Week 3: Uganda

You come from a country with watches, but you have no time.

-MC at the Ndere Cultural Center performance

This has been a week of luxury, filled with great food and incredible cultural experiences!

Our favourite meals this week came complete with delicious food, great atmosphere, wonderful company, and lots of laughs!

Dinner with Francois and Roxane at Cafesserie, Acacia Mall

Breakfast at La Patisserie      Enjoying local cuisine (and people watching!)

                                        at the Fish Market

We were able to attend the Ndere Cultural Center for a spectacular night of food, music and dancing from various tribes found in different corners of this country, and even beyond the borders of Uganda. The performers did such an amazing job, and we were even more impressed when we found out that most of them are teenagers who have been taken in and given a great education.

We continued to explore the streets and shops around us, and met more of the locals. We tried to find businesses that no longer exist, and stumbled upon lots of places we wouldn’t have thought we would find along the way.

We spent a day touring Kampala and learning more about it’s history and buildings. Walter’s Boda Tours provided Mike and Patrick as our expert tour guides for the day, and we enjoyed travelling around the city on their boda boda’s. After the tour, we took ourselves through the Kampala Museum as well, where we learned more about the tools, clothing, animals, and instruments from this beautiful country.

Hindu Temple

View of the Kampala and it's original 7 hills

The 'organized chaos' downtown

The Mosque

The King's Palace

The Bahai temple and our tour guides, Patrick and Mike

Favourite moments at school this week:

Teaching a lesson about algebra and watching as the kids climb the water tower and dump water from the top (Will)

Just a typical 'break' at school

Teaching the kids how to say, “I love you” in sign language and learning how to play the hopscotch-like game the kids play outside with dirt, bare feet, and broken bits of tile (Natasha)

Definitely bringing the rules of this game back to play in Canada!

This Week's Top 10:

• We started the week off by finding the ice cream man! Later in the week, we also found the gelato that came highly recommended.

In my glory! I think the ice cream man is equally excited about meeting me...

• Mosquitos DO exist, and we’ve started using our mosquito net nightly. There’s not a ton of them and thankfully they don’t buzz annoyingly around us, but we have had some itchy bites.
• Almost no one smokes.
• All of the gift shops are so tempting because they are filled with beautiful items, so it's probably for the best that our bags are so tightly packed already!
• Most days, the weather goes a little like this… overcast first thing in the morning, sunny and blue sky the rest of the morning, dark clouds roll in mid-afternoon for a short rain, and then the blue sky returns until evening. It’s consistently warm (26-28 degrees), but isn’t humid, and there’s usually a little welcome breeze.

Afternoon skies

• Banana beer can (and will) go from drinkable to intolerable overnight. This may or may not be because of buying the drink from a roadside wheelbarrow and having it poured from a large dirty bottle into a small dirty bottle. 
• During a day shopping in and around the Acacia Mall, Will did all the shopping, scoring a “Matatu” shirt, a book about the history of Africa, and many shows and movies. After hearing about FunZ Videos, we knew we needed to stop at this shop where you can get any movie or full seasons of any show… Will got 4 movies and 8 seasons of shows for 19 000 shillings ($6.72 CAD!)
• The people of Uganda use the shavings of bark from fig trees to create bark cloth, which they use as material for clothing, bedding, and as a canvas for paintings
• There are 56 different tribes throughout Uganda and 40 different languages
• While riding a boda boda, you can and will be asked to duck your head in order to ride under another boda driver's load of corrugated tin

Random Act of Kindness: Roxane and Francois have taken us under their wing and showed us so much of the culture and beauty that is Uganda. This week, they brought us to their favourite restaurant for an amazing meal together AND gave Will a belated birthday gift of an African bottle opener to help him enjoy beers around the world!