June 5 - A weekend of nothing, an illness and a couple of flat tires.

Well I appologize that it's been a while since I wrote.

Just to make up for the pause...here are some of the turkeys on site at Family Kingdom. Seriously and they are NOT afraid of anything...cars...people...

The Weekend -

Friday we went out for dinner. I'll save you the details but needless to say they don't make very good pizza around here and even the dogs at the restaurant wouldn't eat our 'scraps'. After dinner we headed to Atlantic which is the friday expat hangout. It's right on the beach and you can even walk out to the beach with your drinks. A pretty low key night.

Spent Saturday just hanging out in the sunshine. Reading and sitting on a patio. Very lazy. Here's the view from my book (top) and from the patio (bottom).

Saturday night we finally made it to dinner at the Sierra Lighthouse which is a hotel right on the edge of the beach. We had tried twice before with no luck so it was good to finally make it. Anna had introduced us to the 'Chapman' which is a local SLE drink (don't ask what's in it..I'll find out though so I can make them when I get home) We enjoyed a couple of special Chapmans then hit the casino. Actually I didn't hit the casino. I wasn't feeling well and wanted to watch the Sens game anyway.

That's right...I got the Sens game on tv in my room in Freetown! It was blurry, in french and in the middle of the night but it was on nonetheless. And they won...maybe I am good luck!

Sunday was rainy spoiling our beach plans so we slept in and then Nana brought us our 'wheels'. He has lent us his second car which is standard making Conor our new chauffeur. We now have a bit of freedom which is nice.

We wanted to take it for a practice spin so we headed to our friend Laura's place. I should call it Laura's castle. She works for the British High Commission here in Freetown and lives in the nicest apartment I have ever seen anywhere! Polished marble, chandelliers and a huge tv. We sat in the lap of luxury and watched Anchorman. How's that for a non-African afternoon.

Later, we went to find some dinner and discovered Bliss Bakery. It was Bliss! The food was great. The coffee was REAL (all I had had here until then was instant...blech) and the pastries look brilliant! Unfortunately this was the beginning of the sickness for me so I wasn't able to enjoy. I'll have to go back.

We popped over to the grocery store for some water. The store isn't all that different from those at home but they all have VERY varying prices and all contain houshold goods. Everything from lamps to towels to toys. Oh and liquor...tonnes of liquor. I'll do some scouting and let you all know about prices. Eating breakfast at the hotel and lunch at our desks has made for little need for supermarkets aside from water.

My first Illness - Sunday afternoon introduced my first illness in SLE. I'll spare you all the details but let's say I didn't eat much from Sunday lunch until Monday lunch. BLECH! Feeling much better now though. :)

Hash #2 - Monday night was our second Hash which we managed to be 20 minutes late for. If there's one thing harder than hashing it's hashing without the crowd of people to follow. Luckily Conor was nice enough to run with me until we found the crowd and the locals were more than willing to help us by pointing the direction that the other runners went in. We never once thought that maybe they were lying to us or tricking us. That's just an indication of how nice everyone is here in this city. We managed to make it home and I think I sweated out the sickness trying to keep up with 6'2" Conor. Can you say 'big dog, little dog'?

Crazy Tire Fun - Well we knew it would happen. The driving here is rough. The roads are quite pot-holey and there are always people all over the streets. Conor has done a great job driving so far. We were taken down this morning by a rock that totally destroyed our front right tire. :(

Conor managed to manouver off the road and before we were even out of the car a local had blocked our back tire and started to change the tire. It was amazing! He moved so fast and had the spare on in about 5 minutes. The problem then was that the spare was flat...seriously!

So, this man took the tire and got in a shared cab (more on cabs here later) and rode to the petrol station to fill the tire. We started to wonder at that point if he was going to come back but there wasn't much we could do but hang out on the side of the road with our three wheeled car.

At this point we realized again how safe this country was. If we had been in Nairobi or Jo-burg we probably would have been in some if not great danger but not Freetown. Someone from Plan stopped to see if we were okay and went on to tell the logistics crew of our problems.

Well the guy came back with the tire, put it on and had us on our way in minutes. We gave him some money (which we later found out we didn't have to do but come on...he saved our bacon and it was only 20,000 Le which is about $7CAD. Enough to feed his family for a while or buy 80 mangos!) and were on our way before the Plan crew made it to us.

We joke now that we solved our predicament by looking like foreigners and having a little cash. Puts things in perspective a bit.

Tonight is again movie night and we are actually going this time. MI: III. Yay Tom Cruise running! Thursday is Nana's birthday so that should be fun. I'll try to catch a photo of the ellusive man for you all and give you the details of his illustrious life.

I have also gathered some requests for topics from folks but if there is anything you particularly want to hear about from here just add a comment to this blog.

toodles..here's a lizard to keep you occupied until my next post!