First the shocking: Apparently the Independent Electoral Commission in Botswana, in charge of overseeing the national elections that are taking place this Friday, used the same misguided advertising firm as the stop aids campaign and is also represented by a slightly creepy, over-sized rabbit that is overseeing a cartoon ballot box..... yeah, that is inspiring confidence in the democratic process.
Also, on a more inappropriate note, the english major in our group who is irritatingly (and occasionally naively) positive about life saw a salon called "head job" and said "I wonder if they do manicures?"
Predictable: We recently read in a Botswana guidebook that a village outside of Gabs called Molepolole (awesome name) has beautiful flowering aloe trees this time of year. We had nothing to do on a saturday so we took a 1.5 hr busride out to the village to see the trees. Turns out that Molepolole is a sizeable town (50-60,000 people I'd guess- very pretty area actually) and showing up at the bus stop vaguely inquiring about trees gets you nowhere but laughed at (to be fair, the locals would point at the nearest trees when we asked). Oops. We ended up wandering around molepolole and walking towards general greenery in the distance (note we also did not know what aloe trees looked like) We did, however, find a really sketchy bar (see picture) and the forest from Dr. Suess' "the Lorax" (coincidentally we think these might be aloe trees) Good times were had by all despite our incompetence.
Shockingly Predictable: The Botswana Socialist society was selling T-shirts n Friday for outrageously cheap prices and several of us quickly headed over to the booth to stock up on commie-wear. Unfortunately the shirts were all odd and inconvenient shapes and sizes and those sizes they did have were all completely mislabeled- awesomely appropriate (especially as most of the shirts were either olive green or drab brown). A series of socialism jokes ensued from our econ-major friend such as: "do we need ration coupons to buy these?" "Oh, I think we need to wait in line first." I bought one, it has a black fist and "power to socialism" on it and it is awesome. We also agreed to only refer to each other as comrade while wearing the shirts. If I end up on a black list and am no longer welcome in the states, however, you'll know why.
By the way, sorry it took so long to post this blog, the internet has been out for 4 days (shockingly predictable). I ended up battling a polar bear with my pocket knife in order to get to IT to complain about it and eventually the network was back online.
Did you know if I google "Blogswana" your blog is the 8th hit on the list? Isn't that cool? I'll probably be emailing you soon... I just had a meeting with study abroad to prep for Spain and they told me horror stories. It was awful.. I wish you were here to pacify my paranoidal tendencies with your "lax" personal safety habits!
ReplyDelete