Sunday

Bulawayo

We had a lazy day. Ray brought all of us coffee or tea in bed, and I told him that with that kind of service I might never leave.  Buhle and Helena went to church and I helped Ray to put away the things we had carried from South Africa, and then we went to the market.  First stop, a street market to buy vegetables – sweet potatoes, bananas and tomatoes.  Then on to the supermarket to buy some other odds and ends.  There is a small white community here, and they all seemed to be at one supermarket, Food Lovers.  We did get a couple of strange looks from people…perhaps mixed couples are not common.  We also went to the TM market, with very few white people, but we didn’t get any looks there.

Ray drove me around town so I could see the university, the courthouse, the city hall and some other parts of the city.  The streets are very wide  – enough so that there is angle parking down both sides, and a row of angle parking down the middle, and still enough room for two driving lanes in each direction.  Many of the buildings were build in the 1930s and are really attractive single story buildings covered with stucco and painted white.  Some of them have run down since independence (in 1980) but you can see that there has been some effort to begin to refurbish some of them.

Best sign seen while driving around town, “Male circumcisions available at the eye clinic”. I wonder if they check your eyesight at the same time?

When we got back to the house, I cooked brunch for everyone, and then we sat around on the verandah and read, and generally did nothing at all. Helena is from Ghana, and she cooked a Ghanaian dish for dinner – chicken groundnut soup.  It is essentially a stew made with chicken, onions, chilies and peanut butter.  It goes with balls made out of pounded rice.  The whole thing was delicious, and I will try to make it at home, but perhaps without the chicken feet.  I watched her cut the toenails off, and thought that chicken pedicures were perhaps not my forte.