7 quick takes

1. It's been ages since I wrote a proper 7 quick takes and I am really sorry for that. (Mainly sorry for ourselves as it means that many memories will go undocumented and therefore probably move to the back of our minds where they will drown in a sea of things that should have been remembered but did not survive the cut.) Anyway, I have good reasons. The main one being that October was very very busy, we are starting to believe that our marketing strategies are working and the lodge has been a busy beehive of activity (at least compared to what it was when we came.).  But fortunately I have been taking notes of events that should never be doomed to the sea of the forgotten and now that it's a relatively quiet Saturday morning, the girls are playing and Hartmut is reading, I have time to add some meat to dry notes to make them tastier and easier digestible (don't worry, I don't make up that meat, it's all true 😜).
2.  I got distracted. It's Saturday afternoon now, the lake is still and calm and the girls, who are splashing in it, the opposite of that. Their giggles and happy screams make me very happy as they were grumpy little muppets just a few minutes ago. They just woke up from a nap on this sweltering Saturday afternoon and the best thing we could do after waking up sweaty and hot was to jump back in the lake, eventhough we had been playing in it all morning already. While the girls are swiming I look for delicious ripe mangoes. We are in the middle of mango season and we definitely get the recommended amount of vitamin c each day as all we snack on these days is mangoes. The earth is littered with mangoes and as I am looking more fall down. However,we cannot eat all of them. Most have been plucked by the monkeys who take one or two bites out of them before throwing them down. It feels a bit wasteful and the result is the constant smell of rotting mangoes but training the monkeys to change their habits seems difficult so we will just live with it and eat whatever they did not eat.
3. We don't use laundry lines but the strong sun bakes the dark rocks on the lake shore all day long; creating a perfect space for drying laundry quick and crisp. Every now and then a strong wind blows light items such as napkins and underwear into the surrounding shrubs or rocks but hardly anything goes missing until one day one of the staff members realised that her knickers had disappeared. She looked everywhere but coupd not find them and realised that they were probably gone. A few days later she looked up in one of the trees where a pair of hamerkopfs was building a nest. For weeks they had been flying with sticks, bits of fluf and anything they could get their hands (er beak) on. A familiar piece of fabric was sticking out of their gigantic nest (they were building onto an old previously used nest). We all had a good laugh but she was determined to get her underwear back so she got a long stick and climbed the tree until she could reach it and  removed it from the nest with a quick sqing of the stick. I hope that my underwear stays untouched as my tree-climbing-pole-flicking skills are not as advanced.
4. The days here might be slow but they are never boring and often things happen that we could have never predicted or made up. Like the day we went to stay with mr Bombwe, one of our staff members who lives in a village high up in the mountain. His family had kindly cleared a room for us so that we could sleep but before we entered they warned us that there was something in the room that did not want to be moved. I was curious to see what that was but could hardly believe my eyes when I saw what they were talking about. In the corner of the small room was a hen sitting on her eggs. She did not move, even when we came closer and that's how we got to spend the night with a hen, just a meter away from our heads.
5. We stayed with mr Bombwe because we were invited to a wedding in his village. We did not know the couple very well but I find it hard to believe that most of the other 3000 guests who were present were all close friends and family and we were very curious. The wedding was nothing like I expected but very entertaining nonetheless. The only comparison with any of the weddings that I had been to was the white dress of the bride but otherwise it was all different. The entire party was basically a big fundraiser to fund the party and all that happened was people comitting to give money in many different money games and money dances. Some where about counting steps where each step was worth a certain amount, others about dancing around the happy couple and literally showering them with notes of 50 and 100 kwatcha and even gifts in envelopes (like ours) were publicly opened and the amount were read out, together with the name of the giver. It seemed to be much more about showing of the generosity of the guests (the more generous, the more celebration) than the guests and people who gave most got a ticket to eat at the table where meat was served where others who gave less got a slip for table 2 where you got fed but not with meat and cooldrinks. The most entertaining part was the master of ceremony who tirelessly spurred people on to give more money. I have never seen anyone dance, act, sing amf motivate the way he did. After the wedding I learned that he would receive a percentage of the proceeds and I understood his fanatism a little better. The whole event took place on a big sport field where most people were sitting in the hot sun. We were settling for a place like that too but as soon as the mc discovered us in the crowd he stopped the gift-giving and ushered us to a place under the canopy next to the bridal party. It also did not really seem to matter how much money we gave because we got a place at the meat table anyway and when the bridal party got served drinks we got them too while everybody else had to buy them themselves.  We left when the sun started to set but from we were staying we could still hear the money giving going on for hours. The days after that 'wedding' was a favourite game; Doris would sit down with a veil on her head while Sophie danced around chanting the amounts that she would give to the bride. I wonder if they will be dissapointed if the next wedding that we go to (a Ugandan wedding in December) is going to be very different.
6. Besides getting immersed in the local culture, one of the most interesting things of living here is the kind of guests that comes here. It's almost as if we travel but instead of going to see the world, the world comes to us. We have lately shared supper with a Malawian crocodile hunter, a Swedish farmer, a French actress and an Australian doctor and many many more interesting people. However, we are getting a rather skew picture of what the adult population of the world looks like as most of our guestsb no matter where they are from, are highly educated, open minded left thinkers who rather invest their time and money in travel and experiences than in material things. They are mostly people who love discussing the state of the world and have informed opinions about it. It will be weird when we go back to the 'real world' where the population is much more diverse.
7. The wind is picking up, the sun is starting to set and it's time to start cooking. The kitchen is a bit empty as our supplies are only coming in on the boat again tomorrow but I am excited about our food anyway. We will be eating "mujadara stuffed cabbage with minted tomato sauce'.  It's a recipe from my Smitten Kitchen cookbook and I am yet to find a recipe from her that will disappoint me. Yesterday the food was great too. We made a big fire on the rocks, prepared soup in a South African potjie and roasted stick bread in the fire while listening to the waves and watching the lights if the fishermen in the distance. Aren't we lucky?!