Moldy cheese and ant bread

My room smells. It’s a combination of sour milk and a faint smell of diarrhea, which isn’t too far off from what the air outside smells like in general. And, the roads (dirt) are bright brown-red (the ones which aren’t paved, which is 95% of the city of Bissau). It rains here almost more than it does in New England, and it rained practically all day today. Maybe this was the cause of the constant black-outs in the grocery store today. The hotel lost power early this morning too, when I was just getting up.

Just about all the people here are skin and bones. Even the hotel workers. Today I gave up three different food items to three different people looking to sell silly little items like phone cards, and a car washing. I knew they needed it way more than I did: a guava drink, a coke, and a banana. I was thinking tomorrow I would go in a grocery store, buy a bunch of groceries with my lunch expense, and hand them out to some children. Though I know that sadly, once they are done with these things, the remains are thrown into a ditch. There is no sense of cleanliness here, at all.

We went out to lunch today at a restaurant that was “highly recommended”; well, relatively speaking. We took our driver to lunch as well. Upon sitting down, we were given a basket of stale bread that had tiny ants crawling throughout it. Yum. Joe actually ventured to eat one of them for some strange reason. I ordered the fish of the day which was served eyes, teeth and bones in all. Luckily, it wasn’t too bad and tasted fairly fresh. The only fresh fruit/vegetables and meats are sold by vendors on the side of the street. And normally, you must buy your meat alive and slaughter it yourself. Bon appetite!

We ventured into one of the restaurants we use as a “fast food place” and there were flies everywhere, dirt all over the floors, they were in the middle of painting all the walls, it smelled, and there was a guy in the corner laying down and napping. Yum. We got the price of a cheeseburger and got out of there as soon as possible.
A girl in one of the grocery stores today stopped Joe and motioned to diving into his backpack and flying away with him. (Not sure if it was him she wanted or just to get out of there!) She spoke very little English, but while I was off getting some prices Joe tried to talk with her and she mentioned that we should come back tomorrow and have a drink, or something like that. So, we might! So far, she has been the only person I have met here with any energy to her, whatsoever. Everyone else never smiles and just kind of go about life mundanely. Not that they are not helpful, they just really don’t appear to have much life to them. One of the workers we kept trying to get prices from kept disappearing. We finally found him (after he had already been yelled at!) helping his friend try on a pair of new shoes. There really isn’t much incentive to do anything here, the economy all consists of only dead-end jobs. We asked our driver today what his son does and he said he works on a farm.

I might use one of the owners of the grocery stores for a housing source. When we were asking for permission, he was trying to tell us that he could tell us about the price of apartments too. I was so excited because I need to do this but there is NO ONE to talk to here; (no realtors). Also, I find it interesting to see a place where 99.9% of the foreigners are either embassy workers, or UN/Worldbank workers. Their trucks and houses and embassies seem to be everywhere because they are the absolute only nice building structures that exist here.

Flatbed trucks are used to teach people how to drive; (surprisingly, you still need to go to driving school to get a license! Despite not one traffic light in the whole country). There is an election on Sunday (we didn’t even know that the borders were going to be closed Saturday on for election purposes!) so there are people from the two parties promoting their party through song, dance and flags/signs all over the city. Large flatbed trucks carry numerous people dancing around with flags of the one they support waving. Their president and the head of the military man were both assassinated earlier this year.