Ups and Downs

Beyond the fairly constant exhaustion of just figuring out how to live in a new place and being mostly dehydrated most of the time no matter how much water and fluorescent orange squash is consumed (hello hot, dry season), there are ongoing emotional highs and lows that certainly keep things interesting.

Friday morning I triumphantly track down a candy thermometer (for yogurt making) and reasonably priced q-tips. It’s the little things, really. Then Nathaniel calls with the news that he is physically holding our duty exemption letter for the car, an item that has been standing in the way of our purchase for more than a month. Hallelujah! I’m happily puttering around the kitchen warming up lunch when I realize that my wallet is missing, meaning I’ve lost the driver’s license that would allow me to drive our new car and the ATM card that is a life-blood in a totally cash-based economy where the maximum per-transaction withdrawal limit is $133.00 (MK 20,000).

Luckily kwacha bills don’t really fit into US wallets, so the real cash stash is safely in the inside pocket of my purse and I’m able to take the bus back to City Center and Nathaniel’s office. I have a crying, “I want to go home” breakdown when I arrive – the first and only real one of the trip. Getting around here is REALLY hot and fairly restricted with no car and I can’t believe that I won’t be able to drive for another month or two while we wait for a new license to arrive.

Nathaniel is waiting for a copy of a different letter from earlier in the process (we want to have all possible pieces of paperwork with us when we arrive at the Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) to process our duty free purchase) but the soft copy of the letter has been corrupted by a computer virus (which seem to run rampant in the OPC office) and the ladies with the hard copy are out to lunch. With Nathaniel’s help I pull myself together and go to stand on the corner where all of the mini busses pass by. I’m looking for an older bus with really nice new maroon seats (enough of an anomaly that I’d noted it during the fated lost wallet ride).

Amazingly, I locate the bus! The driver and conductor, thinking I’ll cause trouble, deny that I’ve ever been on their bus, but the other riders are sympathetic and let me search the metal floor. No wallet, of course – at least 30 riders have cycled in and out by now, and someone has clearly taken it. At least now I’ve done all I can and can feel confident that canceling and reordering the ATM card is the right thing to do.

We finally have all the paperwork and fight our way through the blocks-long petrol lines (will we even be able to find enough petrol to drive once we have our own vehicle?!) to hitch a ride to the MRA from our trusty taxi driver, Davies. We’re sent to the “fast track” office (very promising!) where the guy looks at all of our paperwork, nods, agrees, says things look good…and then points out that we’re missing form C-102, which needs to be filled out by the seller and the buyer in triplicate.

And so it goes – the couple we’re meeting for a “sundowner” (happy hour) drink are an hour late, but turn out to be really fun. We have people over for homemade pizza, which comes out delicious, but Nathaniel has caught a cold (miserable in this heat) and can’t enjoy our newfound social success. Whew! Too much! And that doesn’t even begin to cover the retrieval of the wallet (a guy calls the number of a woman whose card I have in my wallet who calls me with his number and we go to retrieve my wallet and license and ATM cards – useless to people here with no internet or credit card purchasing in stores – this morning).

What will this week bring – is it possible that we’ll actually be driving our car tomorrow?! 

Evening Pursuits

It took me so long to write the last post that I’m already ready for a new one on a different topic! As previously mentioned, evenings here are long (the sun goes down at 6) and slow. We’re finally getting a little familiar with the scene, and finding some friends to help us share the time. So what have we been up to?

Wednesday nights folks hang out at The Shack for the weekly volleyball tournament. Fueled by cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer, the international crowd hangs around outdoor picnic tables gossiping and nominally cheering on the various teams. In the A bracket, teams are composed mostly of Malawians with a few serious expats sprinkled in. The B bracket consists of inexperienced players, and those who want to drink beer between rotations. Nathaniel even finds someone [Dale, South African climate adaptation specialist] to play rounds of darts with.

Friday we host our first real dinner party. Dave [visiting American pastor] and Haley [teacher and, currently, pastor’s wife] live down the street from us and are thankful to take a break from the fishbowl of living in a church-owned house with a church-loyal staff. Cooking up homemade pasta sauce and pasta with only one big pot takes a little juggling, but Dave and Haley are sufficiently distracted by the joy of drinking wine and beer (pastors don’t drink here) that they don’t seem to notice. : )

We’ve also brought a little homemade yahtzee set. Here’s us playing in the dark one night when the power is out. Don’t mind the typical Brooks picture face – we're having a good time:

 And last night, in need of some longer entertainment and with the help of loyal Wikipedia, we divvy up the Bananagrams tiles and make a scrabble board on the back of our corn flakes box. Christin, our new roommate, joins us for a round.

“New roommate?” you may ask. Yes, we were going back and forth on having someone join us here, but were rattling around in the house a little (not a lot of furniture, books or tchokies to help it feel full!) and are excited about using the extra income to travel while we’re here. Christin [education researcher for the World Bank] posted that she needed a place to live, we responded and had her to dinner Tuesday and, wanting to get out of her hotel, she moved in yesterday. So far so good! (Don’t worry, Laura, there’s still plenty of room for visitors!)

Next steps? Homemade Scattergories and the founding of a pub trivia night! 

On Having Your Underwear Ironed

I’ve described other day-to-day aspects of living here, but have not yet talked about the bizarreness of having a domestic staff. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this post all week but have been having a tough time sorting through the cultural nuance, internal conflict and new relationships in a way that does the topic justice. Nonetheless, here we go…

We are warned before coming that it is expected that mzungus will employ local Malawians and provide much needed jobs. From the comfort of our Somerville living room we consider this concept in the abstract, conclude that it makes us entirely uncomfortable, and put the matter aside until it needs to be faced. Which turns out to be sooner rather than later.

Phinious, our housekeeper, is already living in the so-called “boy’s quarters” when we rent our place. Our lovely landlady, Barbara, hates to displace people, so she has allowed him to stay on after the previous tenants sell and leave. She encourages us to give him a chance. The first time we meet, a few days before our formal move-in date, Phinious is meek and silent and the usually generous Barbara, who has translated much of the conversation, uncharacteristically informs us that many Malawian domestic staff don’t work very hard and have to be constantly prodded. Already feeling entirely weird about having someone do our day-to-day household chores, we depart feeling like we’ve made a huge mistake renting our own place at all.

Phinious must just have been nervous about his fate the day we met because in reality, he takes a great deal of initiative and his English is quite good. From ensuring the garden is immaculately swept and watered to hand-washing, sun-drying and crisply pressing our clothes (including underwear), he finds ways to keep productively busy all day with rare intervention from me. [As a side note, the only reason we allow Phinious to go to the trouble of ironing underwear is because according to our guide book, there is a species of fly that lays eggs on drying laundry which will subsequently hatch in your skin unless clothes are ironed first. A fate we are hoping to avoid, especially in sensitive regions!] In conversation I’ve learned that Phinious finished secondary school and has a coveted MSCE, but thinks housekeeping is his best option for now as he saves to try to go back to school to do HIV/AIDS intervention and care work.

Patrick is our night guard. He arrives on his bicycle (apparently from about two hours distance by cycle) at five pm – just as dusk falls. When I ask if he would prefer to try to find something closer to his home, he assures me that there are plenty of other people there who have taken the available jobs nearer there, and that he is more than happy to travel so far for employment. Patrick is older and had definitive views on how he should do his job and how we should take care of the garden. He sits outside our house all evening, departing before we arise in the morning to rest at home where a wife and five young children await. Like Phinious, he is responsible and self-starting, leaving us to wonder whether Barbara’s comment was colored by local beliefs about “lower classes”, or whether we’ve just gotten lucky (soon after we moved in, Barbara’s housekeeper stole the $4000 US that we’d pay for our security and first three month’s rent and has subsequently been located with the cash on his person and jailed.)

We’ve acquired a new American roommate (as of yesterday) and a Malawian renter of the other boy's quarters (who we met during our stay at Annie’s Lodge when we first arrived) so there are now five people living here and others that come and go. Compared to many other expats, this is a tiny staff. Some of the folks I’ve met have 6 or more adult employees, some of whom live at the house with their families, but we are thankful to have kept things small. It’s a different feeling of community – a delicate balance of civility, nuanced power structures, tentative friendship and compromise. Among us we share the newspaper, sometimes food, information, language instruction and water and power outages. More intimate than US living and simultaneously more formal and hierarchical.

As I haven’t processed through feelings about all of this, I could probably blather on indefinitely trying to investigate shades of interpretation, but I’ll leave things here for now. 

Sufficiently Stamped

As our temporary residence permits have yet to materialize (surprise, surprise – the wheels of government turn slowly indeed) and we’d reached the end of our 30 day tourist visa (hard to believe it’s already been a month) this morning it was time for an outing to immigration. Fun!

We arrive right at nine, planning to beat the crowds, only to find the office had been open since 7:30am. We wander in to the visa section, thinking perhaps the early crowds have come and gone. Muli bwanje’s all around and we sit down to fill out a simple one-page form. So far so good. The immigration officer signs our completed forms and we get stamp #1. Hauling out a stack of kwacha, I think we’re home free, only to be told we must go to the other department to pay our extension fees.

Flash forward to the other side of the building, a room packed with several different queues of people waiting for various things. We’re directed to the teller queue, only five people long. Great. Well, it would be great if each person didn’t take at least five minutes. Hmmm...

Flash forward again and we’re at the teller, a charming young man in a striped shirt and short tie (apparently a Malawian fashion; many are worn no longer than mid-chest) whose booth is either bizarrely sunk into the floor, or equipped with the world’s shortest desk. Either way, he processes our paperwork quickly, adding stamp #2 and #3 to our single-page forms and printing out a receipt in quadruplicate(?), each copy of which receives its own stamp. We receive two of these apiece and are cordially waved on to the next window.

At this mysterious second window another clerk, this one wearing what appears to be the matching tie and vest combo from a wedding tux (complete with faux-diamond stickpin) records the information from our receipts into a giant ledger, peels off a carbon copy for us (to which he duly applies stamp #4), applies stamp #5 to our original form (just for completeness) and sends us on our way.

Back over at the visa section, the original immigration officer examines our paperwork again, applies stamp #6 to the form (which is duly filed… or something) and, finally, we get lucky stamp #7 in the passport itself, clearing us for another 30 days in country.

Start to finish: seven stamps in sixty minutes.

Lake of Stars

It turns out that music festivals at beach resorts are fairly ideal. What do you do in the morning? Take a swim, lounge on the beach and read, maybe play a game of chess on a giant outdoor board. And once the music kicks in there is a long evening of sitting and dancing in soft sand, Carlsberg Green or Malawi Gin and Tonic balanced nearby. Our car-mates for the trip, the previously mentioned Daniel (agronomist) and Finn (fiddler), along with Lucy (Daniel and Finn’s new roommate – an Australian who just happened to live in Currier House before graduating ’02 at Harvard and is here doing HIV/AIDS research for her Ph.D.) are lovely company. And it is fun to get out of the city and explore more of this beautiful country. Of course a play-by-play of the full 72 hours will bore you to tears, so I’ll stick to observations, themes and highlights like…

…ants. Rather than pay for a hotel room, we decide to camp at the festival. Overall this works out great. It’s a nice campground with decent facilities and our tent and homemade sheet-weight sleeping bag system is nicely functional. There’s just one minor, teensey-weensie problem…or rather hundreds of thousands of them. The campground is one giant ant pile! After a rough first night – lots of ant friends in the tent trying to get to our ripening bananas as well as thumping dance music from the festival until 4:30am – we do a massive and coordinated morning ant attack, stow the food in the car, and move the zippers to a more strategically placed closure position. Night two sees only a small infestation of ants that come in with our now-dry towels and with the help of our trusty headlamp and the Malawian version of Spare Change news, we manage to kill them off. Too bad we return home to a herd of the little guys in our kitchen!

Contrast is everywhere. We drive through the hot, dry Malawian bush for more than four hours to get to the Lake of Stars music festival in Mangochi. When we arrive, a thin strip of palm trees and more lush vegetation fed by the lake makes it feel like we could be on a tropical beach anywhere in the world. Walk outside the resort gates and you’re back to a land of fetid drainage pools and dry scrub. At $60US per ticket, the festival costs as much as our housekeeper makes in a month, meaning that only the wealthiest Malawians are able to attend. Just outside the gates there is a pop-up market filled with tchokies and food vendors selling chambo (local fish), grilled corn, boiled eggs, and roasted chicken. Small boys ask every mizungu for empty water bottles, and locals settle in on the public beach to listen to the music from across the fence.

And then there was the “old married people” factor. Most of the expats here seem to fall into an “middle aged with kids” or a “young and single/significant other is continents away” category. We’re clearly somewhere in the middle. At the festival, we showed our age by hitting the sack at midnight each evening without boozing heavily. Perhaps even more indicative, in the morning I am glad for feeling well-rested while our compatriots who stayed to the end of the live music at 3:30 blearily down cups of coffee in an attempt to wake up.

In the end, we’re home sun-tired and feeling a little gross after a weekend of greasy festival-vendor food, but glad we went to the trouble of securing tickets and a ride. Check out pictures of the journey here. 

On Food and Cooking

Of course one always assumes new foods will be encountered while traveling or living abroad. More striking to me are the foods you expect to taste the same that don’t. Sugar vs. corn syrup is a fairly ubiquitous switch world-wide, of course. (I remember the Mexican-led run on kosher, sugar-based, Coca-Cola near the Jewish holidays when I lived in Allston.) And we have been drinking a ton of full-sugar soda here (hello three flavors of Fanta – orange, pineapple and passion). But it’s been interesting how tomatoes and eggs and oranges taste different too. Points out just how used we are to the singular tastes of mass-produced American products.

Nathaniel and I have been so spoiled by our well-stocked Boston kitchen! It is a fun challenge figuring out old favorites using sub-par equipment and slightly different ingredients, and trying to learn how to cook with local flavors. And with only three pots and no microwave, there is a lot of juggling things around for storage and re-heating. Some of my favorite experiments so far:

Caramel Popcorn

We were jonesin’ for some comfort food a few nights back and decided to take a stab at one of our favorite desserts, despite having no corn syrup, no microwave (our Boston method is crazy and stove-free) and only raw sugar! Enter some popcorn that I bought for 200 kwacha at the local market, “golden syrup” (pancake syrup made from…you guessed it, sugar not corn) our mini cooker and the caramel syrup recipe from our new resource, “The Malawi Cookbook”. All is going well with the caramelizing process and Nathaniel’s popped up a first batch of corn. We realize that these home-grown puppies aren’t nearly as big once popped as the commercial corn we’re used to and go to make a second batch. But wait! What are those little black things in the corn? The dreaded corn-burrowers? Indeed – lots of the kernels have little holes eaten right through them and those little black things are bugs. We actually go through with eating the caramel corn, which comes out surprisingly tasty – after all, those bugs are well cooked and bugs are a great source of nutrition according to our Malawi cook book! For those of you who can’t imagine Nathaniel eating popcorn with known bugs in it, I admit that I am also impressed! We do get rid of the remaining dried stuff ;)

Nsima with Soya “Chicken a al King”

Nsima with “relish” is the basic staple food here in Malawi. It’s really fine-ground maize cooked into a stiff porridge (you can cut it with a knife when cool). Dried cream of maize is super cheap, and we’re intrigued by the line of Imana super soya mince products, which are also very inexpensive. We choose the “Chicken a la King” flavor, which seems less dicey than Oxtail or Mutton (Arinda, are you salivating yet?). We follow the recipe on the Imana box for “Chilli Braai Pap” – soya mince, an onion, tomato and some maize meal. Of course the instructions about how much water to add are contradictory and the original recipe is HUGE, so we wing it a bit. Final verdict? Corn-soya mash a little like baby food, but not bad.

Pancakes!

Pancakes are a weekend morning tradition for Nathaniel and I and it was hard to feel settled until we were able to cook some up. Luckily, pancake ingredients are easy to find the world over, and although we can’t get any real Vermont syrup, the golden stuff isn’t too bad. We crafted our first batch last Saturday – good thing because the power was out Sunday morning and we had to settle for cereal and bread with jam. In fact, I also cooked up pancakes this morning, even though it’s a work day for Nathaniel. Given the heat, the unreliability of electricity, and the lack of things to do in the evening, everyone is on a very early schedule. We’ve shifted to a 6:30 wake-up with little trouble (yes, for those of you who know Nathaniel is not a morning person, this is also quite astonishing). We’ve gotten into quite a nice routine of yoga and working in the garden plus tea and breakfast. Seems livable!

Round One to the Garden

It’s seven am, morning birds are chirping, the sweet scent of burning grass wafts though the open window, and the (relative) cool of the night has yet to fade entirely beneath the onslaught of the sun… what better time to potter about in the garden a bit?

Now, just to be clear, the garden I’m talking about here isn’t the beautifully landscaped amalgamation of native grasses, shrubs, and flowers installed by our landlord’s gardener. Nor do I mean the tidy little patch of vegetables planted and tended by our housekeeper Phinious. No, the garden that has been calling me is the unkempt sprawl of baked red dirt and dry cornstalks that lies in the far corner of the lot. So much space! After Somerville’s postage-stamp properties (35 x 70, according to our deed) it seems an embarrassment of riches. Just think of all the vegetables! It’s so overwhelming I almost don’t know where to begin… but back to this morning: seizing our rake and hoe (a traditional spade-bladed Malawian model that Ariel has procured at the market), I stride purposefully about the space, my mind awash with visions of cucumbers and vine-ripe tomatoes. I quickly site a compost pile, rake together the loose cornstalks, and then reach for the hoe. With the first few swings I know something is up. What’s the soil made of around here, concrete?! Oh for the tender toil of spading up the soft, heavy Homer humus! I make it approximately six feet down the first row before the traditional Malawian hoe raises some nice blisters… unclear if these are also traditional. In any case, I’ve clearly done enough pottering about for one morning.

You may have won this one garden, but I’ll be back… and next time I’ll be wearing gloves.

Chain of Events

In August, when Nathaniel travels here to check things out and be introduced to local partners, he also rents a room from Daniel (Dutch agronomist) for Johannes (Stanford grad student who completes a one month Project Healthy Children internship in Malawi). One of Daniel’s other roommates, Finn, is a bluegrass fiddler from North Carolina who is here making a charity album with Peter Mkwonda (Malawian hip-hop artist).

A few days after we arrive, Daniel and Finn take us out to one of the expat hang outs (Harry’s Bar). Finn mentions that I should get involved with the International Women’s Group of Malawi (IWAM).

Fiona (Irish national working for USAID) posts to the Lilongwe chat list about a weekly quilter’s group. I show up to the quilter’s group and, lo and behold, about half of the quilters are also heavily involved with IWAM. These are diplomat and NGO executive’s wives who have manufactured quite a weekly agenda–a thrice-weekly walking group and “hugging babies” (their words, not mine) at the orphanage besides quilting and IWAM– to keep busy while not working and with multiple staff members to keep house.

Perhaps you can tell that I’m a little turned off by the lifestyle of leisure. Nonetheless, they’re nice women and I’m trying to build connections with people. I get a phone number from Lauren (Canadia wife of a South African man who works for John’s Hopkins) and a promise of a ride to the next IWAM project committee meeting.

Meanwhile, I’m in Old Town at the Axa bus terminal buying tickets for our trip to Blantyre when I run into Finn, who is hanging out with Bella (grungy, raunchy Australian traveler he met during a weekend at the Lake) who has introduced him to Duncan (heavily tattooed Peace Corps volunteer). I invite myself to lunch and ask Duncan about what type of education work Peace Corps volunteers are doing. Duncan gives me the Jason’s (head of education placements for the Peace Corps) number.

Jason agrees to meet with me, gives a lot of good context and his thoughts on the areas of greatest need. Turns out, Malawi’s education system is strained to bursting. Since making primary education free for all in 1994 without the buildings, materials or teachers to create enough space, primary schools have bloated to unmanageable proportions. They operate in shifts with student teacher ratios of 200:1 in some places! Given all of these challenges, only about 35 percent of students actually complete standard 8, and only the 10 percent of those with the highest marks are accepted into government run secondary schools. There are, of course, many more young people who are hungry to learn, so the government has allowed communities to open their own schools (Community Day Secondary Schools – CDSS) which have minimal resources. In Jason’s estimation, these CDSSs are one of the places of greatest need, and he’s placed all his Peace Corps folks in them to try to shore up the secondary system. All of his folks are in rural areas, however, so he doesn’t know which schools in the city need people.

Fast-forward to the IWAM meeting two days later. The first agenda item is sponsorship for ten students and text books at the New State House Secondary School, which happens to be a CDSS and which also happens to be very near my house in area 12. Even more serendipitously, one of the women on the committee is going out to the school that afternoon to advocate for the daughter of her housekeeper and is willing to give me a ride.

This school is also overflowing with students. We’ve arrived between the morning CDSS shift and the afternoon Open and Distance Learning shift, which attempts to serve students who couldn’t make it into either the regular government schools or the CDSS due to space constraints, and who have scraped together the money to pay ODL fees. The school is stuffed to the gills, but there is a boisterous and positive atmosphere. When I mention to Evelyn (assistant head teacher) that I am a teacher possibly interested in volunteering, she gets very excited. There are 18 teachers at the school (for, I gather, about 700 students) and their Form 1 (9^th grade) English teacher is out indefinitely. We trade phone numbers and I promise to call to follow up next week. I still need to think a bit more and talk things over with Nathaniel (he’s been in Blantyre during most of this chain of events and phone calls are expensive) but it seems like a great place for me to spend my time and energy at first glance.

Oh and did I mention that I figure out on the car ride home that the woman who has taken me to New State House is none other than Celia Swann, the woman who wrote the only existing text-based course for learning Chechewa?

All of this strikes me a somewhat incredible. It’s the flow from person to person to deliver me at this school (I’m not above believing in fate). It’s also the smallness of the expat community here; incestuous, but also much more communal. Time will tell where Nathaniel and I fit into the web.  

Best Landlord Ever!

Not only has Barbara filled us in on many of the norms of life in Lilongwe (electricity is prepaid – credits are purchased at gas stations; it’s not just possible but actually preferred to pay the water/sewer bill in cash), provided our sole artwork (two pictures of sailing ships and a huge mirror) gratis, and found us a security guard (the amiable, bicycle-commuting Patrick), she even managed to produce an electrician on Sunday!

Resigned to a further day of restaurant food due to our cluelessness, we nonetheless called her to enquire about getting an electrician to hook up the cooker. Lo and behold, mid-morning Sunday an affable gentleman appeared on his bicycle, proceeded to wrench on some things, journeyed into town to find the correct outlet, and got both fridge and cooker up and running. Total cost: 2,000MK parts, 2,500MK labor.

Finally, our first meal in the new house. Here’s to you, Barbara Davidse.

Home Sweet House!

Despite a late return from Blantyre Friday (fist National Fortification Alliance meeting in a year and a half -- yes!) we hit the ground running Saturday morning. Nothing helps motivate for moving into one's own home like spending a miserable night on a swaybacked hotel bed and a breakfast of watery coffee, runny scrambled eggs and toast with radioactive marmalade (served in a Ranch sour cream and chives jar). Mmm-mmm good! Now get us to our house!

We suffer a bit of a false start when our taxi driver / fixer Davies somehow misconstrues nine o'clock to mean around tenish but manage to while away the time in preparation:

Even empty, the house is exciting! Take a virtual tour of the grounds here.

Once Davies finally arrives with two guys and a truck some further wrangling ensues as he tries to renegotiate the agreed-upon price. Having made it clear that isnít an option (no matter what it does to his margin for finding the truck) we eventually pile in and set out, only to make an immediate series of detours to hunt up some diesel. Cursed fuel shortage! Luckily, third gas station is the charm and we (finally) get under way around 11:30. Despite the congestion we eventually make it to our destination -- the fabled Star Trading Co, home of fridges and cookers galore! (For those of you wondering, a cooker is a stove and both it and the fridge are considered furniture and thus, sadly, not included in a standard rental agreement. Hence the pilgrimage.)

After some frenetic comparison shopping and a failed attempt to bargain on the price of the cooker, we become the proud owners of a set of matching Defy appliances. The rapture! Then itís on to Coffin Road (aka Lubani St. or, as Ariel would have it, the Ikea of Lilongwe) for a bed. Having already purchased the mattress (a Queen, at my request -- just couldnít stomach going back to having my feet hang off the end of a double every night) all we have to do is find a reasonable frame. Should be no problem, right? Well, turns out nobody on Lubani Street builds Queen frames on spec. But we already have the mattress... so we'll soon be taking delivery of a custom-built Queen-size platform. No assembly required. That tops regular Ikea in my book any day.

So as not to waste all that perfectly good room in the truck (and because our furnishings at this point consist of a large mirror and two random pictures of sailing ships, both provided by our landlady) we make a wicker stop. I think the picture here speaks for itself. Fortunately Kelius (driver) and his assistant are good natured about it and somehow manage to wedge everything in.

After unloading our purchases and releasing the truck, itís back into the shopping fray. First on the list: sheets. Or, since apparently Queen size sheet sets some sort of endangered species here, material from which to make sheets. (How is it possible we found the mattress and nothing else? Perhaps that solitary Queen-size mattress has been languishing in the showroom for years...) Four stores later, we hit the jackpot. By this point Iím suffering both sunburn and some serious consumer fatigue, but determined to escape the iniquities of further hotel food we press on, hunting for the bare essentials: pasta, sauce, a pot to heat them in on our new cooker, and a bottle of white to celebrate the move.

Home again, packing material strewn everywhere, and we go to plug in our new fridge. Round plug, square hole: strike one. If only weíd bought a nice bottle of red to celebrate with! But we can still have our pasta... or at least we could if our cooker had any kind of electrical cord: strike two. Accepting our fate, we schlep down to the Four Seasons and celebrate there, returning to tipsily rearrange wicker furniture (two love seats, two armchairs, a coffee table, a bookshelf, and a dining table with four chairs) before collapsing into bed, folded into our six meters of sheeting. There's no place like home!