But on the plus side we're close enough to Greece that I can get real freddo espressi and also close enough northern Balkans that lemonade is just squeezed lemons so I'm drinking a lot of those.
Alarms are for baking not waking
Week in review: 15 - 21 July
- Bussed from Tirana to Skopje, new home for at least a month.
- Ran around Skopje in the rain.
- Wandered around Skopje in the sun.
- Discovered 50% of vegan restaurants are closed for the summer.
- Did some work on BODS infrastructure.
- Ordered new (secondhand) headphones, but won't get them until the end of September.
- Worked out logistics to get my new (secondhand) laptop to me in August.
- Worked on a topic paper to RWOT9.
- Went to the archaelogical museum and cinema (Spiderman Far From Home) to get out of the heat.
The Sarajevo flea market is enormous and amazing, you can buy anything you dream of there for always less than you expect to pay. I wish it existed everywhere. Probably best it doesn't though because today I bought three dzezvas. I do not need three dzezvas. I am going to pick one dzezva to hang on the outside of my backpack, for when I end up in places with no way to prepare coffee.
Co-op life is having my worker rights outrage-o-meter cranked up to Extremely Sensitive at all times, forgetting that ODSC policies are not universal or even close to normal anywhere in the world, and wanting to burn it all down every time I hear even the faintest hint of a company trying to take advantage of an employee. And the employee doesn't really think they're being take advantage of and is trying to tiptoe around the situation so the abuse dosen't get worse.
A couple of weeks in Harare, Zimbabwe
My travel plans and no-fly rule took an unexpected turn this month when I decided to visit Elizabeth in Zimbabwe. Having spent the last two years begging friends and family to take advantage of my various temporary residences in Europe, I was sympathetic to her plight of struggling to persuade people to visit in Southern Africa. I try to put into the world the energy I'd like out, so I tracked down return flights from Vienna for less than $500 with Ethiopian Airlines. I also really wanted to hug Elizabeth.
Life
In Zimbabwe, it is sunny every day. I was there at the start of winter. The sky was consistently brilliant blue, and the temperature was mostly in the late 20s Celsius. The climate is basically vacation-perfect. Never raining does not bode well for the crops though, and even though the temperature was good on paper the sun felt hotter and closer and more vicious than I've ever felt it anywhere before.
Harare is a super green city, with lots of trees, bushes and maize or millet fields filling the wide open spaces between roads and blocks of buildings. Often the maize was looking dead and dried up, while decorative plants in public spaces or peoples' gardens are alive and well. Roads are concrete or dirt, scattered with enormous potholes in both cases. I was frequently a passenger in cars that needed to steer all the way around a hole rather than dipping into it or going over. The CBD is fairly built up, with some tall office buildings and malls, although I only passed through in the car a couple of times. Most of my time was spent taxiing between little pockets of reasonably well maintained commercial areas in the various suburbs. The self-enclosed bubbles of shops and cafes, supermarkets and cinemas, which depend on cars to travel between reminded me a lot of the US.
It seemed like the other form restaurants and bars took were as stand alone properties in what felt like residential buildings in the more upscale residential areas. Many have lots of outside seating, surrounded by trees and statues and generally pleasant environs. In the northern half of the city houses are pretty big, with gardens, balconies, sometimes pools; massive driveways and huge security gates, often with guardhouses. I dropped by the homes of a few of Elizabeth's friends while I was there, and whether local or expat they were all preeeetty fancy.
On the other hand, there's an ongoing energy crisis which affects all areas of the city. Whole neighbourhoods have scheduled power outages for load-shedding, which is documented on a website but not always reliably. While I was there, Elizabeth's power went out for three days straight, unscheduled. When visiting a friend's to charge my laptop, their power went out too one day. Fortunately they had a generator. The lack of electricity is, I believe, due to a combination of fuel imports being from Mozambique (recently hit by a devastating cyclone), lack of money and corruption and inefficiencies in the government.
Everyone is similarly affected by the fuel crisis. Fuel queues were pointed out to me often; people line up in their cars for hours at a petrol station when they hear it has fuel. One friend queued for 3 hours only to find they'd ran out by the time she got to the front of the line. There are some stations which only accept payment in USD (not Ecocash) so if you have enough of that you have a better chance of filling up, with less of a wait. Obviously this benefits foreigners, people who work for embassies, and those recently arrived with a fresh batch of cash. One day on the radio I heard that the country had petrol for a month and diesel for 23 days.
Groceries and household goods are not cheap. Things like cosmetics and furnishings are particularly expensive.
There's relatively little light pollution at night - especially if you're in a neighbourhood with a power outage. So there were plenty of stars and an often brilliant moon to gaze at.
On both Sundays I joined Elizabeth, Sarah and Andrew at church. It was a totally different church experience to the cold, formal, boring CofE affairs that had been imposed upon me by my schools as a child. There was lots of singing and dancing, but also a slightly unnerving occasion of laying of hands, and the messages conveyed by the sermons were definitely at odds with things that make sense to me from Buddhist philosophy. The theme of the month had been fathers, and some members of the congregation across a range of ages gave very moving, funny, and heartfelt stories of the ups and downs of their paternal relationships.
Food
Zimbabwean food mostly consists of sadza, an enormously filling cereal (maize) mush that definitely expands in your stomach after you've already eaten too much, with greens (rape/canola) and beans, usually accompanied with a meat stew, chicken or fish.
You can read about all the vegan food I found here.
Transit
Harare is not particularly solo-non-driving-traveler friendly. For the first few days I felt pretty trapped by my inability to move around independently. The city is very spread out in itself, and natural sights and hiking trails are really far away. Places are linked by wide, poorly maintained dusty roads that mostly don't seem very pedestrian friendly even if it was safe to walk around alone. I was told repeatedly that public transport is not safe for different reasons (dangerous drivers, dangerous passengers, ..) and even if it wasn't I don't know how I'd have figured out how to navigate the fustercluck of marshrutka-style packed private minibuses with no signs or numbers. Fortunately E already had some trusted taxi drivers on hand, plus a few very hospitable friends with cars. Still, not even feeling comfortable to walk to a shop or a cafe by myself from the house is not my favourite. Advice I got about which neighbourhoods and distances were safe to walk varied drastically between people I talked to.
Money
Another thing I don't love a ton is dependence on a mobile phone. Fortunately I have a moderately functional HTC One to use while my Fairphone is still out of action, otherwise I'd be pretty helpless. ATMs and credit cards basically don't work here, and it's illegal to change money. The official currency was changed to USD a few years ago, but also in circulation are Bond notes, aka RTGs, at a variable rate from 3.5 to 4.7. Most places accept USD, but with poor conversion so the price is higher than paying with Bond. The best option, used universally, is to set up an EcoCash account and find someone who will send you EcoCash in exchange for a fistful of USD (also illegal). Setting up EcoCash required purchasing a SIM (2 bond) and filling in a form with a local address (I used E's) and providing ID. They photocopied my passport, didn't need most of my info in the form, and misspelled my name when setting up the account (henceforth, Amy Huy). I topped up 100 USD, and bought some mobile data too (350mb for 1 week for 10 bond).
After that I could pay anywhere, from streetside fruit vendors to the farmers market to chain supermarkets and restaurants with EcoCash using USSD codes. Market stalls have their numbers scrawled on pieces of paper on their tables. That is, typing *151*1*1*{mobile number or merchant code}*{amount}#, followed by a prompt for a confirmation PIN which I set when I made the account (in plaintext). It displays the name of the recipient so you can increase your chance of not sending it to the wrong number before you commit. The recipient's phone goes bloop, and I immediately receive an SMS confirmation of the transaction, plus my new balance. This is horrifyingly insecure, but also a bit cool. There are small fees for each transaction depending on the amount you send. It's not a percentage, there are brackets of fees.
Another thing that was kind of cool while I was there was that Ecocash were running a promotion; for every 20 bond I spent I earned a point, and every 5 points gets me entered into a monthly prizedraw. The top prizes were a house and a river cruise in South Africa; but the better ones were goats, cows, generators, and school fees. I was checking the t&c to find out when the prize draws happened, but made the even better discovery that goats and cows may be requested live or dead; if dead, you have to pick them up from an abattoir of your choosing. If alive, you must pay the necessary transport fees. I'll find out if I was a lucky winner in the first week of June and I'm psyched to make Elizabeth take care of a goat in her yard for me.
If you're gonna be here a while, you can also hook your mobile EcoCash up to a bank account, and get a swipe card to pay with too. At one point, the network glitched out and Elizabeth was a victim; her EcoCash stopped working for sending money, claiming she had reached her daily or monthly limit when she clearly had not. This was a mahoosive inconvenience; we went to the Econet store to try to troubleshoot, and they did not solve the problem at all and there were a ton of other people in line experiencing similar issues. Centralisation at at its finest.
By the end of my visit, the exchange rate had fluctuated so much that it was now cheaper to pay for things in USD. I naturally had just topped up my Ecocash right before the surge; the digital currency I held lost significant value overnight in terms of what I could trade it for. What a nightmare to live like this every day. Many (most?) local people are paid in bond, hold their savings in bond, and as the exchange rate changes their salaries do not.
Coders in the suburbs
I was fortunate to meet Peter and Alana from the Sprout Coding project at a party one night. Their organisation, based in 'high density suburbs' of Harare, teaches locals to code and to teach, and then the locals go into schools to teach kids to code in turn. They invited me to visit and talk with their tutors. I spent one morning at their premises in Dzivarasekwa, sitting in on an informal meeting where the tutors had some forms to sign and got their final pep talk before classes with kids began the following week. I heard amazing stories of how each of them had got into code, including from some who learned with paper and solar panels, without access to electricity or internet for the most part. I spent some time with one of their earliest recruits, de-mystifying git. I asked as many as I could whether they were in it for the teaching or the coding, and everyone I asked said they just loved teaching.
The next day I joined them in Kuwadzana for a braai. This was super fun, and I spent time with the group talking about privacy, surveillance, encryption, and hacking, while we ate sadza and greens.
Dzivarasekwa and Kuwadzana are a far cry from the residential parts of Harare in the north. The roads are still wide and dusty, but there are no more security fences, gardens or driveways. The houses are single storey unpainted brick and breezeblock, often with small vegetable patches in whatever area around them is available. There are many makeshift food stalls, 'tuck shops' and the like, with hand painted signs, or just a table at the side of the road staffed by an entire family. The braai in Kuwadzana was under a tattered awning beside what appeared to be a large shed or market-type building that contained a bar (and pool tables). Besides the bar, the building also hosted meat and vegetable stalls, as well as the people who would prepare the produce you just bought for immediate consumption, and a sink with soap that we could all use to wash our hands before we ate.
Adventures
My first grand adventure was with E's Finnish friend and his Russian guests. We drove to Lake Chivero nature reserve, less than an hour west of the city. In a totally inappropriate small car, we crawled through the trails spotting zebra, impala, wildebeest and even a giraffe. Periodically we had to get out of the car so it was light enough to take a particularly jagged bump or canyon in the road. We took one trail that dwindled into nothing, and got out and walked to the lake where we saw lots of monkeys and interesting birds.
Later we found our way to the park headquarters and talked with the rangers. They offered to take us on a little walk to see some more animals. The ranger Gladys guided us, and after five minutes we practically tripped over a rhino. He stayed snoozing in the undergrowth, and we moved on. A few minutes later he changed his mind, and charged us. I fell over, thought I was going to die, and Gladys rescued me. I posted more detail about the rhino story closer to the time. Later we saw more chill rhinos, and ostriches by the lake.
One evening I joined the Fin and the Russians in climbing a small hill in the south of the city. I'm not sure what it was called. It was a reasonably well maintained public space, with trees and walls and a small sculpture like thing at the peak. From there we watched the sun set. In the distance, Harare looks like any other city, with high rises in the center flattening out to residential suburbs around the edges.
The Harare Botanical Gardens are somewhat in a state of disrepair, but they contain many interesting trees and not much signage about them. Still, nice to wander through for a couple of hours for the low entry fee of 3 bond. We considered taking a nap, but the ground-level insect life deterred us.
Just outside the city are balancing rocks. We got there and they wouldn't accept our ecocash, and we didn't have enough USD between us. Not to mention the USD price was more than 10x that day's bond price, according to that day's exchange rate. Harumph. So we took some pictures of the ones we could see from the carpark and the road, and left.
I spent an absolutely beautiful evening with Elizabeth and Andrew at Domboshava, a granite hill formation about a 45 minute drive north of Harare. The perfect time to go is in the hour or so before sunset. There are incredible views in every direction of the surrounding countryside, as well as balancing rocks and other geographical phenomena, and cave paintings. It is an incredibly peaceful place, even despite all the other tourists who were around.
Longer trips I considered but failed to arrange were Great Zimbabwe, Paradise Pools, and Victoria Falls. Great Zim is an ancient abandoned city that looks way cool. I was pretty disappointed not to be able to make it happen, but the fuel crisis meant none of E's friends were up for driving that distance (about 4 hours) and I couldn't put together enough people at the last minute to make a guided tour good value. Paradise Pools was also a victim of the fuel crisis, after a friend sat in line for hours and wasn't even able to refill. Vic Falls would have been great but required some planning ahead on my part. It's at least a four day trip - one full day on trains and buses to get there, two days to appreciate the city, and a full day back. I could have done it when E was at work (might have been a good use of those days without power at home) but visiting Elizabeth was really the point of the trip and our time hanging out in the evenings was way more important.
Photos
Photos and more notes are as follows:
🛍
470RTGs Ecocash
100usd
Week in review: 29 April - 5 May
- Note-took in interviews for ODSCo-op developer hiring.
- Did some work on flatten-tool.
- Walked a bit around Bratislava environs, and went to Vienna again.
- Finally said goodbye to Bratislava, and then Europe.. and flew from Vienna airport to Harare, Zimbabwe, via Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).
- Reunited with Elizabeth in Harare. Learnt all about the complicated currency situation, and got set up with EcoCash. Spent the weekend and markets and cafes and low key parties and generally chilling.
- Attended a very musical and colourful church service. A member of the congregation pegged me as a lost soul and took me aside afterwards to reassure me God is looking out for me.
- Saw Avengers Endgame again.
- Caught Elizabeth's cold, I think.
I'm trying to figure out cat storage. Not sure I'm quite getting it yet.
how do i cat
So I found a clinic I can walk into without an appointment and wait in line for an unspecified time for a cholera vaccine, this very afternoon.
All the google reviews for this hospital say it's better to die at home with dignity than go here under any circumstances, but the lady on the phone was nice.
Worst of all I can't eat for 3 hours before the vaccine and an hour after, so obviously now all I can think about is the really great seitan salad baguette in my bag that I didn't finish at breakfast and will not get to eat for at least a few hours from now ;_;
Wish me luck in these trying times.
Places.. coworking spaces, restaurants, hostels.. that play music in the toilet.. give it a break. Don't you know people need to go hide out there to get away from overstimulating environments? Why you gotta take away one place for peace and quiet, for empty undisturbed space to think for two fucking minutes?
Week in review: 1 - 7 April
- Ate and cafe worked around Krakow.
- Visited the museum at Auschwitz.
- Remotely attended a ODS Co-op OGM.
- Bussed to Warsaw to see friends.
- Ate and touristed around Warsaw. Visited for the second time the Warsaw Rising Museum, and the Palace of Culture and Science.
- Made plans for the rest of April, and half of May. Surprising plans. But leaving space for this to take shape explains why I was blocked on figuring out what to do after Warsaw for so long.
I consider air travel only for emergencies and I generally have my own travel agenda, but what's the point of having me as your attachment-free digital nomad friend if I'm not going to drop everything and fly half way around the world to see you sometimes?
Week in review: 25 - 31 March
- Hung out in Budapest. Ate lots.
- Bussed to Krakow.
- Finished Expanse S3.
- Chilled and ate and wandered and cafe worked with Felicity and Maelle.
- Feeling kind of behind on everything.
- I love being back in Poland though.
(B)log update: I am having some adventures. Regular service will resume eventually.
Week in review: 18 - 24 Feb
- Jane and Felicity left. Went to Kerimeikos ancient cemetery.
- Walked up Lycabetos Hill.
- Got back to work on BODS internationalisation stuff.
- Wandered along the beach in Glyfada.
- Met cool people from the internet in Athens. Ate pizza. Went to a party in the hackerspace/squat. It was chill.
- Took a bus to Patras, and a ferry awaaayy..