shopping, more nightlife

We drove to Butare yesterday. It's about two hours south of Kigali. I have some exciting video footage of the drive, but I doubt I'll be able to upload it from here. The internet connection is reasonable, but it's not US-style high speed.

We stopped on the way at a pottery studio and bought a very large amount of pottery. Hopefully it will not all break on the way back to Constitution Land.

Then we drove the rest of the way to Butare. We had lunch at a big hotel, which was pretty delicious. Emily ordered a croque madame, which in normal French restaurants and bars means a grilled cheese sandwhich. In this hotel restaurant, though, it meant a grilled cheese sandwich with a huge slice of pineapple in the middle.

She liked it anyway.

We went to ANOTHER store across the street from the hotel and bought a lot more things. Then we stopped at a basket-maker's stand on the drive home. The back of the SUV was full of things. It was very American of us and we felt a lot of national pride for representing our country in such an accurate way.

Then, last night, we were very popular and social. First was a Thai/French restaurant dinner. It was delicious. There were all kinds of interesting politicians and various international aid workers there, but I didn't talk to them. I played with the adorable kittens instead. Sadly, I did not bring my camera with me, or the rest of this blog would just be full of pictures of kittens.

I guess that's not really sad for anyone.

Luckily, I did not bring my camera with me, etc, etc.

THEN, we went to a Future Party. Well, that's not true. My parents went to a Future Party, and Emily and I went to a bar across the street. The Future Party was hosted by some Dutch people, I don't know who or what they do, and apparently it was full of African dancing. So I'm sorry we missed it. But we did have a very entertaining conversation at the bar with two gigantically tall Rwandan men. They were 1.98 meters tall. I don't really know how tall that is in feet, because REAL Americans don't know how to use the metric system. But by an experimental method involving a careful scientific examination of the difference between Emily and the top of the tallest one's head, I have concluded that they were 6'6".

Anyone who has a different interpretation of this data is wrong, because I don't actually remember the number of meters. So whatever it was, the 6'6" result is definitely correct.

Finally, we went to yet another party. We got there late, at about 11:30 I think, so it was a fairly calm period of the party. There was a lot of really delicious cheese and sausage, which I ate a lot of (mostly Brie, because really why bother with anything else?) and some wine. Some people were salsa dancing. I think. Some kind of twisty syncopated 2-step anyway.

Is that how you spell "syncopated"? Synchopated? No, I think I was right the first time.

Then it was after midnight, so I had turned back into a pumpkin and had to be taken home and put to bed.

Today we're driving north to the mountains and staying in a guest house up by the national park. Tomorrow morning we'll hike into the mountains and look at some gorillas. Then tomorrow afternoon we'll drive back to Kigali, and I'll put lots of pictures of gorillas on the internet, so that will be exciting for all of you.

See you later, alligators