MONKEYS mostly

This past week we spent a lot of time working, but that didn’t stop us from having a good time in and out of the office! Our typical week includes us all getting up sometime between 6 and 7 to go running, going to work, taking an after-lunch walk to a shop to buy a Coke Zero, working, then figuring out dinner. On Monday (I think) we made dinner for our little muzungu “family” that turned out really well! We mixed a lot of vegetables, garlic, cilantro and beer into a sauce that we put over pasta, with fruit salad for dessert!

Our delicious pasta sauce! I thought we were just experimenting, but Maggie knew what she was doing and it was so good! 

Our kitchen is kind-of dark even with the lights, so we like to use a headlamp when cooking or doing dishes. Definitely adds to the experience! 

Cutting a mango... actually the hardest thing to cut in the world. Major props to whoever cuts those dried mango strips we get at school, since it just ends up as mush when I try. 

Housemates! (Left to right) me, Nessa, Ciaran, Abby and Maggie!

Tuesday (maybe…I really don’t remember days well) we went to Meze Fresh for dinner again, which I said in my last post is like a Rwandan Chipotle. Obviously, we are fans. There are quite a few other muzungus (white people) who frequent this place. One strange thing about us since we’ve been getting used to living here is that we have started to become weirded out by seeing white people. Just like many people in our area do when we pass, we now catch ourselves staring and pointing out the “muzungu” to each other. It’s a really strange feeling that I never expected to have since the U.S. has so much diversity! It is quite an experience being white here, though. Abby compared our encounters with neighborhood children to being like the ice-cream truck. Whenever we pass, they run out of their houses yelling, “muzungu, yaaay!” They are VERY cute, so I certainly don’t mind being chased down by them! They also always say “Good morning!” regardless of the time of day, so we’ve taken to just replying back with “Good morning!” I hope we don’t get too used to that and make fools of ourselves when we’re back home. On Thursday, we made dinner with Nessa and Ciaran and invited Cassien (our main HDI guy) over to eat with us! I’ll confess that I didn’t help much with dinner since I really needed to do laundry. It was a curry dish and dal with rice and naan bread, which was soooo good! We had a nice time with Cassien here, and then we ran out of water. We didn’t get to shower or wash anything (including our faces and hands) until today, Sunday. Gross. But as Maggie would say, “It’s whatever.”

Two other somewhat eventful things happened during our lunch breaks at work. One time when we were coming back to the office with Cokes and waters, we passed a man sitting casually on some stairs by the road. When he saw us, he immediately started shouting “GIVE ME THAT WATER. GIVE ME IT. GIVE IT TO ME!” until we were out of his sight again. It was pretty startling. Then, another time coming back from getting soda, some guy who was walking past Abby and I got hit by a car. Sometimes cars drive really close to the side of the road, and this one nipped the guy’s hip! It sound really loud, but nobody make a big deal about it. He just walked on, holding his hip in pain.

Friday was nice because we took our computers and went to Bourbon (Rwandan Starbucks) for the whole workday for a change of scenery! We had dinner in town and then headed home because of the early Saturday morning we were anticipating. We left the house the next morning at 5am to make the 2-hour drive to Volcanoes National Park! My eyes kept falling shut, but then as soon as they did I would get carsick and force them open again to watch out the front of the car. When people call Rwanda the land of 1000 hills, they are NOT kidding. There are so many, and they are so beautiful! We got to see the sun rise on our way there.

Sunrise :) Our driver pulled over because he knew we would want to take pictures!

Preview to the beautiful Rwandan countryside! It's 10X better once we get further away from the city air, and hopefully I'll be able to get some good pictures of it later! Every single bit of every hill has farm patches all over it, so it looks like a giant quilt of green and brown :)

Just driving through the hills for hours. I actually got pretty carsick for the first time in my life.

There are five volcanoes in this park in the northwest of Rwanda. We had originally wanted to go there to see the mountain gorillas, but then we found out a few weeks ago that it is SUPER expensive…like around $800 or $900 I think. Yeah right. So, we found out that going to trek the Golden Monkeys is way cheaper, and that’s what we did! It was so worth it – there were so many of them so close to us, and they were extremely cute!

Abby smelling the eucalyptus leaves that our guide showed us!

Then he made her try a "happy gorilla" noise :) 

CHAMELEON. I almost liked this better then the monkeys. Almost. Also, it made me miss my gecko.

One of the volcanoes of Volcanoes National Park. Apparently on the tallest one, you can hike a full day to the top, then camp out, then hike back down. Without question, if I ever make it back to Rwanda (which I hope I will!) I am doing that hike. 

Our gorilla walking sticks :) Completely unnecessary for our short hike, but they looked cool so whatever!

Our tour group going through the bamboo forest at the base of the volcano. 

Our tour guide was ridiculous! He would often impersonate the gorillas, including frequent stops to just pick things in the forest and eat them. He definitely made the trek interesting and funny! 

Hello, malaria.

A pretty opening in the forest where we dropped our bags with some guides before going to where the monkeys actually were eating and sitting.

Volcanic rock just in time to remind us that we're on a volcano! So cool!

And here are the monkey pictures! I had so many since they were all so close, but limited it here for your sake. I'll put more on facebook when I get home and have enough internet to upload them!

Just hangin' out with all the muzungus in the woods.

 We were amused and a little disheartened by our tour group. They were all old, typical, rich American tourists doing ignorant things like getting up in the faces of Rwandan children to take pictures without asking or even saying hi to them. It was clear they weren’t here to appreciate Rwanda, just the primates it has in the mountains. I guess it’s nice to stimulate Rwanda’s tourism economy, but I think it’s definitely worthwhile to see the people of a place you go to and not just it’s nature. I’m glad that when I tell people, “Rwanda is so beautiful” I can refer to the Rwandan people I meet as well, and I think that’s an important aspect of travelling.