Puncture and Paddy's night
So really, my weekends are getting somewhat monotonous-at least for you to read about and I don’t think my week days are getting much more exciting. I’ve started playing squash more regularly, which is fun- tho’ the court is not air conditioned, so it’s kind of warm when we’re playing. I’m slowly getting a bit better, fortunately I’ve found a friend who’s about the same level, so we’re able to ‘share’ winnings rather than just have one person exhausted and the other ‘unexercised’.
Well, in case you hadn’t guessed, I went on the walk this Saturday morning and then went for a swim, the leader of the walk noted that obviously the walk wasn’t tough enough and he needed to make sure we had a faster pace in the future. My response was along the lines of however hard he made the walk, even to the point where I would be collapsing, I’d still swim afterwards (tho’ may have a rest first), because swimming (at least for the amount I do), isn’t particularly tiring unless I’m really trying to exercise and therefore pushing myself to swim faster.
Friday night (lets not do this chronologically), several of us went down to Shanghai restaurant for supper- was v amusing because whenever anyone walked into the restaurant they basically did a walk round all the other tables to say hi to everyone else who they knew and then went over to the table where they were sitting- I did this and so did everyone who came in after me. It’s really amusing to be able to walk into a restaurant and know most of the people in there. This was pointed out to me when I was out eating with a friend who was in SL on a shortish consultancy, he said that it seemed like I knew everyone in the restaurant, it wasn’t quite true, but I did know a lot of people there and as they came into the restaurant they came over and said hi. I guess that shows how small the expat community is here (or how few places there are that people eat out at!)
Anyway, on Friday night (to get back to my original story), I had a puncture (v. common in SL). Now, my guards spotted this just as I was about to leave the compound (it was already quite dark) so I went down to the restaurant with one of my housemates instead. Anyway, I found that I did have all the necessary tools to change a tire in the back of the car, tho’ it take us (me and the guards) sometime to work out how to put the jack down.
Punctures happen fairly regularly in Freetown (and in general in SL), fortunately my mechanic was available on Saturday afternoon and took the (now punctured) tire into town in order to get a new inner tube fitted. I do need new tires as the ones I’ve got work, but could be a lot better than they are.
Saturday was St Patrick’s day, so the Irish community (having been practising Irish dancing all of last week) threw a huge party and invited most of the expat community, plus several locals, to a party on Saturday night. Was good fun- they even got some of the non Irish people attempting to do Irish dancing, wasn’t too hard, tho’ is exhausting after a while and seems to be fairly similar to English country/barn dancing but with three steps for everyone one or two that would be done in barn/country dancing. Was a long night most of my friends got home about 5am and I wasn’t home much before that.
Sunday was definitely a day of rest and in the afternoon I accompanied a friend down to Bureh beach. (I’ve been told that this is the correct way to spell Bureh, although one map that I have spells it without the ‘h’). The beach was deserted (well, there were about 2 other people there, plus those who sell the food) and very pleasant. We had barracuda and rice for lunch, which was delicious. I’ve had oysters there before, which are also very nice.
That’s probably enough babbling from me for the moment, next weekend may be slightly different- perhaps staying overnight at one of the beaches, but nothing’s definite yet.
Labels: beach, bouray, boure, bureh, car, puncture, squash, St Patrick's day, swim, walk
Leaving Freetown
The past weekend was a bit of a mix. On Friday I went to a Hajj (sorry if the spelling's wrong) party- my director came back from Hajj (pilgrimage to
Mecca), and invited us all to his for a party. I didn’t realise this was the reason for the party until after I had arrived and it was interesting to chat to people and meet others at the party and especially to chat to people from work in a more relaxed setting
.
Saturday morning was particularly boring- I was watching and supervising as two carpenters put up mosquito nets on our windows- this will hopefully mean that as the weather gets warmer, we’ll be able to have our windows open at night without having too many extra unwanted visitors.
We spent Saturday afternoon down at Lumley beach. This was more interesting than most visits to Lumely beach as the part we went to had a beach volley ball court, so we played a few games with some Poles and Russians that we met. I haven’t played volleyball since I arrived in SL (and not for sometime before that) and greatly enjoyed it- it’s so much nicer to fall/dive onto sand than other surfaces I’ve played on!
On Saturday evening, a group of us (almost entirely Brits which is unusual to have as a whole group here, but we were joined by one of the Irish contingent so it became slightly more ‘normal’) went to the Sierra Lighthouse for supper. It took ages to arrive (we knew that this would be the case tho’, since some of the group had been there before) and two people ordered blind off the menu-ie they looked at the Indian section and ordered something without quite knowing what it was. They ended up with what looked like green and brown slop (apparently curry), of varying degrees of heat.
Sunday was somewhat more successful- I went to church in the morning and then we went to Bouré beach, which was good fun and ate mackerel and oysters. The surf wasn’t particularly promising (for those wanting to surf), but it was good for swimming. The beach itself is very strange-every time I visit it, the beach has changed shape/terrain. For example, this time, there was a small inlet of water sandwiched between two parts of the beach-I’d never seen this before, despite having come to the beach at both low and high tides previously. There were a lot of people (mainly expats and Lebanese) down at the beach, relaxing in the sunshine; the water was slightly cooler than it was when I left and we think this is because the Harmattan dust stopped the sun from keeping the water as warm as normal, but still much warmer than it would be at home, particularly at this time of the year.
Anyway, back to the title of this piece- I’m going to be leaving Freetown for a bit and heading up country with work; this means I probably won’t be putting anything on my blog for a while, since I don’t know when I’m likely to have access to the net/time to write stuff for my blog, but if all goes well, I should have some good photos to bring back with me to go on my blog, as well as hopefully having avery interesting time while I'm there. Labels: beach, bouray, boure, volley ball, weekend
A few photos from the beach (plus one other)
Wahey- have managed to make it work!! 
This is Bouray beach-v beautiful and clean and sometimes has good enough waves for surfing on- tho' the recent ones have been more suited for beginners than anyone else.
These were all taken sometime ago since this is the first time I have managed to get a browser to work with blogger to get photos up.
And the beach from another direction- ah it's a tough life
More beach
Taken leaving the ferry on my way to the airport to head home- these were the first people off the boat, they were all heading home having sold their wares in the Freetown markets. Apparently they sell a lot of fish, fruit and vegetables at cheaper prices than you'd normally find in Freetown.
And finally, I took this ages ago- the same time I took the pics of the beach above; it's pics of the surfboards we rented when down at Bouray (still not sure of spelling!) beach and were beginning to attempt to learn to surf (tho' these boards were pretty short thus making it kind of tough).
Hopefully will manage to get some more photos on here now that have worked out a possible way of doing it!!
Labels: bouray, boure, photos, surfboards
End of the week
Have just spent an exhausting couple of days doing the CG (Consultative Group) meeting, so am now trying to sort out and finalise the minutes. It was a good couple of days and provided a lots of useful food for thought and for further work in the future. It was a really useful interesting meeting to be involved with from a personal perspective- you get to hear a lot of different views from different people on the state of the economy and the social side of the country and where people think more work is needed to improve the country in 2007.
The workload was pretty huge leading up to this all and then I and another person had the unenviable job of typing the minutes as the meeting progressed. The good news is that my typing skills were up to it (tho’ I did need to correct quite a few typo’s) and that I kept concentrating for the whole way through the 2 days. The bad news is that I was absolutely exhausted by this (and wasn’t the only one)- because no one else needed to concentrate so much for so long. Anyway, it’s over for another year and hopefully means things will calm down a bit. Having said that, there’s still loads of stuff to be done as follow-up to this, so looks like work will be keeping me out of trouble for sometime to come!
I would’ve posted some pics from Bouray (or it may be Bouré) Town beach that we went to last weekend, where I began to attempt to learn to surf- just about managed a crouch but then fell off. However, my work computer has crashed, the hard board failed (tho’ I don’t think I lost too much work since I’d e-mailed most of the important stuff to other people already) and I’m having to borrow someone else’s computer and net connection for the moment. The upshot being that I’m having to use a slightly older version IE instead of Mozilla (which I was previously using) and blogspot doesn’t allow me to upload photos using this version of IE (and since it’s some else’s computer I don’t want to mess around with it too much!), so you’ll have to wait until I get to an internet café or manage to get a new computer with web connection before I’m able to upload more photos.
Not sure what the plans are for this weekend, but since I’m hoping to come home soon, will probably involved a spot of shopping and being hopelessly ripped off by the market traders-ah well, never mind, I just hope that I don’t get too annoyed by the endless haggling that will probably come my way as they start off the prices at 10 times more than you should expect to pay.
Wow- can't believe it's December already!!! There's none of the Christmasy things you'd expect to get 3 months early at home- tho' I did see someone carrying two fake Christmas trees with a few bedraggled bits of tinsel down the road yesterday. I think the heat also means that it feels like it really can't be coming up to Christmas yet!
Labels: bouray, CG, work
