Yesterday was very eventful and quite the mixed bag.
My morning started off normal. I had my breakfast and then spent some time getting ready for the day. I found myself with an extra hour because I had woken up earlier than normal, and spent that time setting up my LinkedIn.
I went to work and was delighted to find that power had returned. Up until lunch I felt pretty brain dead. I was reading a bunch of articles, leaving some annotations—still working on the literature review. I decided to work through lunch (I’ve only been eating a banana or two for lunch anyways, so I wasn’t missing out on much).
During the period where everyone else had gone out for the 1-2 hour lunch, the office was overtaken by a horde of monkeys!
At first I heard a lot of clambering and banging against the metal roof. I thought it might be my cat friend from the previous day. Then these little suckers started to show their face and get pretty bold. I had to chase a few out of the office; at first I thought it was cute, but when they started climbing on the tables and going through the trash can I decided I had had my fill. When I went outside to investigate I found at least 50 of the little guys monkeying around. Some were in trees, on the roof, climbing about, others were fighting and babies were feeding. It was a full on troop of these suckers.
When everyone got back from lunch there were still a few monkeys lingering about, but not as many as I had seen. I was told that these fellas are pretty frequent visitors. The staff are all fed up with them and treat them like pests because they’ve lived with the monkey disturbances all their life. I thought it was a nice little surprise.
I got back to work and was productive with the rest of my day. I had a meeting with my managers—one of them I was meeting for the first time. Unfortunately the power decided to flicker out in the middle of it, but everyone seems used to it and I was able to join back 15 minutes later and it was fine. “Welcome to Africa,” is all they said and we got right back to it.
Throughout the day it was super hot. It’s been really rainy recently, so it was nice to have a warmer day, but sitting in a concrete box with a metal roof all day didn’t treat me too well. There was no cloud cover at all yesterday and it was the first day I experienced the true Ethiopian heat. I’m sure it gets even hotter during the summer—yesterday was a scorcher though. As much as I was uncomfortable and complaining, I was very happy to show up back home and see all my laundry had dried.
I had my typical dinner and got ready for bed pretty early. I’ve been feeling a bit tired with the poor sleep due to the mosquitoes, I’m really hoping that my net solution works out. I spent sometime just sitting out on the terrace listening to music before hitting the hay around 8:00pm.