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!