Market and minibuses

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This morning I woke up very early to the African songbirds. For breakfast we ate at the sunbird hotel, a fancy 4 star next door. The breakfast buffet offered all the North- American food we are used to plus delicious coffee and fresh Malawi fruit. After breakfast we set out to find cell phones, following a long walk and a few cab drives we found them at the same supermarket we visited during the previous day. For 2000k we got sim card phones and 300 units for 400k. We then headed to the pacific hotel to set up or phones and use the internet to send some emails. A short while after leaving the hotel I flagged down a poor cyclist with a huge stack of sugar cane on his bike. For 10 Kwacha he sold me my first sugar cane. Trying to devour it because it was so tasty I was ridiculed by the locals for eating it the wrong way. We wanted to get to the market so we headed towards the minibus station to take us down. A minibus resembles a beat down VW westfalia van with several seats inside, they always run at full capacity, and stopping for every person standing on the side of the road. It can be quite nerve-wreaking for a first timer. After being dropped off at the market we footed through the hundreds of stalls and shacks of vendors, each selling the same stuff as the next. Each stall consisted of a beat down wooden frame roofed with a sheet of rippled steel or tarp. I was quite overwhelmed with the whole experience, walking trough the narrow path way through the stalls, I felt like I was in a maze with no sense of directions or even sight of the sky. Suddenly we came across a handmade really sketchy bridge crossing the river which separated both sides of the market. A toll man charged us 10k to cross, on the other side we found ourselves in another maze of clothing vendors. We had to re-cross the river on the bridge to eventually make our way out of the market. To make our way back to the lodge we embarked on another minibus. Later that day we met with the CIDA consultant for Malawi. I later bumped into a local surveyor in the city center. For supper I tried local fried fish also known as “Chumbo” with some hand cut fries or chips. It was the first fish I ate with eyes still on it.

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Comments

[Jaime MacLellan]

Impressed!
Justin! I'm so impressed that within the first few days of being there you had already tried nsima and chambo!! I'm so jealous (well, not of the nsima...)!