“I’m on Fire…”

September 20th 2005, 2010B

As much as I don’t particularly like the Burundians, I have to give them this much – their coffee ain’t too bad, & they make a damn fine peri-peri. I’ve just been out to supper at a Chinese place around the corner, & while it’s no Maan Hing on Moore Road, it was pretty damn good all the same. A little bit on the pricey side and the mossies were out in force, but good food & lots of it. And of course, nice peri-peri :P
My mouth is still burning after a good 1.5 litres of beer, & I’m likely going to wake up in a sweat tomorrow morning lol
The menu was a little different to what I’m used to, but it makes a change & I’m not complaining – how many restaurants have you been to where they’ve offered goat? In spite of what you might think, it’s actually bloody nice, so I recommend you try it if you ever get chance. It’s quite similar to mutton, but nowhere near as greasy.

All in all it’s been a pretty good day. It didn’t start off too well, & I was awake a little before 0300, regardless of the immovaine. I also didn’t feel too kosher when I woke up – nausea, headache, malaise & so on – & I was a little worried about malaria, but the test came back negative at least. I’ll be having another one tomorrow morning just to be on the safe side though, as the test kits sometimes generate false-negatives.
I also didn’t have anything to do so far as work goes, which was a tad frustrating, but I started feeling better around lunchtime or so & the evening has been fairly pleasant. The net connection here at the base has been down the last few days, so I popped into a net café around the corner before supper to do the email & updating of blog thing. For a change I actually had some personal mail instead of the normal junk mail that I get. Needless to say that went down very well and has done my mood the world of good. Also, typing up replies will also give me something to do tomorrow if work doesn’t keep me busy.
Something I found quite amusing when I had a look at the comments on this was the “blog spam” that had been left on one of the earlier entries. As Mark succinctly put it “WHAT THE FUCK?” :P
How a certain Wayne Hairston could ever think that people who read the blog of a soldier who’s deployed on a peace keeping mission in the middle of Africa would be interested in home business opportunities just boggles my mind lol
“I can relate to your blog” indeed….
As amusing as I find it though, it’s also pretty annoying. Spam in your email is bad enough, but on your blog? That has to be one of the more intrusive & offensive forms of unwelcome marketing anyone has come up with. And it’s not as if it could be very effective either, ‘cause I’m certainly not interested in what they had to offer, & if 15 people a week read this I’d be surprised. If as many as that even, so we’re hardly talking about the huge volumes of traffic these guys rely on to generate results. Not that these two clowns let that stop them from trying to use me as free advertising. Bastards.

Something that was very surprising about the net café was how much they asked for the time I spent online – only 900 frambos, or about 75c US for a little over 30 min. The last I checked, that would have cost me at least R30 back home, or about 6 times as much. I find it interesting that a country like Burundi can offer net connectivity at that kind of price, yet it’s so damned expensive in SA, which is a far more developed country.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
I think the net café being cheap was perhaps in compensation though, as it was certainly an interesting experience trying to use the pc – everything was in French, so I had fun & games trying to figure things out lol
I seem to do ok when it comes to figuring out written French, things like signboards & so on, so I managed to find my way around Windows les Français well enough, but the real challenge was the keyboard. The manager went out of his way to make sure I had an English QWERTY keyboard, but the computer saw it as a French language keyboard instead. “What difference does that make?” you might ask. Not too much for the most part, but the key layout is about 20% different, & I had a barrel of laughs pressing keys at random trying to find the one I wanted :P
I think next time I go there I’ll take the notebook with & see if they’ll let me plug it into their network rather than struggling. Using my own laptop would also mean I could do my banking, because I’m very wary of things like key-loggers & so on at net cafés. I would not be amused to find my account cleaned out the next time I checked, I can assure you.

Anyway, the fat lady is busy warming the vocal cords for her final performance of the day, & I’d best be on my way to evening roll call. Thanks to everyone who’s sent mail lately, as it really is appreciated. The contact with home goes a very long way towards maintaining the happy thoughts, so keep ‘em coming :P

Cheers for now ;)