Toe in the water

I'm trying this out to see how it works. If it does, then I'll use it to keep in touch with our family and friends. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Mo was small. Part 2 The house in Mbeya

Image
Finding the house. Another extraordinary meeting - and indeed an extraordinary discovery. I'd chosen a hotel just a few hundred yards from where we thought my family house in Mbeya had been; again judging by google earth, and also by Peter's memory of having stayed near there forty years ago when he was working in Tanzania and had visited the town. The satellite showed a house with a shape like an E but with the middle arm missing. The long side of the E was the front of the house, facing the road. That is what our house had been like. When I was aged about seven we had moved there from Dar. The family lived there until Dad retired, when I was ten. After we had arrived in Mbeya from the Dar train, and changed our clothes we walked along. There the house was, now gated and with high opaque walls. Peering through the gate I suddenly remembered the front verandah, its red tiles, and my mother sitting there crying. She was holding a letter saying that Great Aunt Ethel had...
Read more

Staying at the Bulawayo Club - history and pictures and staff

Image
When Rhodes, one of the richest men in the world acquired his first country (he ended up owning four, and being the Prime Minister of another) in 1890-1893 he considered it a priority to establish two towns, and, in Bulawayo, to set up a gentlemen's club fit to entertain his fellow gold and diamond mining magnates who might invest in his company and develop another Rand in the country known to have gold everywhere and to be the location of the fabled King Soloman's mines. This club is now a hotel.     When his henchman, Leander Star Jameson, declared the town open in 1895 he stood on the steps of the Bulawayo Club and made the following speech: "It is my job to declare this town open, gentlemen. I don't think we want any talk about it now. There is plenty of whisky and soda inside, so come in". The assembled crowd did just that.     A year later Jameson took half the country's police and invaded the Transvaal Republic, hoping to  provoke a ...
Read more

Things fall apart - but the centre holds

Image
No problems? (Hamna shida?) Two of our relatives had remarked that the blog was pretty much all positive, and had nothing gone wrong? What had we been hiding? Well, actually, it's been a very lucky journey, and no, nothing much to complain about. We made a list of complaints to see what we could come up with. There was the badly signposted road with the truly terrible surface in the Matopos. We'd both been frightened that we might get stuck all night in a car in the  middle of a game reserve. But we had written about that. And there was the deplorable hotel and chaotic traffic in Harare, neither of which we'd enjoyed. But we'd written about that too. And I think we'd mentioned that getting a 2 a.m. flight from Harare to Dar had not been the best (though it was the only one we could find). We didn't like trying to bend our aged knees in a squat toilet in a swaying, lurching train on the way to Mbeya. What else? 1. Coffee! Sometimes wonderful, but mostl...
Read more