Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Living In Uganda

Living in Kampala is great! It is a little bit crazy and the jam (local term for traffic jams) is out of control. I thought Joburg was bad, but it is nothing compared to Kampala. I don’t think I could handle driving here.

The dominate language is Luganda here in Kampala. I have learned a little bit: nange = me too, sagala = I don’t like, masou = stop (that is what one says when one wants to get off the taxi); and please excuse my spelling :)

The food is also pretty great. At work, we are fed lunch every day. It is quite consistently beans and the stickiest rice you have ever had with g-nut sause. “G-nuts” stands for ground nuts, but which actually means peanuts. It tastes like peanuts for sure but it is in the form of a sauce and it is actually really good. We have also had matoke which is green bananas, pealed, boiled (or steamed), and then mashed into a really heavy mound (it is not exactly what you would expect and will take some getting used to). We have also had posha (again, I think my spelling is off) which is the same thing as pap in South Africa, but Ugandans make it much heavier. Posha/pap is boiled corn meal. It is similar to making cream of wheat where you put in too much cream of wheat relative to water so that you can put it on you plate in mound rather than an porridge.

But one of my favorite things is what they call “rolex”. It is a Kipati (which is similar to a tortilla or roti, but a little thicker) with scrambled eggs, cabbage, tomatoes, and onions. It is like the best thing to eat at like 2:00 am!

It’s nice because the food is conducive to helping me keep up my vegetarian lifestyle. They do eat a lot of meat as well; Ugandans especially like pork. From what I have heard, “going for pork” is like a social event here.

1 comment:

  1. Hello there Vegetarian Boy! I am glad that things are going well, and that you are loving it. Thanks for email a little bit ago. Sorry I have been slow in emailing you back. We are happy for our little baby boy now we just need to find a name. Talk to you soon!

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