Nenya.net

Another week gone...

Hmmm,

Not entirely sure what to write about- there’s not been much going on this week. We’re more of less settled in and are now car hunting. In the middle of our Krio lesson we lost national power (somewhat annoying tho’ might be our fault for not topping up our account recently enough) and now the generator seems to be being moody. It’s amazing how useful electricity is and how annoying it is when it goes, although I’m beginning to get more used to doing things by candlelight when needs be.

It’s not true that nothing’s happened this week. As I said, we had a (short) Krio lesson on Monday, on Tues evening we went out to the film night- they were ‘seasonal’ and did something Halloween-ish which was fairly dire, although the eye-candy of George Clooney made it a bit more interesting ;-)

BA recently launched flights between Heathrow (I think) and Freetown and on Tuesday evening held a reception to celebrate it, although I haven’t met anyone (to my knowledge) who was actually invited to attend but then there are a lot of people out here who I don’t know you so am sure plenty of people turned up. The flights are probably going to be fairly expensive and currently everyone who I’ve spoken to is keen to continue flying with Astraeus, mainly because they have a 60kg luggage limit which is brilliant and altho’ the on-board entertainment might not always be described as state of the art, the flight times are good, the staff friendly and they have cheap flights around Christmas time!

Wednesday involved a leaving-do for one of the guys from Dfid who I’d got to know slightly. The reception was held at the house of the head of office and has a gorgeous pool (I haven’t been in), as well as a really nice open area to stand/sit around and meet people. A friend and I have decided that we’re not quite up to ‘oiling round the room oozing charm’ (or something similar that we were ‘recommended’ to practice during our pre-SL training week). This ended with half-a-dozen of us going to PB’s for a light bite (although for some reason the burger I had seemed to be spiked with chillies), generally PB’s food is really good but I’m discovering that they do like to litter their food with small pieces of chilli, which makes it much warmer than you first anticipate.

Thursday involved another leaving-do, which was great fun, with amazing views from the apartment out towards the beach- it’s a bit up the hill from where we live and you can see for miles around. That’s one of the things that seems to make Freetown so different to many other cities- it’s so green, everywhere. Having said this I haven’t been far towards the eastern end of the city yet, which is meant to be the poorer end, so it might be a lot less green. I think the greenness is probably because of the (up to) 5 metres of rainfall that hits this part of the coast every year.

We've also started looking for cars; there's a fair number to choose from but nothing suits yet. We'd like something suitably rugged so that it's easier to get out of the city and onto the peninsular and possibly even up country as well. We've looked at 2 this week and have heard about plenty more. Fortunately, since neither of us know much about cars, our friends have brilliant mechanic who's been helping us look at them and discuss the good and bad points of them- very useful to have around!

Enough ramblings and I definitely look forward to going to the beach this weekend- I didn’t manage it last weekend and although I’m not having withdrawal symptoms I’m really looking forward to going to explore another beach.

Labels: electricity, Krio, travel

posted by Nenya @ 2:00 pm