I am reading The Power Broker, which is one of those books I have been meaning to read for a while. I think I sputtered out at page 50 on my first attempt, and I feel really accomplished to be at p. 150 and going strong. Caro's writing is great, and the research he must have done is amazing, but it is a lot of book. After reading for a while, I turned on the TV and The Interpreter was on, which is a political thriller involving an assassination attempt on the corrupt leader of a fictional African country. The movie had a few dramatic twists and turns, but it was also amusing because you could see the lengths they had to go to to find camera angles that hid the significant height difference between Nicole Kidman, who played a UN interpreter with a shady past, and Sean Penn, the Secret Service agent tasked with protecting the leader.
Having been exposed to the military TV network for a week, I find it oddly fascinating. There are a handful of channels that have general themes - family, news, sports - but play programming from all networks with only a semi-fixed schedule. The news channel rotates between Fox, CNN and one of the main three networks so as to broadly cover the political spectrum. So we are all just takers for whatever AFN decides to play. They do reliably play the Daily Show and Colbert, and wrestling. Obviously, I am glued to the TV for the latter. There is an angry, red-headed wrestler named Sheamus (deliberately misspelled), who is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. He wrestles in kelly green shorts and his hair is a ludicrous shade of red. The second best part about the network is the ads - all military PSAs. While some of them carry important messages, they will at times be amusingly juxtaposed. There's an ad on what to do if you want to send mail immediately followed by an ad warning about the dangers of drug use.
Saturday, I did house stuff (I was hoping for laundry, but alas, Saturday there was a water outage) and made it to my first Ouaga grocery store. It had a lot of French brands, but it was noticeable that there were significant gaps in the inventory (basically out of cheese, and there has been no skim milk for weeks apparently. The cheese is the real travesty). Other than that, it was a pretty standard grocery store. I have yet to go to the grand marché in Ouaga, but I'm pretty sure I am still too green to go into the grand marché and not totally be a) pickpocketed or b) totally ripped off.
Saturday night was poker night, hosted at the house where I am staying and featuring a lot of American ex pats. I have not played much poker before, but it was a 5,000 ceffa buy in (~$10) so I googled the instructions and tried to figure it out. I lost 1,500 ceffa, but was not the first person out and considered it a success. One of the guests brought a bottle of "BBQ" brand red wine to the party, which was an interesting taste experience. Apparently, it's a French wine where they introduce barbecue spices during the wine making process, and it came in a bottle that looked like a large Kikkoman bottle with a plastic cap. It tasted like red wine with the aftertaste of Lay's barbecue potato chips. Needless to say, I switched to local beer but kept my wits about me to as to better attempt to win my colleagues' money.
Sunday, I went for a run at 8 AM, and discovered promptly that 8 AM is way too late to run in Ouaga and I should stick to runs starting much closer to dawn. It was already excruciatingly hot. I hydrated and recovered and went to a barbecue at the house in Ouaga 2000 where two other colleagues are cat, chicken and turtle sitting. The guests were all young ex pats in Ouaga, and it was great to meet new people and connect with one of the girls that a friend from HKS had put me in touch with. It was also super, duper hot. I had this week been feeling kind of smug that the weather wasn't that bad, but that was probably because I spend no more than 20 minutes at a time without air conditioning. Lesson learned.
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