Jen's email #2

Hello again! So I’m here giving you another update on things here. I think I emailed you all on Thursday. Well on Thursday night we went over to our boss’ house for pizza and getting to know everyone.
|Friday we went to our little shopping center where you can buy groceries. It’s a cute little shopping center. Looks like it belongs out west, it’s all wood buildings and very quaint. It was not at all what I imagined. The grocery store was very nice, but expensive. $20 for olive oil and shaving cream!!! Insane and we stuck to veggie oil and soap. Then Friday night, we went over to one of the administrator’s house for dinner. Grant and I have become pretty close with him. He invited all the new teachers and their families over for a true zimbabwian dinner. We had chicken, sadza (it’s a type of cornmeal cooked and look like mashed potatoes from afar but is very mealy…probably a bad description), cooked kale and some sort of amazing gravy. And it’s traditional to eat with your hands so that was interesting. Everyone talking with food covered fingers and licking fingers throughout the conversation. That will create close relationships. It was fun though. We all sat around and talked and had African wine until about 11:30. We got an ok night’s sleep that night. Probably from the drinking.
Saturday, we went to the area called sam levy village. It was a strip of shops, restaurants and grocery stores. It’s so cute and outdoors. Very nice. Not what you are thinking with like chickens flying around everywhere and people yelling at you in the street to but their product. It’s nice stores and very quiet. We had fun. Then Friday night was grant’s and my first night alone in the house. We had no power all day Saturday. So when we got back from our day of shopping we found things to talk about. It’s weird when you have no distractions like tv and computers to take away from each other what you find to talk about. So we sat around and then cooked a dinner on our gas burner that we have when power is out. We made okra and cherry tomatoes and chicken with mushrooms. We had to cook before 6 b/c after that it gets dark. We ate at about 545. Had a lovely dinner outside on our patio furniture with amazing weather, watched the sunset, drank south African red wine…..so romantic. Then it got dark, still no power and we looked at each other and started laughing b/c we didn’t know what to do. So we sat in the dark for a while talking about what we wanted to get for our house. We got a decent amount of money to start getting our house to our liking and we talked about what else we could buy……..then at 8 we got bored and decided to turn on our generator so we could watch a movie. Grant made me watch the ghost and the darkness. He thought it would be a fun, spooky movie to watch since it’s a true story about the African wild. But it just ended up being a cheesy Michael Douglas movie from the 1980s. but it passed the time. So we went to bed and for the 2nd night in a row we both woke up at 11:30 at night wide awake. So we sat in bed and watched reruns of the Jersey Shore on grant’s IPOD until it died.
So yesterday we woke up and walked down to the spar(the grocery store shopping area) since it’s really close to us and had breakfast and bought water (big commodity here). Then we came to school and met all the new teachers for a fun day of adventure. We went to this bird sanctuary and had lunch and sat there for about 1 ½ hours just relaxing. There was a huge lake there. So nice. Then we went on a game drive through a protected park about 45 min from Harare. It was so cool. We saw zebra, antelope, warthogs, ostriches, impalas and a rhino. Apparently rhinos are becoming extinct here. One is killed a week and there are only about 100 of them in zim right now. They actually have men who follow rhino families around in the wild as their job to keep them safe from poachers. Crazy! Alright so that brings us to today. We had work related orientation most of the day and went car shopping. We are going car shopping again tomorrow as well. Grant wants to get us something big and fun. We shall see. I love you all and will keep you updated!