The South Africans left early this morning. They also left three burst coke cans in the freezer which has created quite a mess. Perhaps we are anally retentive, but we try to leave a place as clean and tidy as possible when we leave. Not everyone has this mindset it seems.
It's Sunday so John and I strip the beds ourselves and put the washing on. Thank goodness there is water; it was off all day yesterday and will go off early on Monday and only be back on Wednesday. The assumption in Africa is that you always have someone to do the dirty work for you, but this is not always true of us. We have a lady, Eunice, who comes once a week to clean the cottage and do the ironing. These days, it is usually only booked over the weekend so she comes on a Monday morning. It is also our day for having full power, which goes some way to making up for the water being off.
John goes to visit a friend and comes back with two crates full of stamp magazines. He rather sheepishly explains that he was given them to put with the rest of the stamp club paraphernalia that we seem to have taken on. Like many of these clubs, the Stamp Club is dying a slow death in Zimbabwe and for some reason John sees himself as the protector of its sad remains. A couple of months ago, he came back with six crates of books, catalogues and magazines, some vaguely interesting, but most old and outdated. The reasoning behind this was vague from the beginning: the club had nowhere to keep its library and so John offered to take it and sort it out into some type of order. After spending far too long clogging up the veranda table, I eventually managed to persuade him to move them elsewhere with the result that they are now boxed up and sit gathering dust on the back veranda.
As we go to sleep at night, all we can hear is dogs barking.
'Don't the owners know their dogs are barking?' grumbles John. 'Can't they tell them to shut up?'
It appears not.
Bulawayo, says John, is synonymous with barking dogs
.
It's Sunday so John and I strip the beds ourselves and put the washing on. Thank goodness there is water; it was off all day yesterday and will go off early on Monday and only be back on Wednesday. The assumption in Africa is that you always have someone to do the dirty work for you, but this is not always true of us. We have a lady, Eunice, who comes once a week to clean the cottage and do the ironing. These days, it is usually only booked over the weekend so she comes on a Monday morning. It is also our day for having full power, which goes some way to making up for the water being off.
John goes to visit a friend and comes back with two crates full of stamp magazines. He rather sheepishly explains that he was given them to put with the rest of the stamp club paraphernalia that we seem to have taken on. Like many of these clubs, the Stamp Club is dying a slow death in Zimbabwe and for some reason John sees himself as the protector of its sad remains. A couple of months ago, he came back with six crates of books, catalogues and magazines, some vaguely interesting, but most old and outdated. The reasoning behind this was vague from the beginning: the club had nowhere to keep its library and so John offered to take it and sort it out into some type of order. After spending far too long clogging up the veranda table, I eventually managed to persuade him to move them elsewhere with the result that they are now boxed up and sit gathering dust on the back veranda.As we go to sleep at night, all we can hear is dogs barking.
'Don't the owners know their dogs are barking?' grumbles John. 'Can't they tell them to shut up?'
It appears not.
Bulawayo, says John, is synonymous with barking dogs
.
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