Movie Night

We tend to focus on the exotic aspects of living in Botswana, but we also have regular, ordinary adventures as well. Last night, we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets at the Riverwalk Cinemas. It only has 4 screens and we don't always get the newest movies but we do get most of the really popular movies fairly soon after they are released and it turns out there are a lot of perks to going there. We left work at 5:10 with plenty of time to get to the 5:30 movie.


The usual cost of a movie ticket is 30 Pula (about $5) but on Mondays you can get 2 for 1 tickets. One of the cell phone providers has a code that you send by text message to a phone number that is provided on a poster in their shop window directly across from the movie place. They send you back a text message with a different code that you give to the box office when you buy your movie tickets. And then you only get charged for 1 ticket. So we got 2 tickets for the movie for 30 Pula (about $5).

So when you buy your tickets, you have to pick out your seats and they show you a seating chart which happens to be totally backwards from the layout in the theater. But you get to pick your seats and even if you are the only person in the theater, if you do not sit in the seat that you chose, they will make you move back to your assigned seat. So we carefully chose our seats and paid the 30 Pula for the tickets.



Then we got some popcorn and a coke and some M&Ms for 26.50 Pula (about $4.40) making our movie date total expenses less than $10.





There were about 10 other people watching the movie with us last night. A much larger crowd than usual for a Monday night. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and had a lovely evening.

A Green Christmas

When we were on vacation in Maryland earlier this month, we went to the NASA Goddard Visitor Center with Deb's friend Mandy. They have this cool spherical screen that they use for all kinds of educational purpose but they showed it to us just for fun. One program they ran was the weather for the past 30 days and they zoomed in on Botswana and we said, "Wow, looks like Botswana has been getting a lot of rain while we've been away." That was something of an understatement.

Yesterday after work, we drove out to Mokolodi, the local game park, just to see what was going on out there over the holidays. When we were out there in July, we made a donation for drought relief because the situation had become so bad that they were shipping out some of the DLA because there wasn't enough plant life to feed them all.

However, these days, it's freakishly green!!!

There's plenty of grass for all the DLA and even the little baby DLA!

At World's View overlooking the park:

From World's View -- that's the Gaborone Dam (the city reservoir) in the background. There's lots of water!!

Here is our rugged Toyota Hilux Surf at World's View:

The rain has had a rather negative effect on the roads through the park, so Thom enjoyed some serious 4-wheel driving. Apparently the rain has also washed out a few of the "do not enter" markers for some of the roads that are off limits to the drive-your-self-ers and we accidentally ended up in some quite dodgy territory. But we lived to tell about it and did not have to be rescued by the Park Rangers (which would have been terribly embarrassing) so just another part of the adventure.

Unbelievably this is the lake in the park. In July it was barely a mud puddle:

And then there were the giraffes!

We saw this one shortly after we entered the park:

And then coming down from World's View we came across this one:

Don't you think they're looking a little fat these days?

Happy Holidays from Hotswana!!!

We're back from vacation!

First we want to reassure our readers that we have not fallen off the edge of the earth. We have just returned to Botswana after 4 weeks of vacation. We put about 2500 miles on a rental car and had a great time visiting with family and friends in 6 states and the District of Columbia. A few lessons learned from our trip: 1) contrary to what we thought before, it is NOT impossible to take 4 weeks off from work -- they will survive without us; 2) it is not the best idea to eat all your favorite foods every day for 4 weeks straight; 3) we do not like cold weather.

It snowed while we were in Washington, DC (see below).


We had a fantastic time at the National Air and Space Museum which turns out has expanded to 2 facilities.



After being away for 4 weeks, it was really good to come home. We are now busily getting ready for celebrating Christmas in Hotswana where the temps have been around 100 all week. Looks like we might have some rain today though.

Chicken Art

This is a new addtion to our back yard. We found it a craft fair last weekend and just couldn't resist. Thom named him Tenders.

Cape Town in the Spring

To celebrate Thom's birthday, we planned a little getaway for Columbus Day weekend. We ended up driving to Johannesburg on Friday, spent the night at a hotel close to the airport, and then flew down to Cape Town on Saturday. We love Cape Town. It's so refreshing to be on the coast or down town at the Waterfront. It's a special treat after spending months in the desert.

This time we stayed right on the beach in Camps Bay. And we managed to lose our camera so all of our photos for this blog are borrowed from other websites.


We stayed at the Fairways which was nice.


But the best feature of this hotel is the restaurant Luigi's. We had dinner there Saturday night and it was unquestionably the best Italian food we have had in a very long time.

Our other fabulous restaurant experience was Codfather's. Codfather's was recommended to us by a friend who had also given us the driving directions to Johannesburg and we're just not sure if she was trying to kill us or not. After the driving directions experience we were somewhat skeptical of the restaurant she recommended. It turned out we were pleasantly surprised. At Codfather's, you get to pick your food from the fresh seafood case and you can mix and match and then they cook it perfectly. We had tuna steak, sword fish, local mahi mahi which is called something else, and prawns from Mozambique the size of lobsters (they're truly too big to be called shrimp). It was a delightful experience.

It was a just a bit too chilly and way too rainy to really enjoy being on the beach. It rained all day Sunday. We tried going down to the Waterfront and even made it to the Green Market Square craft market in a break in the rain:




The craft market experience is similar to many places in Africa and many of the "shops" have the same stuff that everyone else has. There's the typical hard sell approach because you'll find the same thing at the next shop and maybe they'll make you a better deal. When we first got there, everyone was pressuring us to come inside their booths and look at there stuff more closely. As soon as it started raining, the message changed to "buy something and then you can come inside to get 'free' shelter".

We ended up going back down to the Waterfront and spending several hours in a very nice mall to stay out of the rain. Debra was happy. Thom, not so much.

We're looking forward to going back in February when it should be hot and steamy.

Time to Build an Ark

They say it's a good sign when the rains come before Botswana Independence Day (September 30). Well, the rain came Thursday, September 28. According to some reports, we had more rain that afternoon than all of last year.

Since Thursday, we've had showers every day. Today, we're having quite a lot of rain. This is a pretty big deal. Botswana is a desert country. The currency in Botswana is the "pula". The word for rain in Setswana is "pula". See the connection?

However, some of us, accustomed to the bright sunny days with endless blue skies, are starting to feel a little depressed. Will the sun ever shine again????

This is what the Thursday afternoon storm looked like from our patio (after it got light enough to take a picture):

Trouble in Paradise

Our friend the Weaver Bird from our last blog entry built what we thought was a lovely nest but the Girl Weaver Bird did not approve.

While eating breakfast on the patio yesterday, we watched the Girl Weaver Bird totally tear apart the nest that the Boy Weaver Bird spent the past couple of weeks building. It would have made a fabulous picture story but we have realized that we just don't have the patience for photographing birds. It was quite entertaining.

This is what is left of the nest today:

For those of you who would like to see good pictures of weaver birds, check out Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_Masked-Weaver

And here's a link to a video on YouTube that shows a weaver nest being built:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO12M_FP3L4&mode=related&search=