Fresh Baguette, Mint Lounge, and Wall-E!

7/2

We had a big egg breakfast and hung out around the house until about noon, when we took a cab to the Manda Hill Shopping Mall. We had fun walking around the mall with Ivy and seeing all of the Zambian clothing stores and prices. It’s definitely a shopping center for the wealthier people in Lusaka, and it was depressing to see how many more white people were there compared to a typical area in the city.

We stopped by the Shop Rite grocery store to talk to the manager about making consistent donations to Fountain of Hope. They are getting bread donations from a bakery for breakfast every day except for Wednesday, but so far they still don’t have a consistent source of food for dinner. We’re trying to get the Shop Rite chain to start donating the food they would otherwise throw away (i.e. bread, meat, fruit). We need to write a letter and deliver it back to the store on Wednesday or Thursday.

We stopped to rest at a really nice café with lots of sandwiches, French pastries, and other yummy things. We only ordered drinks (I got a café latte with a shot of hazelnut syrup and Sarah got a mango smoothie). As we were leaving, we bought a freshly baked 24-inch baguette and it was only about $1.25. We were so happy!

We went to the shopping mall we visited last week, Arcades, next. Ivy showed us a really good restaurant called Mint Lounge. It’s her favorite place and we totally see why. It’s really nicely decorated with an outdoor section and the food was delicious! I got a strawberry banana smoothie, which was definitely the nicest thing I’ve had in a while. We both ordered amazing sandwiches on toasted baguette with chicken, cheese, grilled onions, and mushrooms. We expected something pretty small because they were only about $7, but they were enormous and came with a nice garden salad on the side. We haven’t had any raw vegetables in a while, so we were unthinkably excited. It was a nice treat to celebrate our one-month anniversary in Zambia J We’re going to go back for another meal on our last day.

We spent another hour or two in the same internet café we used last weekend because the connection is great and it’s the cheapest one we’ve found. Afterwards, we picked up some more groceries before heading back to the house. We watched Wall-E and then went to bed!