Finally, a couple of photos

Just for you visually oriented readers... I actually took out my camera during this evening's festivities! So instead of writing a bunch, I'll post a few photos. For the past month, we've had Eileen back here in Jb working with us. She lived with us on the compound for almost a year before she moved to Australia to work with the "diaspora" language projects there. But she comes back to us about twice a year and helps us so much with some of the technical linguistic stuff, as well as some translation checking etc. And she's just a hoot to have around - such a dry witty humour, it often takes a few seconds to catch on to her jokes, but they're so hilarious when you actually "get" them :)

Anyways, to celebrate Eileen, we went out for a Chinese feast, followed by a nice macchiato. We had sweet and sour chicken, cashew chicken, sizzling beef and a huge pile of noodles. So tasty. I love this particular restaurant because it used to be a house, so there are separate rooms where you can go and sit. Each of the rooms has a lovely A/C, so it's nice and cool. And I found out this evening when I went to go for a "short call", there was a bathroom right off the room in which we were sitting! There was a toilet, with a seat, with running water! Will wonders never cease...

I forgot to take a photo with all the food (I was too busy stuffing my face), but I got a photo of the satisfied diners afterwards:

Here is the lovely light that we dined under. It's actually pretty cool because it changes colours - from red to green to blue, and all shades in between!

I think it might be what one might call, "tacky"... or, perhaps more euphemistically, "kitsch".

Following the dinner (and a wonderful trip to the loo!), we went to visit my Eritrean buddies at the "International restaurant", where they serve lovely macchiatos (as long as the power or generator is on!). Since there's a huge football (um, I mean, soccer) match (game) on tonight (Man United vs. Barcelona in some Champions League), the inside was jam-packed with people watching the match (game) on satellite tv. So we moved out to the little verandah to drink our coffee. I wanted to take a few photos, but sitting on the side of the road in the evening with a bunch of white folks and flashing your camera everywhere is a good way to draw attention to onesself. So I turned the flash off and got some rather "artistic" photos of the experience :) Here's one of Jackie about to indulge in a macchiato.


(oh, someone must have scored - the whole town just went up in a roar!)

Now I must run along and check out the score on the internet or something because this is going to be the hot topic of conversation tomorrow in our Arabic lesson - our teacher is quite a football (soccer) fan!