Since we had traveled for Christmas, we decided to spend New Year’s day in our site and welcome in 2010 with our Mozambican neighbors and friends. The weather continues to be sunny and summery, not quite congruous with the holiday season, but enjoyable nonetheless. We also received our first visitors to our new home, two Peace Corps Volunteers traveling through to Malawi. We decided to celebrate by attempting to create a Spanish menu out of local ingredients. Our gazpacho and fried peppers got thumbs up, but our tortilla Espanola experienced some technical difficulties (non-stick pans do not exist here). Obviously no manchego cheese, chorizo or olives were available, but it was enough to remind us of all our pleasant memories from summers in Spain!
The local Nyau celebrated the festive season in full costume with a raucous session of exuberant dancing, while channeling various animal forces. We were given chairs front and center so that we could fully experience African culture. Although we have been sleeping before 10pm almost every night here in Africa, we made a special effort to make it to midnight for New Year’s. We regretted not having any types of bomb bags or silly string or fire crackers available for the occasion, but we have no accessible Chinatowns in this region of the world! People made noise instead with drums or any kind of drum like objects, in our case our water buckets, at the stroke of midnight (or our clock-less neighbors best estimates of when midnight should be). People seemed more tired than usual January 1st, but still managed to celebrate with church and soccer. We celebrated by sleeping in!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment