Braai

Last night I got to experience my very first South African "braai" (barbecue). Clinton and Philip, two of the South African guys took us to Checkers, a grocery store in town, and we picked up the food. I got some ostrich sausage. There is no refrigerator in Monica, so we had to get the food fresh and bring it out back for Dirk, our activities director, to braai up for us. So in a traditional South African braai, you should never use matchlight charcoal. You burn real wood and use the coals from that to cook over. It's a much slower process and it gives everyone plenty of time to relax, hang out, and talk.

Also at the school this winter is a group of students from Gabon. We see them occasionally, and they were in our last class with us. I talked to a group of them for a little while last night. One of the guys was telling me about wedding traditions in Gabon. He said that the brides family likes to haze the new groom. They put about twenty girls in a room and cover their faces and the groom has to find his fiance. If he gets it wrong he has to pay the brides family some small amount of money. It's not serious, just sort of a fun tradition they do. They expect you to choose wrong a few times because there's no way to know who's who, and they tease you when you get it wrong.

We stayed out braaing pretty late, there was a lot of food to cook! It was a lot of fun. Clinton put on some crazy Afrikaans music and I got to talk with a lot of people on the trip I hadn't really gotten to hang out with much. I went to sleep around 11:30 last night. I tried to get a full night sleep because I knew that the next day was going to be really busy.