10 Most expensive cities in the world, posted by ECA

http://www.overseaspropertymall.com/trends/international-real-estate-trends/the-cost-of-living-2007-by-eca/

33 hours to home

The flights home were BRUTAL. I was traveling for 33 hours straight, in and out of airports, 4 different flights to get home. I was just about to leave on the longest leg of the trip, from Senegal to Atlanta, Georgia, and new people were getting on the plane. I had had the whole middle row to myself up until now, and there weren’t that many people getting on, but I had two men sit on either side of me. Just what I wanted, especially since I had finally gotten to sleep right before the plane landed. The guy to my right passes out immediately, but the guy to my left starts talking, which is fine. But he doesn’t stop talking – about his wife, his two boys in high school, etc. Finally, an hour and a half into the flight I pass out cold on him, after eating some food and drinking some wine. When I wake up I decide to move into a more empty area since there were very few people on the plane, but in the end I go back to my seat and we keep talking. He tells me I was so cute when I fell asleep, like a little kitten after a warm bowl of milk. Ha, how corny. We get off the plane and immediately we are best friends and he asks if he hang out with me until I need to get on the plane again. Ok, sure… so we hang out for just a little bit because my flight is leaving first. We exchange business cards, and I have gotten two emails from him so far, just a few days after getting back into work. THEN I get an e-card from him on Valentine’s Day; word for word it reads:

To Lauren - a jewel out of Africa, mysterious, sensuous and most desireable. Happy Valentine's Day from Mark

Kinda creepy??

My 7 hour dinner

So, it was Saturday and I thought it would be nice to take my driver out for a nice dinner to show him that I appreciated the work he had done for me. They grocery store I was trying to finish up was closed (they finally told me at 5:30 PM that the store had closed at 5) so Egidio and I headed out to a restaurant that I needed to get some prices from, anyways. I was thinking 6 PM dinner, I’ll be home and packing by 8:30, 9 the latest. Once we finally found a parking space, we went into the restaurant and sat down. It was about 6 PM. Apparently, the restaurant itself didn’t open until 8 and I couldn’t tell whether or not the bar was open or not, but we were sitting at it. Meanwhile, I am pretty hungry (but there aren’t a whole lot of restaurants to choose from, anyways), but I ask Egidio if it’s OK to wait until 8 to eat. Egidio says “its no problem for me”. Then Egidio pondered over the drink menu for about 45 minutes and I was waiting for him to order a drink, but he never did. So I never tried to either. Instead, he started talking, and talking, and talking which was funny. In the first few days that I went out with him, he spoke very little. I wasn’t sure if he was just shy or if he was nervous using his English. Half of what he said made no sense to me, but I tried to catch whatever I could. He spoke of the Civil War and how most of the men in the country died in it, so there is a huge population of women but not many men. In Angola, if you are of a certain age, you are required to be in the military if needed. So at about 645 the bartender comes to talk to us and I think yay, we are finally getting a drink. Not so much. They need to spray the restaurant (this is a very upscale restaurant for Luanda, by the way) with bug spray so that the mosquitos won’t be a major problem. Really? So we need to leave until 8 pm, but we make a reservation. So I say to Egidio, “where we go?” and he says we will see sights and come back. OK… so we get back into the car after spending nearly a half hour just looking for this parking space and we drive all the way out to the island of Ihle (I think that’s how you spell it?...) We drive to the very end, very slowly, and then we come back. Meanwhile, Egidio is still talking my ear off about imports and how they are required to wait on the harbor for months before they are actually allowed to come in, etc. etc. etc. So finally, restaurant is sprayed, and after a good 30 minutes of parking space hunting we find another spot, kind of far from the restaurant. This was my first time being out at night, and some parts were scary to walk around at night. The shadows that stare at you when you walk by during the day are much more frightening at night. But, I stayed close to Egidio and had no problems. So we get to the restaurant, good thing we put in a reservation cause there was no one there, until about 9:30 PM. They still asked us in the doorway if we had a reservation. So we are seated at a nice little table upstairs and the service is wonderful. The food, not so much. I got shrimp that smelled and vegetables that had been pre-frozen. Egidio orders HIMSELF his own bottle of wine which cost me about 5 million dollars, while I settle on a beer. So we both order entrees and I receive mine and eat it in about 30 minutes. Egidio takes, no joke, 3 hours to eat his full dinner. He spends too much time talking despite the fact that I’m clearly passing out right in front of him so I have absolutely no idea what he’s saying. We finally finish dinner at 12 AM and my quick dinner which I was so sure of was over much too late. I nearly had to stay up all night finishing things that I didn’t get to because I was at dinner. With tip, when all was said and done, dinner cost me almost $200 USD. When we were on our way out from dinner, Egidio was talking about someone who liked to give food to the poor people and I thought, I want to do that! So I took out a package of chocolate wafer crackers that I had only eaten a few of and I looked desperately for someone to give them to on my way back to the car, but was very disappointed to pass very few people on our way there, back to safety.

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.

So backwards

I was in an expensive store downtown with my driver, and we were walking around, checking out the men’s and women’s clothing, when a woman approaches us and asks my driver if he speaks Portuguese. She starts scolding him, almost yelling at him, and my first reaction was, uh oh. Time for me to go, she doesn’t like me writing down prices. Or so I thought. When she was done yelling at my driver he says to me, do you want to finish? As in, shall we keep going? So I say yes, everything OK? He says yes, yes. I noticed, however; that for the rest of our time in that store there was a woman that nearly followed us around everywhere, and my driver kept asking her for prices instead of looking at the tags. I had no idea what was going on. OK…… so we get back in the car and he says, that lady was mad that we were walking around, we look and we look, but we were not asking for help. She said we have people that work here and that is their job to help us. He explained to her that we did ask someone for prices, but apparently his job was to mop the floors, not help with the prices of items , and we were suppose to know that! Man, Africa is so backwards.

Lessons in safety

I ran into a man who actually worked for Chevron, one of the clients that I was doing research for in Luanda. At the time I was actually falling asleep at the bar while drinking a $16 irish coffee and trying to finish up some work. We spoke about where we were from, he was from England, and what we were doing here. He had been here a few times, and was intrigued that I never received a security briefing on arrival to Angola. He started discussing how dangerous this place was, and warned me to be very careful and always be aware of my surroundings. He had even witnessed a robbery that very day; a car that had been stuck in traffic was robbed. Meanwhile, suddenly all the power cuts out and we find ourselves sitting in complete blackness. I had been meaning to go to bed for the last half hour, good thing I wasn’t in the elevator at the time! We both hung around until the lights came back on 15 minutes later, and I went to bed feeling a little more uneasy than I had been feeling before. I didn’t feel completely safe in Luanda, but I was starting to get comfortable. Maybe God wanted to remind me of where I was, and how vulnerable I was. Luckily I had a driver that took his job pretty seriously doubling up as my security guard, and was at my side almost always, even up to the point where I crossed through security when I was leaving the airport (he waited 2 hours in line with me!).

Hospitals and health issues

When I was in Luanda, one of the things I needed to do was price the cost of sleeping in a hospital room. So, without even thinking it over, my driver took me to a public hospital. I went in through some large doors and walked down through the corridors before I approached a “guard” sitting in a chair. I tried speaking with her. Twice. She didn’t look at me. She was cross-eyed and had flies buzzing around her. The moment struck me as a scene out of a horror movie. I quickly walked by her into the corridors, trying to find someone I could speak with. It was a beautiful hospital, although I’m sure the medical care wasn’t quite up to par with the care of the facility. I finally found a couple doctors who were looking at me strangely, so I decided to speak with them. One spoke some English, the other didn’t. So I spoke, and the one that spoke English translated. Eventually after much discussion, I got the answer I needed and headed back the other way – the cost of a hospital room and all service was free. This time the creepy guard stopped me as I was heading out the door. She made it clear I couldn’t go out that way. So I began heading in the other direction. But wait, my driver was right outside. If I don’t go that way, I’m going to have to walk around the whole damn hospital. So I turn back around, and fruitlessly try explaining to the guard… but my “insert steering wheel motions” was right outside, pointing to the doors that I came in. Uh uh. You can’t go. So then I pleaded. And I got somewhere. She poked here head out the doors and motioned for me to go, quickly. Soo I snuck out of the hospital, and ran down to where my driver was. Apparently those doors were not to be used. Who knew.

Speaking of hospitals, I didn’t escape Africa without some minor issues. I woke up a few days after arrival with a swollen eye, which I came to realize was an eye infection. I’m not sure what caused it; whether it was simply the air filled with pathogens or the water from the hotel. I began pouring bottled water over each of my eyes every night before I went to bed. In a couple days my infection was no more. Inevitably, I also had some stomach issues. I tempted fate one night by eating from the buffet but unfortunately it didn’t go very well. My skin, the whole time in Africa, suffered. I have eczema as it is, and it’s bad enough; but I was getting hives everywhere, including on my face. It took my face alone a week to recover (once I got home) from the pollution buildup that was causing me to break out. Also, the most seasoned surveyor on my team who was also in Africa was just medi-evaced to Paris – they never found out what the cause was, but he woke up one day paralyzed from the waist down, in the middle of a country with very limited health care. Very scary. He is now back in the office and is just about fully recovered, thank goodness. But it’s just one reminder of the issues we face as surveyors. Just goes to show how important it is to be strong and fearless, as much as possible – because when a situation arises, the worst thing to do would be to panic.