Play-Doh

It’s funny – I didn’t realize how used I had gotten to Quelimane until I stepped off the plane in Maputo yesterday feeling like a wide-eyed country bumpkin in the big city. The airport was huge. Cars and chapas everywhere. Lots and lots of people. A bewildering variety of produce and things for sale. And hey, hot running water!! I can’t remember the last time I had a hot shower – the water in my apartment takes so long to heat that it’s not worth the hassle, especially since the shower pressure is nonexistent (not to mention that it’s usually a bazillion degrees out anyway). It’s possible that this is not the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in my entire life, but when I got here yesterday it sure felt like it.

The Cardoso is actually quite a nice hotel by any standards (except that the “king bed” is really 2 twin beds pushed together and covered with one bedsheet). Awesome pool, great view, nice rooms, and for a change, polite service. Nothing to worry about there. No, the biggest headache of the past 2 days – by a long shot – has been my quest to find Play-Doh. Yes, Play-Doh. We need a fair amount for the survey (long story), and it was nowhere to be found in Quelimane. No problem, I thought, I’ll just buy some in Quelimane. Little did I realize what I was getting myself into.

I started the quest almost as soon as I got here yesterday, and quickly discovered not only that Play-Doh is not very common here, but that most people have never even heard of it and don’t have a clue what it is. I would walk into a store, start asking questions, and pretty soon I’d have 3 or 4 salespeople gathered around trying to figure out what I was talking about. It was like when I tried to buy peanut butter in Argentina, only worse, because there part of the problem was that I was  using the Mexican rather than the Argentine word for peanut. But have you ever tried to explain Play-Doh to someone? “It’s this sort of dough thing, in lots of different colors. No, not bread. It’s sort of a toy for children, that they can make into different shapes. Yeah, lots of different colors (at this point, the person would say excitedly, “Oh, you mean building blocks!”). No, not building blocks. You can build things out of it but it’s soft, sort of. No, not that. Oh, I don’t know what age kids would use it. Maybe 2 years old? What’s it for? Well, just to play with. Nothing, I don’t know. Like clay. Only it comes in cans (this was a new wrinkle, because even the people who were sort of familiar with the concept of Play-Doh thought I was talking about modeling clay). Yes, in cans. About this big, I guess…” On and on. I spent literally all afternoon walking from store to store in the city, repeating basically that entire conversation in every store, except when I got lucky and found someone who knew what it was but didn’t have any.

Fortunately, today – after asking every hotel employee I saw between yesterday and this morning – I managed to arrive, by process of triangulation, at a list of a few places, and was able to buy 26 canisters of authentic Chinese play-doh-type substance.. The rest of the shopping I was going to do here will just have to wait until December, I guess. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get all that Chinese Play-Doh back to Quelimane with me, but I’ll worry about that tomorrow when I leave.

Customer Service

At the moment I am trying to decide whether service here in general is as terrible as I had first thought, or whether the appearance of rudeness is just an expression of the shopkeepers’ extreme concern for my well-being.

Item one: I had nothing to eat for breakfast this morning, so I decided to stop at the bakery on the way to work to buy a pastry. I pointed to the one that I wanted, but no, the server said, you can’t buy that one, that one is from yesterday. But I’m hungry, I said. He pointed to another roll and told me that I could buy that one if I wanted. But I don’t want that one, I said, I want this other kind. But that’s a day old, he said. The ones on the other side of the shelf are the ones you should buy. I still hesitated. Well, he said, you can wait until today’s rolls come out. Never mind, I said. So much for breakfast.

Item two: I went yesterday to the LAM office to ask about the schedules of flights to Maputo. The flights are at different times every day, and because of the Frelimo conference the flights are rescheduled, added, or changed from week to week. There is a complicated reference table that lists all the flights and is accurate about 70% of the time. Better than nothing, I figured, so I asked for a copy. But no. Why would you want a copy, the agent said, because that table only tells you about the flights until October 28th, and after October 28th you’ll have to come back and get a new chart. That’s okay, I said, I’m actually interested in flights that leave before then, so do you think I could have a copy? But it’s not even worth it, the agent said again, because it expires. See? October 28th is only two weeks away. But really, I said, I don’t mind. May I please have a copy? The agent was getting annoyed now. Okay, I said, does that mean that you don’t have any copies? Yes, said the agent. She was glad to get rid of me — ahem — glad to have saved me the trouble of getting a schedule that would expire in two weeks. So much for the plane schedule.

I guess those two could go either way. Harder to explain away, though, is the change mafia across the street, aka the Casa das Frutas grocery store. For some reason, this big, prosperous grocery store (one of the biggest in Quelimane) is one of the worst at giving change.  I still remember the first time I went in there. I bought 2 bottles of water (30 meticais) but when I went to pay with a 100-metical note, the cashier shot me down so fast that I was immediately convinced (and remain so to this day) that they are hoarding change for some nefarious purpose. There’s no change, she said. Go buy another 2 bottles of water. But I don’t want another two bottles of water, I said. She gave me a look that clearly said "tough". I caved and headed back to the cooler, got my bottle of water, and tried to act like I really had wanted it all along.

This post didn’t really have a point. Hi John.

the bollywood cinema, finally

I decided two weekends ago that if I survived until this week I would have nothing to fear again in my life, ever. So here I am. The past two weeks have been frantically busy, and things have been complicated by the fact that the internet functions only sporadically and in select locations, cellphone service is up and down, and the electric company managed to send 360 volts through the office systems a few days ago, causing us to lose power entirely for almost a day and frying air conditioners, printers, and anything else that wasn’t attached to a surge protector.

Naturally, this was in the middle of what would already qualify as an abnormally stressful period. Specifically, we were hiring survey enumerators. I think that I’ll write more about that some other time – or maybe not. In a nutshell, I looked through well over a hundred resumes and conducted 62 interviews in five days. In Portuguese, obviously. Now that that part of the job is almost over (thank goodness), things are going pretty well. I’m getting used to how everything works in Quelimane, a little bit. I really like the apartment I’m in now (even though it doesn’t have AC)—I’m living with a Brazilian missionary who is absolutely lovely and is trying to teach me how to cook. I’m getting used to Quelimane, a bit, and I even went to the cinema last week. Yes, that cinema. I know I’ve been talking about it ever since I got here, but I must say that it lived up to every one of my expectations.

When I first got here I was actually afraid that the cinema didn’t exist. There used to be a cinema close to the WV offices, but the roof fell in a few years ago and now the part that is still okay is just a pool hall. I walked by it every night on the way home from work and it was always such heartbreak… but finally I asked around and it turned out that there is another cinema (this one with a roof) that has taken the place of the old one.

I went last week for the first time, and it was nothing short of amazing. I went with Christel, and after paying our 20 Mtn (just under a dollar) admission, they waved us into a medium-sized theater that was completely empty except for 2 giant rats that scurried away as we walked in. Needless to say, I kept my feet up off the floor whenever the lights were off in the theater. This was uncomfortable, though, because although the tiers of seats looked like they were covered in cushions, most of the cushions did not actually have any padding left in them. We eventually gave up on finding two seats together that both had padding, so Christel took one with a marginally lumpy cushion and I just shifted my weight from one side to the other on the wooden seat whenever my butt went numb.

I had been told that sometimes they have English movies, but we realized that this one was with Hindi, with Portuguese subtitles (I forget what it was called—something about the Fires of Hell). The subtitles themselves were well worth the price of admission. They were clearly typed on a typewriter, and ever so often you’d see a place where the typist or translator had made a mistake and simply xxxxx-ed out a letter, word, or entire line. On top of that, they were hand-scrolled during the movie by someone who clearly either didn’t speak Hindi or wasn’t paying that much attention. This meant that the subtitles were hilariously out of synch with the action, and the dialogue was completely hopeless. The operator would fall behind, try to fix it by jumping ahead several lines, then realize the mistake and just turn the subtitles off until the action on the screen caught up to the words scrolling across the bottom. Oh yeah, and one time we saw a rat silhouette scurry across the subtitle projection.

Luckily, Bollywood movies tend not to have very complicated plots, or much of a plot at all in fact. So between the singing and dancing, the gunfights, the flashbacks, and the clearly intense conversations whose subtitles arrived in the middle of the next chase scene, I was very well entertained. Definitely a highlight of the week.