Considering Vegetarianism
It’s comically humbling when the simplest life tasks leave you dumbfounded and useless, and in our case, a little hungry. We found a home, a beautiful apartment overlooking Lake Victoria. We are free from the perma-drunk backpackers of the guesthouses, the late night dance beats keeping us awake, and shared bathrooms. Now we can set up house, come and go as we please, cook our own food—or can we?
Our landlord is a kind old Belgian man, who made his fortunes as a plantation (I mean agro-farm) owner in the Congo. He and his strikingly beautiful, 16-years-younger Congolese wife took us on a tour of the neighborhood— the supermarkets, restaurants and bars. “This is where you can buy the meats” he said, motioning towards a concrete roomful of whole, skinned mammals hanging from medieval hooks. We looked at each other wide-eyed—we don’t really know how to begin to prepare a whole goat, or even which pieces of cow to ask for.
Thus began a series of perplexing questions on how exactly we were going to eat. Milk only comes in a bag. Trying to pour it into a teapot (the only suitable container, we decided), I lost most of it down the drain trying to control the unwieldy sack. Trying to cut a pineapple and avoid the prickly bits left us with about ¼ of a pineapple. Bananas, it seems, are only available by the ton, and the butter we bought smells more like cheese. Eggs all look the same but are labeled “white eggs” or “yellow eggs” (what does that mean?) and we have no idea how to transport them home as they come with no box. The massive 10-gallon water bottle provided to us by our landlord weighs more than both of us combined, and we had to have the gate-guard bring it inside for us. Thankfully, we have stocked up on peanut butter and jam.
After an unsuccessful dinner (I wouldn’t allow either of us to eat the frankfurters as I was overcome by paranoia of some brain-melting pork disease, and they were awful tasting anyway), we resigned ourselves to watching a DVD we picked up at the grocery store. Eight movies for four dollars on one disc, fantastic! After about ten minutes–just enough to get into the film, each one stopped working. We crawled under our mosquito net and went to bed, determined to do better in the morning. Surely breakfast would be easier.
-Anna
anna @ April 15, 2007