit of attention before it becomes "home". Either, it needs replacing or repair … hopefully it'll be done before too long, or I fear we'll have some flooding on our hands.

View from our bedroom towards Maputo Bay	View from Balcony towards downtown and the port
French Cultural Centre	Cathedral near City Hall

It looks like there is going to be a delay of about 3 - 4 weeks till we actually start our placement as we brush up and improve our Portuguese. So far I've been getting by with portuñol! But I'm not sitting idle till things get sorted out - I got involved with another related project setting up a computer resource centre for Mozarte (Mozambique centro de arte).

I worked with Enosse from CJE Maputo who was great. We walked quite a bit through Maputo: one day to plan the layout of the room, another to obtain quotes for hardware, yet another to get the cash to purchase, and one more to actually make the purchases. Sometimes it took us quite a bit (like an hour) to actually pay … they love stamping paper! Nothing is official without it. But last Friday we finished the installation, this week I need to update software and install other stuff. However, it was a valuable experience in terms of understanding how things work here, the culture, and importantly, practicing/learning portuguese. Without him, I would have definitely shied away from taking the chapas - a bus, either mini or small bus. The saying goes that there's always room on a chapa! And indeed that is the case. On one trip I was standing in a minibus between two bank of seats, braced against the ceiling while trying to avoid falling onto the lap of an older lady. These rides get even better when the music is blaring ;)

View of the courtyard at the MOZART Centre 

Umm ... that's a lot of cable!

Plugging away ...

Wires are installed ... let the unpacking begin.

Plug in what? Where?

Computers installed, yea!

You can walk a lot around Maputo, there are of course some areas you have to be aware of - either for security reasons or olfactory. And while the sidewalks are quite wide, it is more of a hike than walking in the city. There's always some construction to deal with water main repairs, telecom installations, or its broken up because the tree roots didn't like the pavement.

Have I mentioned that they love music here? Well, I'll say it again. They love music here - anytime, anywhere, and any reason to get up and dance. OK, not everyone. But many places love to share their music with the local neighbourhood by cranking the volume as loud as it can get.

It's definitely interesting … we found a fruit/vegetable street vendor lady on our home over the weekend. Very lovely lady with decent prices and a good seller too.

However, we did run into someone pretending to be "the guy" who admitted us into the country at the airport. He said that he remembered us, but we probably don't remember him because he's out of uniform. Asked us how we were getting along and so forth. The only problem with that story was "the guy" at the immigration desk was a lady! Yup, he wanted something: some gas money. Though it would be very unfair to say that no one is nice here. On the contrary, it's been easy to say hello to people, be they be guards, street vendors, or storekeepers. After a few times they recognize you and you get some great tips on where to go to get decent stuff. Most of the time they are very patient with me in explaining how things work.

But yes, I am enjoying it here and looking forward to meeting my colleagues at MINED.

Até logo!