Out and About

... and don't forget to say that with a Canadian accent, eh?

Anyway, our Canadian numbers on the compound swelled to THREE of us yesterday!  A friend of a friend breezed through town on Monday evening.  So she came to stay with us here, and I spent most of the day on Tuesday with her, helping her to buy a plane ticket out of here, and making sure her paperwork for immigration was all in order.  Actually, it wasn't in order at all, but thankfully, our master of all things is here, and R was able to get it all figured out for her.  Of course, the figuring out for her required a trip to the airport immigration desk.  And unfortunately, because of the timing of her flight, the trip to the airport had to happen exactly at the same time that the body of a recently deceased VIP was being flown back to town. 

I've never seen so many people and so much security at that airport!  It was truly a sight to behold.  There were literally busloads of people coming to the airport to "welcome" this guy's body.  And pretty much everyone was dressed to the nines, too.  Because the airport was under serious security, R told me and Sean to stay in the landcruiser out in the parking lot while he took my friend, along with her passport and papers, into the scrum which was the airport terminal.  I had a great time sitting in the back of the landcruiser, watching the comings and goings (ok, mostly comings!) of the people and admiring all the beautiful dresses.  I'm itching to get a new dress, as my head turns when I see any sort of beautiful African print dress these days... anyways, Sean got pretty tired of hearing me exclaiming about all the beautiful dresses, so he tuned me out after a very short time.

So I just sat there, yacking to myself about all the people wandering by.  In fact, I started to feel a bit of affinity to the polar bears who used to live in the zoo in my hometown.  Those poor bears seemed to just sit all day in their cage and watch the people go by.  They were white creatures, in a world that didn't quite fit them.  But they probably had a great time chatting about what the people outside the cage were doing!

And speaking of cages, I was locked in my little landcruiser cage again today while R went into the traffic police office to pick up some folks' driver's licenses.  Funny thing was, where my little 'cage' was parked was overlooking the place where the traffic police give their driving tests!  The police had somehow hobbled together a bit of a shelter, made from some old tin, cardboard and what literally looked like an old metal cage.  And there they sat, under the shade of their "post", watching drivers park between big red cones.

Hmmm... I'm sure I've seen other interesting bits on all my drives out lately.  It's been good to be able to get off the compound and see some new places in the last few days.  I get a bit of cabin fever if I just sit at my desk all the time.  Today I also went out to the market and bought a lovely little pumpkin. I'm really excited to try a bit of a different vegetable.  I can almost taste the roasted pumpkin and pumpkin soup already.  Mmmm... I love the rainy season!