08/11/09

I ate seven mangos today. We got up at about 6am in typical Mozambique fashion, made mango and banana crepes, and just hung out in their yard for most of the morning. They have shade cover over part of their yard (essential because it gets hot!), and have a few kids who basically live in their yard. For lunch we went to town and met up with a bunch of other volunteers who live in the area and their visiting trainees. After we went to the beach near their house. It is perfectly acceptable to have alcohol in public here, so we all bought beers and walked down the beach with them. The large beers are actually cheaper here than the regular (16oz) beers because the large bottles are returnable, so being the environmentally conscious Peace Corps volunteers we are, we all got the big ones. At the end of the beach is a small mountain and we climbed to the top where the view was gorgeous: the Indian Ocean on one side and palm trees as far as you can see on the other. We couldn’t find a chapa back to their house, so we walked for a while until we were able to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Giving rides and hitchhiking are pretty common here, to the point that it’s rude to drive by people without picking them up.