Oops, or mea culpa

So, I realized a few moments after pressing publish on that last pot that it had actually been only three days since I had checked my email. I am very sorry. Down to the good stuff, though.

I am in Lilongwe, Malawi. One time I had a conversation with Miriam about cities that had beautiful names, and Lilongwe is one of them. Unfortunately, Malawi also has a hot election coming up in about a week, so it seems like it's not exactly the safest place to be at the moment.

So what happened between the last blogpost and this one? About a billion things.

From Jinja, we hightailed it to Kampala. Kampala is huge and crazy, hot and hilly. We were only there for a few hours, and didn't do much to really feel the city. We went to the white mall, saw a movie--Duplicity, which was surprisingly okay, but maybe that's because I've only been watching Nigerian movies--and drank beer and ate ground nuts on the roof of the white mall.

From there, we took an overnight bus to Kigali--sorry Mimi, the overnight buses are jut too convenient to miss out on. We got to the border a little after dawn. It was chilly and misty. The most striking thing about Rwanda, I think, is how clean it is. Besides outlawing plastic bags, there are cleanup crews all over the place. My friend Peter peeled an orange while we were waiting at the border. Like he would have done in Kenya, he dropped the peel on the ground. A man came over with a piece of paper, picked up the peel that had dropped, and put it near Peter's feet for the rest of the peel. Bizarre.

And into Kigali. Rwanda is mountainous, and incredibly cultivated. It seems like every inch of the mountains is covered with farms. A few kilometers in, I saw the first memorial of the genocide. It was a sign fixed into a rock wall, with some words in black letters in Kinyarwanda, and "Jenocide" in red.

So Kigali is beautiful, Milles Collines or whatever. But really not worthy of an "or whatever."

I don't know how Rwanda has done it, really. Kigali is clean and beautiful, and in the countryside, people plant gardens that are just for beauty. There are decorative gardens! We couldn't find any foreign banks in the city--maybe that has something to do with it? All of the motorcycle drivers--motos are a legit form of transportation here--wear helmets, and carry a helmt for their passenger. They're also only allowed to carry one passenger.

Went to the genocide memorial in Kigali. Peter asked a man on the street where the museum was. The man said, "there is no museum in Kigali." Peter said, "the genocide mueum," and the man replied with a "gai gai gai," which is the noise you make when you're surprised.

The genocide is something I've been interested in since high school, one of those obsessive fixations people have, but I still can't understand it really. I've read that there's a culture of obedience, that people who didn't participate were risking their lives, but it still seems unimaginable. I told my friend Kat that I wish I could go back in time and stop it, and she said that I should think about how to stop things like that happening in the future. Hello, Kenya 2012.

IN ANY CASE then we went to Tanzania, where everyone lied to us and we were tangled in transit for 5 suckful days. Tanzania sucks.

And into Malawi. Where there is not much of anything. We were going to take a ferry down the lake, but we got to the launch point and the price had gone up $150 since our Lonely Planet was published. So we said no way and got a room for 400 Kwacha, about 3 bucks, (100 Kwacha too many in my opinion) and spent the night in Chilumba. Chilumba, Malawi, where there are two things to do: drink and watch people drink. I had a beer, it started to pour, we sprinted to our room.

Next morning, we walked to Chitimba, had a weird interaction with a girl named Grory which I won't forget and which made me feel angry, and terrible for feeling angry.

Everyone--and I mean everyone--asked us for money in Malawi.

We stayed by the beach in Chitimba for 2 days, which was perfect. Lake Malawi, despite having some raging Billharzia, is beautiful. The waves were big and pushed you around, but they weren't salty, so we didn't mind.

So yesterday we hitchhiked to Lilongwe. The very first car we saw stopped, and lo and behold, was heading to Lilongwe! So we jumped in.

Our companions were two men. One named Rafael, from Tanzania. Short, bulgy eyes, talked fast. The other was the most massive man I've seen. He turned around in the drivers seat, pronounced some deep syllables that I think were his name. He had a scar over and under his right, bloodshot eye. He was wearing a green, leopard-print shortsleeve shirt of indeterminate slinky material, along with a gold chain around his neck, and some serious wrist bling. Rafael exlained that he was from the DR Congo.

They said they were going to Mozambique on business. When we asked them what kind of business, they laughed. Turns out they do some hustling of diamonds and other gem stones and precious metals around DRC, South Africa, Mozambique. We didn't have the guts to ask if what they were doing was illegal.

And now we're in Lilongwe. It's been ages since we've been on computers, so we decided to do it, finally.

Also, I understand that my phone isn't working. I haven't had service since coming into Malawi, but I am alive, and hope to get some service in Zambia. If not, South Africa will hook me up, I'm sure.

In any case, I'll leave you with a joke. In Kenya, when you call a person whose phone is off or out of range, you say they are "Mteja." This word just means "customer," but it has to do with the message you get when you call the phone, which goes somthing like, "Samahani, mteja ya nambari uliopiga something something iko sasa." Since we've been out of range, Kat and I have been making jokes about the most terrifying Samahani (which means somthing like excuse me) messages.

Samahani, your daughter has been kidnapped by diamond smugglers.
Samahani, your daughter's night bus has rolled somewhere between Lusaka and Windhoek.
Samahani, your daughter has decided to marry a Kenyan.

Kwa heri!