Second Weekend

Thursday 6/3/10
Today was a public holiday, Martyr’s Day. So there wasn’t much to be done because nothing was open.

Friday 6/4/10
Went to catch up with another friend. She has been managing a health club. She was the one who took me to the market last summer to buy clothes. Hopefully we will get to go again this time. Grace made her Thai chicken for us today. It was soo good, just as good as I remember it from last time. It rained again today. It seems to be raining a lot more than last summer. I took Meagan to this BBQ restaurant today. It is funny because we have been having this ongoing conversation of exactly was gristle means. I thought it was the stuff left in the pan after you fry something. She thinks of it as the occasional rubbery piece that you get when you bite into a piece of meat. Anyway, she doesn’t like it, so I wasn’t sure how this adventure was going to go. The BBQ is different from what we think of as smoked meat with sauce. The bring out piece of meat that has been roasted on skewers with salt and this hot chili paste. I love it and think that it’s great, especially because you eat with your fingers and they bring sides of tomatoes, avocados, bananas, ect. So she didn’t like it too much.
From there we went to another place that I knew about where you could get fast food, burgers, milkshakes, pizza, etc. We had better luck while we were there ordering a pizza. I’m pretty sure that pizza has been my saving grace on several occasions since I have been coming here. It is just so nice to be able to order something, and you know approximately of what it is going to taste like, but since pizza is pretty versatile, it tastes good no matter what you put on it (for the most part).
From there we went out with some of our friends for the night. Ugandans really like to stay out late, so they we pretty surprised when we wanted to go home around one or so.

Saturday 6/5/10
Feel like I’m coming down with a cold. I spent a lot of time sleeping today and hanging around the house. Meagan wanted to go to a movie, so we made plans to go see “Sex and the City” at the shopping mall here. I really like how the shopping mall is arranged. It is an open air mall, but it gives you the feeling that it is enclosed because it has several floors and ramps to get from one floor to the next. It just has several points where windows would normally be, but are just left open. There was a lot of white people there too. I still can’t find anything in my size in the stores.
We went to the food court to get some food. I had never been to a food court here before. I should have known that it wasn’t going to be like what I expected. Immediately we were bombarded by restaurants that would have people standing out front trying to get us to take a look at their menu, i.e. trying to sell their food to us. They had a lot of ethnic food, but out of curiosity we went to the Lebanese restaurant because Meagan has a Lebanese heritage. We took and ordered the hummus, and it was actually really good, with fabulous pita bread. Ugandans aren’t really particular about their bread. I think that they eat bread that to me is almost stale. They don’t think the softness is important. So it was a pleasant surprise to have pita bread that was actually soft and malleable. We bought some to take home with us =).
We went to the movie next. A friend met us to see it. The line at the ticket booth was a free frall, like all other kinds of lines. I had to push my way to the front. When we went in the theater they screened us for weapons. The guard felt my purse and told me that I had a lot of “gadgets” in there. They didn’t look it it. They might have found my pocket knife and mace, but I suppose I couldn’t only do so much with that anyway. The theater was air conditioned! Weird. By now I’m accustomed to not having it. I was cold through most of the movie, but Meagan somehow managed to fit a sweater in her bag. I didn’t care for the movie that much. People were talking through the whole thing anyway, and our friend Jude kept answering his phone in the middle of the movie. Cell phone etiquette is one of my things, and it’s hard to set it aside. We always talk in anthropology about cultural relativism, which is the idea that you can’t pass judgment on other culture’s customs because those customs are the result of different historical processes and value systems. So I can tolerate all kinds of customs in Uganda, like polygamy and traditional healers, and all of the beliefs that people have surrounding HIV and AIDS that would bother most Americans, but I just can’t set aside the cell phone etiquette.
Our friend Jude took us home. He tends to pay for us a lot, which makes me uncomfortable at times, but when I buy something for him, like the movie ticket. It clearly makes him uncomfortable. Not sure what to do, might have to come to a compromise somewhere along the way. He really looks after us though. He wanted us to go out again that night, but we were both wiped out, and my throat was getting worse along with my mood. So he took us home. I think though his friends were disappointed when we went home. They seem to think that we are a lot of fun.

Sunday 6/6/10
The cold is better today. Staying in was a good idea. I’ve just been writing and sleeping through most of the day. I know that tomorrow will be busy, so trying to relax and enjoy the down time. I realized that we can even download music on the internet =).