An extended layover in London

On our trip home, Sam and I planned an extended layover in London so we spent three and a half days there. The last time I was in Europe, London was one of my favourite cities so I was very much looking forward to going again.

Our flight got in at 7 in the morning and after dropping our bags off at our hostel around 9:30, we spent the rest of the day sightseeing and window shopping (with a little bit of actual shopping!). We put 30 pounds on an "Oyster" card which is like a credit card that you scan to get unlimited access to the Tube (London's subway system) and the buses. Public transportation in London is very easy to figure out and it is the perfect place to people watch. I loved it!

Our first stop was Abbey Road to see the famous Beatles crosswalk since it was close to our hostel. However, there really wasn't much to see as it was a busy street full of traffic.

This was the coolest tea shop called Fortnum & Mason. There were hundreds of teas that you could buy and the multi-level store was so beautifully decorated.

We spent some time relaxing in a couple of the beautiful parks in London. This is in Hyde Park.

This was the hostel we stayed at. It's called "Palmer's Lodge - Swiss Cottage" and I'd recommend it if you're looking for a place to stay.

 Our second day we did a walking tour in the morning where we got to see the main attractions in Westmintser (Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, etc.). Our tour guide was from Vancouver and told us lots of interesting stories about past royalty. For the afternoon we just did more sightseeing, went to the National Gallery, and then went back to the hostel to get ready for a nice dinner and a West End show - Matilda!

This is "Canada Gate" right outside Buckingham Palace near the edge of Green Park.

 

This is an piece that is on exhibit in Trafalgar Square. There's some irony in it being there because of where Trafalgar Square got its name (defeating the French in a battle) and the chicken being blue and a chicken (France's colour is blue and it's national bird is a cockerel).

This was so random! Sam and I were watching a street performer in busy Trafalgar Square when a girl comes up to me and says "Are you Whitney?". It was a girl that had visited Amani (where I was volunteering in Jinja) and was now backpacking through Europe. Small world!

This made me happy to see!

We had the worst seats possible but it was still a great show!

 On the third day we decided to watch the "Changing of the Guard" at Buckingham Palace because we forgot what it was like the first time we'd seen it about 5 years earlier. It takes place at 11:30 each morning and we got there around 9:45 and there was already a large crowd forming so we decided to stake out a decent spot and wait. While it was cool to see, it was long and I didn't really understand what was going on. The highlight was when the band started playing the theme song from James Bond. After that, we took a double decker bus to St. Paul's Cathedral where we grabbed some lunch and people watched and then we went to the other side of the Thames River to see the Globe Theater and walked down to the London Tower Bridge. That night we went to a pub near our hostel with our new friend Kayleigh and watched the London-Uruguay soccer game. That was a fun experience (even if London lost)!

 

St. Paul's Cathedral - it was so huge!

In the pub, "The North Star", watching the soccer match.

 Our last day we had half a day to sightsee before we needed to head to the airport. I had the nerdy urge to go to Platform 9 3/4 to see the Harry Potter attraction where you could  take a picture pushing a trolley through the wall. The wait in line for that was quite long so it took about 45 minutes but I think it was worth it. Unfortunately my camera died just before we got there so I was only able to snap a couple pictures on my phone. After that we sat in Green Park for a while before heading to our hostel to retrieve our bags and head to Heathrow Airport.

Just getting in some quick exercises before doing a LOT of walking for the day.



Us leaving our hostel - Sam is happy to leave and see Mike and I am sad I have to go back to the "real world".

 So that was our quick trip to London! One of my favourite cities. If it weren't for the astronomical cost of living, I would be on the next plane back to London looking for a job there.

A look at Ugandan food

I have been back in Canada for a week now and it's still feels a bit strange to be back. It took me a while to get over jetlag and now I have a cold so I'm happy to have a few more days off before I go back to work. The last couple of weeks of my trip to Uganda flew by very quickly as I was busy trying to take in as many hugs and songs from the kids as I could and spend as much time with my friends as possible before I left. So, needless to say, I didn't take the time to post anymore blog updates.

But there are some more experiences that I wanted to share with friends and family so I'm going to post a few more entries that are from my time in Uganda (and a bit from London). The first topic I wanted to touch on is near and dear to my heart. FOOD! I love food and I love trying new food so there was definitely a lot of opportunity for this while in Uganda. At Amani, we were provided with eggs, bread, and fruit for breakfast so almost everyday I ate scrambled eggs, toast with peanut butter, and a bit of pineapple. This is the best pineapple I've ever had! Our housekeeper would cut it up for us and make us pineapple juice using the core and the peel. I'm really going to miss that. For lunch, the wonderful "Mama Cook" and her helpers would make food enough to feed all of the staff and all of the volunteers. I ate a lot of rice, beans, peas, spaghetti noodles, and potatoes! I enjoyed every meal except for one - sweet potatoes with g-nut sauce. The sweet potatoes were not the typical orange and sweet potatoes but instead the dry potatoes that I think we call yams. And g-nut sauce is peanuts (they call them g-nuts) made into an unappetizing greyish purple paste. Let's just say that on days where we had this meal, I was glad I brought Kraft Dinner and other dried pasta mixes for a bit of comfort food from home! I also wasn't a huge fan of "posho" which is a type of food that is made from mixing water and maize (or cornmeal), has the consistency of mashed potatoes but has no taste whatsoever. You just drench it with the sauce from other parts of the meal. It doesn't have a lot of nutritional value but is a filler so it makes you feel full. It's one of the cheapest foods to buy so most Ugandans have grown up on it and love it. I, however, did not grow up on it and do not love it. But I could stomach it if I had to. Here are some pictures of the lunches we had: 

Here is a typical lunch at Amani. As you can see, I enjoyed the food more than Samantha did (her plate is on top, mine on the bottom). This day we had rice with green beans and carrots, cabbage, and matooke which is a banana that is not sweet but savoury.

 

Rice, cow peas and cabbage

Rice, beans, cabbage and spaghetti noodles. I'm not sure how Mama Cook made these noodles or what they were even made of but they were one of my favourites!

This was my favourite meal that Mama Cook made! It was a holiday this day in Uganda (Hero's Day) and so Mama Cook always includes some kind of meat in the meal. We got fried chicken, pumpkin (squash), rice with  a minced meat mixture, and cabbage. It was so good!

This was, obviously, not my favourite meal. It was posho, cabbage and irish potatoes with a pea sauce.

 

 

We were on our own for supper so we had to make our own meal or go out for dinner. If we ate in, dinner usually consisted of spaghetti with meat sauce, veggies and rice (because we hadn't had enough rice already), goat meat from a street vendor or chapati tacos (I will talk more about this below!), Because Jinja has quite a few muzungu's (white people), relatively speaking, there are several restaurants that cater to a more "western" pallet. We probably ate out for dinner 2-3 times a week because the food was familiar and because it wasn't that expensive. You could get a really good pizza for 22,000 shillings (about $9) and have leftovers for the next day. There was a place called "The Keep" where you could get a killer Kit Kat milkshake for 8,000 shillings ($3.50). We also went to a delicious East Indian restaurant where you could get a large serving of butter chicken with unlimited rice and naan for 18,000 shillings ($7). Yum!!

 

Probably my favourite indulgence was a wonderful thing called Chapati and its counterpart, a Rolex. I may have discussed this already in a previous post but a chapati is kind of like a thick tortilla that has quite a lot of oil in it so it's a bit greasy. They were 500 shillings a piece (about $0.20) so you really couldn't go wrong. You could eat it on its own as a snack, have it for a light dinner, or we liked to accompany it with our dinners. We'd make a veggie stir-fry and then wrap it in a chapati. My favourite meal that we'd make with chapati's though were tacos. We bought frozen minced meat (hamburger that we hoped was made in a safe and clean environment) from the supermarket, and used zucchini, green peppers, tomatoes, onions, and avocado for fillings. So good! Here's Sam looking happy to eat something other than rice and beans.

 

 

 

The counterpart to a chapati is a Rolex which is a delicious and filling meal that only costs 1,500 shillings (about $0.60). I could have ate these every day but the amount of oil and salt that goes into them is a bit ridiculous so I tried to limit myself to once or twice a week. Basically a rolex is an omelette wrapped inside a chapati. They fry two eggs mixed with different veggies (usually green peppers, tomatoes, carrots, and onions) and then add a good amount of salt and wrap it into a chapati. They make Rolexes (along with chapati, samosas, mandaze, and other cheap foods) on the side of the road in what they call kiosks. Thankfully there were two of these such kiosks right around the corner of Amani so we could just walk over and get what we wanted.

 

Here's Sam and our friend Aaron ordering a rolex on a beautiful day.

Here is the vendor making the rolex. Something I had to get used to was the lack of food standards. This guy, handled the dirty money, cut the veggies up with a dirty knife on a dirty wood counter using unclean hands, and added two eggs that were sitting out in the hot sun. It was a bit of a shock at first but the food tasted delicious and I never got sick so I got used to it pretty quickly!



In addition to eating out at restaurants and ordering from these kiosks, there was also another food experience that I will never forget. While travelling to Kampala in order to go on our safari, we stopped at the side of the road so I could order some food. These street vendors are VERY intense and swarm your vehicle as you are barely coming to a stop. I'm not talking about 2 or 3 people but probably about 15 come running up to your vehicle and shove their arms in any open window trying to get you to buy whatever they're selling which could be fruit, soda, water, chips, chicken, goat, caseva, matooke, corn, among others. I decided that it was probably a good time to give "Chicken on a stick" a try and wash it down with some Coca Cola. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the chicken tasted. It was very salty as is most Ugandan food but it was yummy. After the driver somehow grabbed a piece of chicken and a Coke for me from two different people and then paid only one of them the full amount of 4,000 shillings (less than $2) - I'm not sure how the vendors square up with each other - we were back on the road in less than what seemed to be one minute. I got this meal a couple more times during my stay in Uganda because the experience was so crazy and the food was good!

 

 Overall, my experience with the Ugandan food was great and I kind of miss it. Of course, I am also glad to be back in the land of steak! 

A safari to Murchison Falls

As I sit here writing this post during my afternoon break, there is a torrential down pour like I've never seen before (and that's saying a lot considering the rain we had last summer in Southern Alberta). It makes me want to make a cup of tea and read a book while in some cozy sweats. Unfortunately I didn't bring any pants or hoodies along because I thought it was just going to be hot the whole time. I guess a cup of tea and a book will have to do while I sit shivering and waiting for the rain to stop. And now the power has just shut off too! Oh well, I may be cold but I'm also sitting in a nice house while there are people down the street sitting in a small shack with a tin roof full of holes. I really shouldn't complain.

Anyway, this past weekend I went on a Safari to Murchison Falls which is in the northern part of Uganda. IT WAS AMAZING!!! As my dad put it when telling my grandma what a safari was, it's like going to the zoo but instead of the animals being behind bars, the spectators are. I loved almost every minute of it and was left speechless when I saw my first herd of elephants and giraffes. You got to see the animals in their natural habitats and see how majestic they are. We saw so many animals including elephants, giraffes, baboons, warthogs, buffalo, a hyena, antelope, heart beasts, so many birds, hippos, crocodiles, and even a lion cub!

I went with Samantha and one of our housemates, Summer. It was a lot of fun going with Summer and we really got to know each other better. She also has a type A personality so we understand each other's desire to plan and organize or as some people say, micro-manage every detail. :) On our safari were also two girls from France and Belgium so it was a great mix of cultures. We did our safari with a company called Red Chilli and I'd highly recommend them to anyone looking to do a safari in Uganda. They were affordable and had decent accommodations and were very organized. We stayed in a stand-up tent for two nights and our campsite was also home to warthogs, baboons, and hippos which was interesting. I never actually saw a hippo because they come out of the water at night and we were usually in bed by 9 because we were exhausted from the day and had to wake up super early to do it all over again but they were apparently there.

I could talk more about the safari but I think pictures can do a better job portraying how cool it was so I'll just show you a few.

On a bittersweet note, I only have a few more days here at Amani before I start my trek home. While I'm looking forward to seeing friends and family that I've missed over these past two months, I think I'm equally sad, if not more, to be leaving the kids I've met and friends I've made behind. I may not see them ever again and I will miss them so much. I hope it's in God's plan for me to come back again but we will have to see.