When I came back to the apartment this afternoon, one of the building maintenance guys was in the lobby holding the hand of his son who looked about 5 or 6 years-old. The father and son entered the same elevator as me still holding hands. It was obviously the first time the kid had been in an elevator and he nervously clung to his father's side ( Read more... )

For being a pretty sprawling city, Maputo has a surprising number of tall buildings. Our apartment building has 23 floors (we live on the 17th), and there are many other buildings with at least 10 or 15 stories. Even more surprisingly is that many of these buildings don't have elevators that work ( Read more... )

I just got back from a one-day trip to South Africa. Nelspriut is the nearest South African town across the border and can be reached from Maputo in about 3 hours depending on how backed up the border crossing is. For South Africans, Nelspriut is just a minor provincial capitol, but for visitors from Mozambique it's like a visit to Disney Land. ( Read more... )

In Maputo, like any big city, you can frequently hear the sirens from emergency vehicles. I hear them many times every day and since we live on the 17th story it's easy to see where they are coming from. In four months, I have never seen an ambulance nor a firetruck, only police cars. But the police are not rushing to the scene of a crime. What are ( Read more... )

Yet another car story ( Read more... )

I was driving Yuka home about 8:00 last night when I was stopped by two young policemen. They were both carrying big guns and it was a dark and mostly deserted street. Police checkpoints are common in Mozambique, but I was suspicious when they asked me to get out of the car. In theory they cannot stop diplomatic vehicles and just showing a ( Read more... )

So, for the past week Maputo has been hosting the African Games which, like the Olympics, is held every four years. It has most of the traditional Olympic events including, track and field, basketball, swimming, volleyball, etc. (Apparently it doesn't have gymnastics which made we wonder if I've ever seen an African doing gymnastics!) Anyway, last ( Read more... )

Last night I was having dinner at the restaurant across the street when the power went out. Now, normally when the power goes out everyone groans and pauses their activities waiting for lights to come back on, but that's not what happened. Instead everyone carried on with out skipping a beat as if nothing had happened ( Read more... )

It's nice to finally have a reliable Internet connection at home unlike the WiFi at the hotel that was down at least half the time, but prices and quotas here are outrageous! Since we've never had metered Internet before we decided to start with the smallest plan which is about $25 a month for 3GB of data. Just checking email and doing some light ( Read more... )

We finally moved into our new apartment last week. We spent this weekend unpacking and I finally feel like we've settled in. Yuka likes that she finally has a bathtub, and we are both enjoying the great view of the ocean. On the downside, it lacks storage space--although maybe that's a sign that we have too much stuff! Also, the washing machine ( Read more... )