More Pictures and a Lead on Housing

In keeping with my goal of posting less content, more often, I thought I'd add a few more pictures to the mix and answer a few common questions.

I might have mentioned once or twice that this place is rural. It really is. There are a few main streets that constitute the "city" and I'll post some pictures soon (once I take them), but these next two pictures more accurately capture the overall Swazi scene. It's not always this gray -- today it was 70 degrees and completely clear -- but you get the idea. The winter here is the dry season, so rainy gray days should become much less common. It is definitely starting to feel like fall and get cold at night--after dinner tonight we could see our breath frozen in the air. The swazis are already wearing their thick jackets, even during the day, which is pretty funny.

A view from "Pine Valley," a scenic, if a bit remote, part of Mbabane.

This house is cooler looking than the picture makes it out to be but it provides a sense of how isolated the places in Pine Valley are. Once you get out a few kilometers* past town the houses become very far apart and most/all have great views. I don't expect to live out this far from town, even though it's only a 15-minute drive to work and a few of my colleagues do live in these parts.

Speaking of living, a common question: Do I have a permanent place to live yet? Answer: No, not yet. I'm still living at the cushy hotel with a pool and a tennis court, and will be here for another week at least. The current plan is to find a place with a colleague who is also brand new to the country, in a two- or three-bedroom house depending on what we find. We have a lead on a great place that will be open in late June, which we may take if we can find something temporary (and less expensive) than the hotel we're in now. I don't expect it will be a problem, there's a lot of transient people here, especially in the expat community.

I mentioned that I hiked a mountain when I first arrived. This is the mountain/rock, called Sibebe (si-bay-bay) and is one of the largest single deposits of granite in the world, apparently. We climbed up the face about a third of the way from the right side of this photo, and it was a bit of work at times to keep from tumbling backward due to the steepness. The top has at least one cave that was fortified by original Swazi tribes, which was really cool to see. Apparently there are many thousand-year-old cave drawings in the country which will be interesting to explore.

Finally, this is a relatively unrelated picture from my hotel room in Nairobi, notable for the new-to-me mosquito net that hangs over the bed. I'd never seen anything like it before, but this is a very effective malaria prevention tool. Also it's a very effective fishing net, which is what a sizeable percentage of the netting that is donated to rural parts of the country becomes. In Nairobi and western Swaziland there really isn't much/any malaria to speak of, but the nets make western tourists feel better, I suppose. Right now in Mbabane it's mostly too cold for mosquitos to survive the night, so malaria at this time of year is almost unheard of.

Sala khale (goodbye),

Garrett

*I'm trying desperately to comprehend the metric system and learn 24-hour time--too bad I didn't pay attention to Scott's Anglophile expressions more closely... Thank god no one here uses the term "fortnight"