sweet elevator

I forgot to mention before that the hotel has a fantastic open elevator, a version of which I'm sure was original to the building, one of those where you open the door as if stepping into an ordinary room when the elevator gets to your floor and the walls are mostly just an iron grate. It's beautiful.

Today was more of the same. Aman, Emma and I went to a little Italian restaurant for lunch. We sat outside at a picnic table and enjoyed our pasta and Cokes. My Coke can was noticeably sturdier than your average US can. Lunch was fun, we cracked each other up quite about talking about everything from Aman's youthful love of Jean-Claude Van Damme -- and confusion when he didn't win any Oscars! -- to how Mozambique is "Africa lite" compared to places like Addis Ababa and Abuja. That is, Mozambicans leave you alone when you walk down the street, crime is low, it's not horribly hot, etc. That sounds like an insensitive, essentializing comment, but from what I've heard and from what Aman and Emma said, it's true.

After getting back to the hotel I talked with Leanne, did some more email-type stuff and went to the gym before ordering room service again. It's expensive but not as expensive as the @*!# buffet. I'm not paying for it either way, of course, but jeez.

Tomorrow will be work all the way through, as we finally do the workshop, but I will try to take at least part of Friday off. The next time I come here I am definitely going to try to get to Swaziland. The Hlane National Park is only about 60 miles from Maputo and if you can join a group it's not so expensive to take a day trip out there. Lions and elephants and giraffes, oh my! I probably won't even get to swim in the ocean this time around. But that's finer than it would be in an ordinary week because I was just at the beach last week.

Last thing before sleep: This hotel, for all its niceness, kind of sucks. The food is insanely expensive and barely good and they don't have outlet adapters or shaving cream. What? Surely I'm not the first American to stay here and forget either of those things at home. Plus the staff don't speak enough English to understand what shaving cream IS, so when I asked for it (once and then again an hour later), two separate people brought me a shitty safety razor. Call it whining but for as much as AKF is spending for me to stay here, that's a pretty pathetic showing.