Passionfruit, Mangoes, Fried Pork, Shangri-La

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At least two of the ingredients for a perfect West Nile Saturday are (1) fruit and (2) pork (unless you are a resident Muslim). Those two food items and the relatively cool weather that arrived in the area on Thursday night made for a pretty good start to my Ugandan weekend.

I slept in until 7:45am instead of the usual 7:00am, because the sun still comes exploding into the sky, even on Saturdays. Then I got the water boiling on the stove for instant coffee and oatmeal - both luxuries in this part of the world. While breakfast cools down from boiling, I enjoyed a brief, cold shower, courtesy of the outdoor cistern which provides cold water in the morning and lukewarm water in the evening. Then I pulled back the sliding doors wide onto the yard so the house can exhale some of the stale, warm air. Rashid, being the kind-hearted man that he is, offered me a couple of mangoes from the tree in the yard (they are as plentiful around here as acorns in Minnesota). After cutting the mango, I squeezed some fresh passionfruit juice from fruits bought on the roadside yesterday evening. Then I fired up ye olde internet for some e-mailing on my laptop, turned on the BBC World Service, took a sip of coffee and exhaled.

Late in the morning, I met with a couple of international friends at the house of Janet, my (previously mentioned) cook and her husband Richard, in the nearby (previously mentioned) village of Ediofe for a lunchtime feast of fried pork and beer. As I wrote before, the system for pork-purchasing in Ediofe is a little unusual coming from America. You go to one of the "pork shacks" which are small and stand alone from the villages many bars. There, you buy the pork by the kilogram, and if you're ballsy like Richard, you haggle the pork-monger about which piece of pork you want to eat. Richard lobbied for some rib bits, and the pork-monger obliged. Both me and my international friends did our best to not look too closely at the sanitation in said pork shack, but suffice it to say, there is no health code in this part of the country. You may gather that by looking closely at the photos below.

We took a seat at a nearby bar, with a strategically close position to the television to catch the Manchester United v. Manchester City English Premiere League soccer match coming on in an hour, we ordered a few drinks, and we waited. After a long wait, a huge plate of fried pork arrived (which I was too hungry to photograph before eating), along with a kind of slaw salad, sliced raw onions, tomatoes, a shallow dish of salt and hot pepper flakes, and a big dish for pig bones. I'm not very clear-headed about food these days, but the cold beer and the sizzling, fried pork was about as good as food gets. The good view of the soccer match on t.v. helped.

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