Tonight we took our neighbors out for dinner. They've been living here since the beginning of January, and they have made our lives SO much sweeter here on the compound. They're a great combination of ethnicities: Dutch-Canadian.
They have also been doing so many of the things around here that have needed doing for a LONG time. Fixing everything and anything, cleaning everything and anything, and just basically being all around nice people! Margreet is also wonderful to have around because she's willing to go on little adventures with me all the time. Any time I need to go on any errands, she just jumps in the truck with me - and even opens and closes the gate for me so I don't have to get in and out of the truck :) Now that's mighty neighborly.
Unfortunately, they're only here for a short time :( I'm already starting to miss them, since they'll already be gone by the time we come back from Nairobi. So we took them out for dinner tonight, just to spend some time with them. It was a minor adventure finding the restaurant, but I'm glad we perservered because we had a great meal in the end!
One of our friends here had told us about a restaurant that is run by the Sacred Heart Sisters (um, those would be Catholic sisters... even though the name sounds like a cool all-girls band). We had the general gist of an idea of where this restaurant is, but since there are no street signs, and few landmarks - turn left at the thatch hut and bamboo fence - we were just sort of following our noses. We managed to leave the compound before dark, which facilitated our actual finding of the right place, unlike a couple of our previous adventures in finding new locations!
When we got close to where we thought it SHOULD be, I had the honour of jumping out of the truck and using my new found Arabic to ask directions. Of course, the answers to my directions always came in English, since the people I was talking to were speaking much better in English than I was in Arabic!
Anyways, we did manage to find the place and had some lovely chicken and chips. The chicken wasn't as good as our usual chicken place, but the chips... oh man, the chips were AMAZING. But the chicken at the other place is truly amazing. So I was having a little conversation online with my sister (yahoo messenger is amazing!) about my dilemma - which restaurant do I prefer. Which is more important - a good chip or a good chicken? It's very important to spend time pondering these deeper questions of life, especially across the miles on yahoo messenger :)
But it IS amazing that I even have this dilemma - this time last year, there was one place to buy chicken and NO places to get chips! This town has really come a LONG way. Now there are at least 5 places to get Ethiopian food. 2 places to get Chinese food. 2 places to get pizza. And I can't even count the number of places to get chips. Me, I like development :)
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