We went to a restaurant called Open House for Indian food and cake. I had the chicken tikka masala.

followed by some cake!

Joiining me was (left to right below: Merab, Immaculate, Poover, and Susan)

There's a few more pictures here if you can't get enough pictures of me eating: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlhaynes/sets/72157594365155629/

Here's the site specific to our story, it says the video of the show will be up November 7th.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/index.html

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/burma601/index.html

Let me know if you see me!

I'm within easy walking distance of a nice little market for buying fruits and veggies as well as several small supermarkets. It's also the crossroads for two different taxi routes so I can get to either side of the city in just a few minutes which is nice.

The other nice thing is that where we were living, the taxis stopped running about 8:00pm so it was impossible to eat out or see a late movie (at the one movie theatre in Uganda). The taxis run late to Ntinda so we can go out on the town and still make it home in one piece.

The front of the house.

and the back with the maid's quarters

We had a nice dinner where I was able to order Mac & cheese and it was taaasstttyyy!

It was Susan's birthday so we headed to Jinja for a relaxing weekend at one of the nicer resorts in Uganda, The Jinja Nile Resort. The resort is made up of a bunch of cottages right on the Nile. We were well protected as the heads of the armed forces for Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania were all in town for some military exercises. There were no shortage of soldiers around, though we had to make sure to hit the dinner buffet early because once the soldiers arrived...bye bye food!

Most of my days were laying by the pool drinking Stoneys (ginger soda):

and eating:

and drinking passion fruit juice:

and swimming:

and Susan went swimming for the first time in her life:

And after 6 months in Africa, I finally saw a monkey (actually a whole family of them)!

There weren't too many shots of me, I spent most of my time ducking so I wouldn't get in the way of the shot. I think if I make it in the documentary, I will be "Van Passenger #2". Still it was fun to watch the shooting and all the people interviewed were good sports even when they had to stop and ask the same question multiple times to get the shot right. Of course we drew a crowd everywhere we went!

It'll be fun to watch to final product and see if any of the footage I watched get filmed actually shows up on TV.

Lots more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlhaynes/sets/72157594299646824/

The Street leading up to our compound, they are building a school in the background. The compound has 5 houses, two unattached and 3 attached, I'm in one of the attached ones.

The front of our house.

The view from the porch:

Our water tanks:

I've had about two usable days since I've got it back. The problem seems to be on their back end, I can connect to them no problem but their proxy server kills connections constantly so I get a bunch of empty web pages whenever I look at anything!

Its gotten bad enough that I am now looking to either move to a house with a phone line or try to rent a small office. I looked into satellite connection here but they are ridiculously expensive as opposed to ISDN which is just expensive! Both are equally slow.

Anyway most of my time has been spent trying to get East Africa Tech Ventures off the ground. When my connection works I am going to try to start updating my blog there with the business side of things and leave this to the more sporadic personal side of life here.

http://www.eastafricatechventures.com/blog.html

1) I took a trip to Europe and visited London, Ireland, Paris and Rome. It was very interesting returning to a world of stop lights and drinkable tab water. We did the quick tour, fitting in the louvre, eiffle tower, Notre Dame, and more in Paris and all the highlights in Rome as well all in a little more than a week! All I can say is I miss cheese, oh how I miss cheese.

This trip was planned before I came to Africa and I though I would use it as a gage on how long I would stay here, if I dreaded coming back, I would pack my bags and head home. If I felt like I was returning to my home, then I would stay. The good news is that I was looking forward to returning to Uganda sooooo.....

2) I've moved to Kampala and will be sticking around awhile. I've hired a lawyer to incorparate a business (East Africa Tech Ventures) and will be processing my own work visa. My hope is to pick up some contract programming from the US and do it from my home here. I'm also hoping to commercialize some of the software I've developed for TiVo, primarily apps.tv. We'll see how it goes, all else fails, I return to Silicon Valley and get a job!

3) I've rented a small two bedroom house a little outside Kampala, in Mukono. It's about a 15 or 20 minute ride into town (sometimes an hour!). It's a brand new house in a compound with 5 houses, two unattached and three attached, I have one of the attached units. The biggest problem so far is water. The landlords had an illegal connection and got busted and had to pay about a $1000 to get a real hookup. This meant two weeks of no water while they were pretending that they had the money to pay for it! Luckily there's a borehole nearby and I was able to pay someone to bring me water everyday. The water is finally back on though like electricity, it's sometimes on. I've been told the water is on for 48 hours then off for 48 hours. When it is on, I have a large tank that fills and is used when the water is off so in theory I would never notice when its off...in theory.

That's about it, mostly I've been running around trying to get things settled, dealing with immigration, they wouldn't give me another extension on my visitor visa as I've been here since April, thus the need for a work visa.

I'll post some pictures as soon as I upload them to Flickr.

Will post details of my trip and other juicy bits when I get a chance!

See ya when I see ya! (probably 5 weeks or so).

This weekend I went to a hand-over ceremony for students from a local college organization. I think the purpose is that the outgoing president is supposed to hand over duties to the incoming president. Why I was invited, I have no idea!

I was was told it was to start at 1:00, it started at 6:00. We arrived about 4:00. It took place at a local hotel that has some very nice grounds with some statues made by local artists. So we spent most of our time hanging out in the gardens drinking sodas.

Here's Susan with Moses's children: Mavis, Shalom & Moses Jr. out on the grounds.

This fuction was similar to others I've been to as it consisted mainly of people giving long speeches while the audience looks bored. This went on for a good three hours. I somehow got seated at the head table so I spent most of the night trying to look interested.

This function had a couple interesting twists though. In between speeches someone would come up and lip sync to a song and people would come up and put money in their pockets.

Then at the end someone came up with a package and people were supposed to bid on it. I'm still not quite sure how it worked but it took about an hour and somehow they got about 4000 shillings out of me (about $2.00).

Finally we ate!

Here's a picture of the completed hut:

We cooked up 5 chickens and a couple kilos of goat meat along with plantains and potatoes. Everything came out great.

The big hit came after we finished eatiing, last time I was in Kampala I picked up a bag of marshmallows and we roasted them over the fire. No one here had even heard of marshmallows before but they were all quick converts. Soon we had dozens of kids hanging over the fence as we roasted and gave them marshmallows. I think I may need to pick up a whole bunch more next time I go to the city.