Interesting Restaurant Experiences

We have record rainfall while in Namibia, both in Windhoek, and all around Namibia, resulting in flooding in some areas. We even ran into a river blocking a road in town one evening.

When we were in Walvis Bay this last weekend, we saw a bunch of people (of all ethnicities and social standing) lined up filling water containers from a spigot at 2 different construction sites. Then a bit later we were having lunch (at a restaurant on rickity stilts over the lagoon), and we noticed a man repeatedly filling up big white buckets with salt water out of the lagoon and bringing them into the restaurant. We came to find out that there was no running water, so in the bathrooms there were buckets of fresh water to wash hands with, and workers were bringing in the buckets of salt water to "flush" the toilets with. Then leaving the restaurant later, we noticed that they were washing the dishes in buckets of salt water from the lagoon as well. (I'm sure they were different buckets than the ones for flushing. I think.) :)

It turns out that the flooding had caused a dam to overflow and contaminated the city's water supply, so while they were trying to clean it up, the water utility simply shut off the water to most people for most of the day. As we were leaving town, we saw bunches of people lined up at the Kuisebmond fire station filling up water containers. We're still unclear on why the construction sites would still have water (the fire station makes sense), or whether the water people were collecting there was any cleaner.

Then, the next day, we stopped at a coffee shop in a tiny town called Karibib. (Yes, there are coffee shops here, even in pretty small towns; but no Starbucks.) When we got there, Abigael discovered a gigantic spider carcass on the table hiding under the salt and pepper shakers. (He was dead, and he did blend in with the tablecloth, and you'd have to be at Abigael's height to see him.) There was only one menu for the entire coffee shop, and most of the food items you had to go procure yourself from the adjoining grocery store. There were also 2 small dogs wandering around, but that in itself isn't usual here. There have been many places where we were joined by (domesticated) 4-legged creatures. Then it turns out that this little coffee shop has the best iced coffee in all of Namibia (in our humble but experienced opinion). :)

We're headed up to the north of Namibia this week. Tonight we'll be staying in Tsumeb, where last week we had coffee with a mother and daughter from Norway we met who happened to have lived in Tacoma for a year. Small world sometimes.

(P.S. Sorry for the weird line breaks. Seems to be from the way the email posts get submitted. We'll clean them up when we can. UPDATE: We're home now and back to a decent connection, and all the wierd line breaks have been fixed.)