Grocery store blooper

Loud rhythmic music and all the usual chaos at the supermarket checkout. The cashier hands me the receipt and change in 5-Kwanza bills. I glance at my receipt and I notice that there are 10 Kwanza less. Full of confidence in my Portuguese I tell her that she should give me the proper change. She refuses with a loud laugh and yells at the others cashier ladies with sarcasm: dez Kwanza! Some other expats are smiling at me with compassion. I get irritated and insist on getting the change back refusing to leave... till I realize the Kwanza exchange rate.

From Miss Rhena

Maarten has transitioned so well into his new school and he also loves going there by bus all by himself. Already on the first day he was thrilled describing it as not a real school but rather a fun camp! Today we received this message from his teacher: Maarten said he is liking school, but I think he is a bit hot. Hopefully the weather will cool down in the next week or so. He is very enthusiastic and is able to understand and follow instructions in English without much trouble. He tells me if he doesn’t understand, which is great. His vocabulary in English is also very good. I will assess his reading level next week, but in the meantime he is taking books home that he can hopefully enjoy. His math skills are also very good.

Salko!

Sweetened evaporated milk is my personal favorite treat since ever and I found its Brazilian version here in Luanda! And for 160 Kwanza it really is a bargain. Since there are not much yummy sweets in the local supermarkets I’m really thrilled! However, problably only my Czech friends can understand.

@ Monte Belo

The house(s)

Yesterday evening we didn’t have much time to explore our new home. It is so extensive! And with it’s 2 large living rooms, 7 and half bathrooms and 7 bedrooms… I’m not exaggerating. Someone mentioned it's a West African “Portuguese”-style house!

The first night Maarten was a bit scared of all those dark strange rooms and to be honest so was I. Particularly, when we found out that we are sharing this property with a huge cockroach. We caught him at once and I sincerely hope he was the only one.

Well, there are some more inhabitants of our house, "our pets" as Maarten likes to call them. I can’t sum up all the small insects and there are also those cute little guys. We spotted this one in Maarten’s bathroom.

It’s probably not a surprise that the abundance of insects really makes Maarten happy. He is obsessed with catching crickets in the playground which is just in front of our home. However, it is strange to call this house our home knowing we are going to move out of here again soon!

All the families in this compound are getting brand new houses (pic yellow houses with red roof). This is exciting for all of us but to be honest the idea of moving again doesn’t really stimulates me to neither settle down here nor decorate.

“At least we are done with cleaning by now!” that’s what we thought leaving the Deurle house behind.

Our house here in Luanda should have been cleaned and ready to move in. It probably was cleaned in some way but definitely not to our standards. This house is huge and the future one is only a little bit smaller therefore if I don’t want to spend my days in Angola by cleaning our castle it will be unavoidable to hire an empregada as they say in Portuguese.

It's very common for expatriate households to hire a maid and somehow, employing local people is kind of expected of us to do, to give something back to the community.

@Luanda

It was already dark when we landed after this quite an agreeable flight. We also got through the immigrations without any trouble. We didn’t even have to wait in line because of “the baby”! Luckily Maarten didn’t understand that as he was already pretty high and over-excited.

We were picked up by some of our new neighbors who were so kind to help us with our extensive luggage. Well, that’s what we thought about our 9 suitcases. But the neighbors assured us that we can’t compare to the 30+ usual pieces of other arriving expats.

@ Sheraton Brussels Airport

Cold, strong icy wind and it’s raining. I don’t mind cold weather but with only few warm clothes left it’s not much fun even in the beautiful ancient streets of Ghent. After Rob’s goodbye lunch we will move to the Sheraton Hotel at the Brussels airport for our last night here in Belgium. It’s the same place we waved goodbye to Europe almost 8 years ago before our American adventure!

@Korenhuis

Maarten hates the raw tuna appetizer that is a specialty of the house.

@ Marriott Ghent

The movers are gone; the house is empty only our 9 suitcases are left bursting at the seams.
I feel completely worn out, emotionless.
My hands are dry, my fingers cracked from all the cleaning and cold. My body screams for yoga.
Yesterday we took a little break from it all and took Maarten to a small authentic circus that stopped in our town.
We all had a blast! It made me forget all the hustle of these last busy days.

Before I could finish writing this post we went on again. We loaded our baggage into the car. After picking Maarten up from school we headed for the hotel downtown Ghent which will be our home for a couple of days.

As the circus is quite a personal and emotional subject to me I hope to come back to writing about it another time soon.

Ladybugs

What would you do when all is packed and no toys are left? Collect ladybugs!

From our immigration lawyer

The consulate indicated that they can not issue a new visa sticker. The reason is that the stickers are created by a scan of the passport ID page and a new sticker will therefore be identical to the current one. They advised that it happens frequently that a name is misspelled by a single letter due to the scanning procedure and that this is no problem whatsoever in entering and residing in Angola.

We insisted that we still wanted to have a new visa sticker, but they refused to do this and confirmed that the visa can be used the way it is.

Segastiaan

Today, after 10 long and hard months we finally received our visa's.

But! Maarten’s middle name is spelled wrong!

Will they be able to get this fixed by tomorrow morning?

Frustrating!

We were promised to have our passports with Angolan visa back on Wednesday at latest. That was yesterday! I got suspicious and unfortunately I was right. Today we heard from our visa agent that we could not collect the passports yet.
Even though our visa application is successfully approved our passports can’t be stamped yet due some technical problem!!
The consular officer indicated that this should be solved next Wednesday and according to him, in time for the intended travel.
Well, that still might be a problem as the movers are not allowed to start packing until the physical visa sticker is inserted into our passports.
And for now, they did plan to start packing on the 12th and they need at least four days. As we were required to submit our travel itinerary to make sure that the visa validity date corresponds with our intended date of arrival in Angola our tickets have been already booked for April 19th!
That’s why any delay in the packing process will require flights to be re-booked again.
To be continued…