More strange facts about Angola

Some other strange facts about Africa, well, at least Angola:

Despite the poverty, luxury cars are everywhere. For whatever reason (I noticed this and my driver confirmed; I hadn’t even brought it up to him), people own cars over houses. They scrounge for 40,000USD to buy a really nice car, but cannot afford a roof over their heads. Really. I don’t get it. Not only is it impractical to start with, but the traffic and driving is so ferocious in Luanda that it was nearly impossible for every car not to be dented up or have cracks in the windshield or both. Boggles my mind.

People interrupt each other all the time. You could be having a one-on-one conversation and someone will come up to you and completely interrupt. Apparently, this is absolutely OK. People here are lazy as hell but they can’t wait to speak with you, go figure. I noticed this first with my driver (good thing I had him around). He would go into a store with me and interrupt people constantly so that we could get some prices. I sure didn’t complain, but it was very strange, I had to hold back from feeling bad for the person who was interrupted. But clearly they didn’t care anyways.

Another thing people do is answer phone calls in the middle of a conversation. My driver would do it alllllllllll the timmmmmmme. The one I remember clearest is being in a pharmacy and we were in line speaking to a pharmacist about the price of certain drugs and my driver of course was translating for me, and his phone would ring and he would pick it up, talk for a minute, hang up and then keep going. Meanwhile, myself and the pharmacist would just sit there in silence because we couldn’t understand each other. When I took my driver out to dinner he answered every call that came in then, too. I noticed other people doing this as well. Very bizarre, but you need to prevent yourself from getting mad about it, cause this is culture. When you are in Rome, you do as the Romans do.

My driver didn’t know what McDonalds was. There isn’t much I can say about this, it’s pretty shocking. I didn’t know anyone in the world wouldn’t know what McDonalds was.

Funny quote of the day was – “You don’t work like this in your country, do you? It kill you” Yes, Egidio, Americans are work-aholics. I am no exception.

There are no parking garages in Luanda. It’s a very large, populated city with many, many cars (as I mentioned before) but there are no garages. So naturally, there is a problem with parking. The way they deal with it is this: They double park. Then, they either put their phone number on the car they are blocking, or they tell the guard or person that just happens to be sitting outside doing nothing and staring at you where they will be going if someone wants to move their car.
Random people try to help you park. If you pull over and they can tell you are parking your car, they will do anything and everything to help you get in the spot, but then they ask for money right away. It’s really annoying.

Armed guards are everywhere. I’m not sure if they make me feel more or less safe.

My boss needed to wire me some $ because none of the ATMs would take my debit card. So I needed to go to a Western Union to pick up the cash; there were many of them throughout the city, the issue was, though; that most of them were down. We went to 3 different Western Unions whose banking system was down for the whole day. I was getting hopeless; this was Friday and they weren’t even open on Saturdays. We finally tried one last one at the end of the day and it was working, finally. We were one of the last customers to be served that day, and I thought that maybe we wouldn’t even make it because of the terrible traffic we had to go through to get there.